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Acme Boots

Acme Boots was founded in 1929 by two Chicago shoe manufacturers, Jessel Cohn and his son, Sidney, who initially were children’s and infants' shoemakers. The moved from Chicago, Illinois to Clarksville, Tennessee, where they set up their new factory and called it the Acme Shoe Manufacturing Company.

The Cohns family continued making children’s sandals and shoes under the name Just-Kids, which sold for 40 to 50 cents a pair, until 1935. The same year, while on a business trip to Texas, senior Cohn spotted a pair of western boots and impressed by the price of 65 dollars, he decided to take a pair of boots with him to study the how they were made. Having studied the construction of the boots, he and his son decided they could produce the boots on an assembly line, keeping the same quality, but making them cheaper.

Their new line of boots was so successful that after some time they stopped producing children’s shoes and the company was renamed Acme Boots. In the 1940s, Acme Boots became the largest maker of cowboy boots and remained the world's largest until the 1980s.

Acme Boots has since been held by various corporations, including Arena Brands of Dallas, Texas, which licensed the Acme Brand to the Texas Boot Company of Lebanon, Tennessee in 2000, which in its turn put the brand up for sale in 2002, when it was acquired by H.H. Brown, a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, and placed under the Double-H Boots brand label, where it remains today.