Round Top, According To Fraulein Boots

Turquoise, according to the sisters behind Round Top favorite Fraulein Boots, is a neutral.

At Round Top, that philosophy fits right in.

Maybe that’s why Fraulein feels so at home there: spotted under linen dresses, beside wagons full of vintage finds, and usually worn by the women having the most fun.

And for Fraulein’s founders, sisters Margaret Walker and Sarah Caruth, bold ideas tend to move pretty quickly. (It’s the turquoise.)

So when Sarah looked across the dinner table during COVID and said, “I really think we should start a cowboy boot company,” neither sister spent much time talking herself out of it.

At the time, Margaret had stepped away from years in retail, and Sarah had recently lost her job in medical device sales. Life looked different than either of them expected when, over dinner one night, Sarah looked across the table and said something that would change both of their lives.

“I really think we need to start a cowboy boot company,” Margaret remembers her saying.

“It was like the light bulb, fireworks in the sky moment,” she says. “I just immediately thought, absolutely. This is the best idea ever.”

Their mother, who was sitting at that same dinner table the night Fraulein was born, had always taught them that not knowing how to do something wasn’t a reason not to try.

They still laugh remembering one of the earliest moments Western style imprinted itself onto both of them: sitting in the Houston Astrodome watching Crystal Gayle perform, then going home, wrapping towels around their heads pretending they had her famously long hair.

“We wanted cuter boots,” Margaret says simply. 

That was the goal, and everything else they figured out along the way — from Googling factories during Covid, building their first website in between hours-long Shopify support calls, and learning things like wholesale, inventory, and branding in real time. 

It didn’t take long for Round Top to enter the story.

Their first pop-up was at Townsend Provisions, where they sold boots almost entirely from samples because they barely had inventory yet. “If you were a size seven, you could try them on,” Margaret laughs. “Otherwise, you just ordered from the sample.”

At one point, someone actually wanted to buy a pair, and Margaret had to run inside for help figuring out the point-of-sale system.

“We didn’t even know how to work it yet,” she says.

But somehow, people kept buying the boots anyway — like when a group bought more than a dozen pairs at once.

“We just looked at each other like… okay,” Margaret says. “This is going to work.”

That was when they realized Round Top wasn’t simply another stop for the brand. It was becoming part of the story itself.

“Our Super Bowl,” Margaret calls it.

In a lot of ways, Fraulein feels exactly like Round Top itself: colorful, nostalgic, personality-filled, and a little impossible to explain unless you’ve experienced it yourself.

That same essence carries through every pair Fraulein designs, from the bright turquoise San Antonio Rose boot to the green Buttercup boots that sell out again and again. 

“We’re always telling people turquoise is a neutral,” Margaret says.

But underneath all the color and personality is something surprisingly sentimental.

Nearly every design starts with some kind of memory or vintage reference: an old saddlebag turned into a roadrunner motif, Southwestern jewelry inspiring stitching patterns, or details pulled from pieces collected over years of traveling and treasure hunting.

“We always ask ourselves, does this feel like a vintage boot?” Margaret says. “That’s really important to us.”

Even the name itself carries history. Fraulein was their father’s favorite song, and later became the first dance song at both sisters’ weddings. Around the same time they were building the company, Tyler Childers and Colter Wall released their own version of it.

“I heard it come on in the car one day and immediately called Sarah,” Margaret says. “I said, ‘I found our name.’”