It's Miller Time Again
The new Miller Ranch Brand is classic, classy and worthy of the name.
By: G. Daniel DeWeese 08/25/2009
In 1918, Philip Miller got off the train at Denver’s Union Station with a sample case of Miller Brothers cowboy hats, most of his worldly possessions and a persistent cough. When he arrived, the American West was still largely wild and sparsely populated, but the former gold-mining camp was already a teeming metropolis with nearly 250,000 people. Denver buried the Old West, along with Buffalo Bill on nearby Lookout Mountain, the year before, and commerce was the new frontier. Little did this sickly hat drummer know he would help define the New West and launch an industry.
Miller, in his late 20s, had been dispatched to Denver from New York City by his hat-making brothers. His job was to open new sales territories for the family business. Denver was chosen as his base not so much for its bustling economy but for its dry mountain air. They hoped it would help ease his fight with tuberculosis. A family member would later say that he went to Denver to die, but didn’t get around to it until he was in his 80s.
Miller thrived in his new location, and he launched his own business: Miller Hat Co. Traveling extensively throughout the Rocky Mountain and Great Plains states, he called on small town mercantiles and remote ranches to sell cowboy hats. The farmers and cowboys he dealt with were having trouble getting boots, clothes, saddles and other necessities for life in the West. Seeing an opportunity, Miller started the Stockman-Farmer Supply Co. and published his first catalog in 1923. He soon amended his company’s name to Miller Stockman Supply Co. and expanded the scope of his business. By the mid-1930s, he was manufacturing clothes for ranchers and cowboys as Miller Western Wear.
Fast forward to the 1980s. Philip Miller had retired in 1962, and the company he founded was a full-blown conglomerate called Miller International Inc. The company included the original Miller Stockman catalog division, 30 Miller Stockman retail stores, Miller Western Wear shirt manufacturing and Rocky Mountain brand jeans for women. “Rockies” were not the standard Western five-pocket, boot cut denim jeans. They offered a flattering fit and unique styling that quickly became the company’s best-selling product. In 1992, Miller Western Wear was renamed the Rocky Mountain Clothing Co., and the last shirt with Miller’s name on the label was produced.
Rocky Mountain Clothing Co. introduced mainstream Cinch jeans and shirts for men in 1994. Aside from the evocative name and its availability from Western stores and catalogs, there was nothing intrinsically Western about the line. Two years later, Cruel Girl debuted as a female version of Cinch.
In 1999, 76 years after Philip Miller published his first catalog, Miller Int’l sold off the catalog and the retail stores as the company focused on its manufacturing and design business. Despite the fact that the last Miller Stockman catalog was mailed to more than three million customers, Philip Miller’s name all but disappeared from the Western market.
Rocky Mountain Clothing Co. returned to its Western roots with the launch of Southern Thread in 2004. The shirts and jeans were designed and marketed to appeal to young male fans of Red Dirt music—the alternative Country music inflected with Woody Guthrie’s folk sensibilities and Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson’s outlaw attitudes.
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