The Art of the Ambassador: Kelsey Charles on What Lucchese Is Building Next

“You can’t manufacture authenticity.”

Kelsey Charles comes back to that idea throughout her conversation with Liv Longin, and when you look at Lucchese, it is easy to understand why.

The company has been making boots since 1883. Today, a pair can still take four to six weeks to make, passing through more than 180 hands inside the company’s El Paso factory. Some of the artisans are third- and fourth-generation bootmakers, continuing techniques that Lucchese has deliberately chosen not to replace with machinery.

At the same time, this 143-year-old bootmaker is the official boot of the Dallas Cowboys, has appeared alongside Post Malone in Paris, and recently collaborated with Chris Stapleton. Now, Lucchese is building the next iteration of its ambassador program.

That intersection between heritage and cultural relevance sits at the center of this episode of The Brief. Kelsey leads brand marketing and strategic growth at Lucchese after building a career across the Dallas Cowboys, Toyota North America and Susan G. Komen. Her job now is not simply to market a historic company. It is to decide how that company moves forward without losing what made it significant in the first place.

“We’re not just marketing it. We helped build it.”

For Kelsey, that history creates both an opportunity and a responsibility. Lucchese can participate in contemporary culture, but it cannot allow the culture around it to dictate who the brand becomes.

She describes her approach as something close to an 80/20 rule. Most of the brand remains firmly anchored in its history, craftsmanship and values. The other 20 percent gives her team permission to experiment, take risks and find unexpected ways to introduce Lucchese to new audiences.

That might mean Paris with Post Malone or a major NFL partnership. But the idea still has to make sense for Lucchese first.

“Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.”

That discipline becomes especially important when Kelsey talks about partnerships.

Post Malone was already buying Lucchese boots before working with the company. Chris Stapleton was searching for vintage pairs on eBay. Parker McCollum was already deeply connected to the culture and values surrounding the brand.

The common thread is not celebrity. It is genuine affinity.

Kelsey argues that consumers can recognize the difference. They know when a collaboration exists because two brands belong together, and they know when a logo has simply been placed somewhere because someone paid for the exposure.

After years in sports marketing, she has a name for the latter: “logo soup.”

“Don’t be in the logo soup game.”

That same philosophy is now shaping Lucchese’s ambassador program.

Rather than building the largest possible roster of creators, Kelsey is interested in people who are already wearing Lucchese, participating in their communities and naturally representing the values behind the company. The program is invite-only, and the goal is not to hand someone a pair of boots and ask them to become a different version of themselves online.

“I’m not asking you to change. In fact, I don’t want you to.”

That is also how Liv became part of the program.

Before there was a formal relationship, Liv was already wearing Lucchese and creating content around the brand. Kelsey found the content and asked her social team whether Lucchese was working with her. They weren’t. Liv simply genuinely liked the brand.

For Kelsey, that made the partnership an obvious one. Liv is now officially the first ambassador invited into this next iteration of Lucchese’s ambassador program.

“If you don’t have a North Star, then you’re not going anywhere.”

Lucchese will celebrate its 145th anniversary in 2028, and Kelsey is already thinking about the three-year journey leading there. The ambassador program, partnerships, events and cultural moments are all pieces of that larger strategy.

Her distinction between tactics and strategy is simple but important. A collaboration is not the strategy. Neither is an event, an ambassador or a social campaign. Those are individual expressions of something larger.

For Lucchese, the challenge is making sure every expression still feels connected to the same 143-year-old company.

Because building what comes next does not require abandoning what came before. Sometimes the strongest brands are the ones that understand their history well enough to know exactly how far they can take it.