The booth that appeared at the National Reined Cow Horse Association event looked, at first glance, like something that had always been there: cedar-built, barn-style, stocked with red enamel camp mugs, flour sack towels and fashion-forward apparel.

It was, in fact, the newly designed retail presence launched by the Four Sixes Ranch and featured at this winter’s Celebration of Champions. It was created by TCU faculty and students.

The Four Sixes Ranch, founded by Samuel “Burk” Burnett in 1870 and today spanning roughly 260,000 acres of King County scrubland in northwest Texas, is one of a handful of American ranches recognizable by name alone. Its profile expanded after Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan put the ranch on screen, turning a state institution into a national obsession. Sheridan and his wife, Nicole, later helped purchase the ranch and have since been navigating a careful line between modernization and preservation.

When the time came to expand the brand’s reach, the ranch’s marketing team looked to TCU.

“Everything that we do, we want to do it ethically, and we want it to be excellent — first of its kind, best of its kind,” said Carley Myers ’17, the ranch’s senior vice president of marketing.

She initiated the partnership after reconnecting with her former instructor Kevin Smith, an adjunct professor at the TCU Neeley School of Business.

An Evolving Vision
The collaboration began in April 2024 when Myers contacted Smith, who connected her with instructors Nicole Bettinger, Rima Shrestha and Charles Freeman, professor and chair of fashion merchandising and director of research and creative scholarship initiatives in TCU’s College of Fine Arts. Freeman expanded the effort to include Albert Marichal, associate professor of design, whose 3D renderings of the Supply House gave Myers and Nicole Sheridan a way to visualize the finished structure before it went into production. Faculty and students in the interior design program contributed to the booth’s design and final renderings as well.

The result, fabricated by Bayer Brothers, is a storefront that’s fully reconfigurable and designed to travel, adapt to different venues and maintain a consistent visual identity throughout. It is already scheduled to appear at the National Finals Rodeo, Cowboy Christmas and the Cowgirl Hall of Fame induction luncheon.

The merchandise inside threads a similar needle. Practical enough for ranch life, polished enough for a broader market, the Four Sixes product line reflects both the ranch’s history and the evolving vision of its new owners.

‘The Sheridans Really Trusted Me’
For the TCU students involved, the stakes felt different from anything a classroom could replicate. Carys Ciobanu, a senior fashion merchandising major at TCU, spent nine months as an intern contributing to product development, buying reports and digital merchandising. Several of her designs are now in production.

“If I had an internship at any other brand, there is no way they would truly take my designs and start producing them,” Ciobanu said. “Carley and the Sheridans really trusted me, and that’s something I never would have had anywhere else.”

Freeman, who traveled to the Sheridan’s Bosque Ranch in Weatherford during the project’s early listening phase, sees the collaboration as something larger than a single project cycle. The booth, he noted, is one component of a wider effort to grow the Four Sixes’ digital presence while keeping its historic retail hub in Guthrie, Texas, which has served the surrounding area for more than a century, at the center of its identity.

“What really makes the Four Sixes unique is that it’s an iconic heritage brand of Texas — one of five or six ranches known around the world just by name,” he said. “We talk a lot about community engagement at the university, and this was a chance to really help something that is part of the story of Texas. We’re now written into the history of the Four Sixes Ranch.”

-Caroline Collier

Visit the Four Sixes Supply House pre-party on Saturday, April 11, at the Will Rogers Memorial Center, Brown Lupton North, from 4 to 6 p.m.