Tony Lama is a U.S.-based corporation that designs and sells western-style boots. The company bears the name of its founder, who lived from 1887 to 1974. During the 1930s western wear craze in the southwestern U.S., the company focused its efforts on western-style boots.

Lama learned his cobbling

Shoemaking

Shoemaking is the process of making footwear. Originally, shoes were made one at a time by hand. Traditional handicraft shoemaking has now been largely superseded in volume of shoes produced by industrial mass production of footwear, but not necessarily in quality, attention to detail, or...

 skills while serving in the U.S. Cavalry near Texas. Tony Lama is now a division of Justin Brands, which is itself a division of Berkshire Hathaway

Berkshire Hathaway

Berkshire Hathaway Inc. is an American multinational conglomerate holding company headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska, United States, that oversees and manages a number of subsidiary companies. The company averaged an annual growth in book value of 20.3% to its shareholders for the last 44 years,...

.

Trade and public policy implications

The Tony Lama company is frequently cited by U.S. Senator Byron Dorgan

Byron Dorgan

Byron Leslie Dorgan is a former United States Senator from North Dakota and is now a senior policy advisor for a Washington, DC law firm. He is a member of the North Dakota Democratic-NPL Party, the North Dakota affiliate of the Democratic Party. In the Senate, he was Chairman of the Democratic...

 during his speeches on the floor of the Senate about the impact of U.S. trade policy. Dorgan regularly notes the impact of Chinese government

Government of the People's Republic of China

All power within the government of the People's Republic of China is divided among three bodies: the People's Republic of China, State Council, and the People's Liberation Army . This article is concerned with the formal structure of the state, its departments and their responsibilities...

 yuan

Renminbi

The Renminbi is the official currency of the People's Republic of China . Renminbi is legal tender in mainland China, but not in Hong Kong or Macau. It is issued by the People's Bank of China, the monetary authority of the PRC...

 devaluation

Devaluation

Devaluation is a reduction in the value of a currency with respect to those goods, services or other monetary units with which that currency can be exchanged....

 ("pegging

Pegging

Pegging may refer to:* Pegging * Pegging * Pegging report, a manufacturing record* The act of setting a fixed exchange rate between two currencies...

") and trade imbalances on U.S. companies like Tony Lama.