Tips, Advice, and Options for Buying Shoes
This post is for everyone who doesn’t want to regret buying shoes afterward. Maybe I can’t cover every risk, but I can certainly cover a good part of them. In addition, I also give useful info for after you buy shoes.
The most important property of good shoes: the right fit
A pair of new shoes will fit you either quite well, quite badly, or moderately well. If you order new shoes online, the right fit is the biggest risk.
You can give the shoe seller some of your foot measurements, but that’s no guarantee that the shoes will actually fit in the end. Many also offer instructions for measuring yourself, but something like that can’t capture the full complexity of your feet. The more your feet match standard shapes, the fewer problems you’ll have here. And if a pair of shoes doesn’t fit you, with ready-made shoes you often have the option to send them back. But none of that is ideal.
That’s why the best way to get a suitable pair of new shoes is to try them on directly. So it’s very important that you can be somewhere in a store or with a local shoemaker to not only admire your next shoes, but also try them on. Only after you’ve found a shoe last that fits you can you order more shoes in the same last from the same shoemaker with no risk.
Map of shoe stores and local shoemakers
For the purpose of trying on different shoes on site and getting to know different shoemakers, I’ve created a map of shoemakers .
There I list various shoe manufacturers on a map - small and large ones. If you ever plan a city break, you can use it to find different places to visit. In particular, the small shoemakers from Italy are very happy about visits, as I’ve learned from several sources.
My personal exception
I often gladly accept the risk of an unsuitable fit when the cost of a pair of high-quality leather shoes is very low. This mainly applies to platforms where you can usually buy second-hand items. But there you can also find new and like-new shoes - often at a fraction of the price. In addition, you can have the leather shoes you bought widened by a cobbler afterward if they’re a bit too small in the toe.
Trying on by roundabout means
Buying second-hand has one more small advantage: if you find your desired shoe from your preferred manufacturer there, you can get the shoe at a low price to try on - and then order a new pair afterward if you’ve gained certainty about the fit. That saves you from having to travel directly to a suitable store or shoemaker.
The strategy can work, even though I imagine the success rate overall isn’t particularly high: if the shoes fit moderately well, another size may still fit even better. And if the pair of shoes you bought doesn’t fit at all, then you’re not much further along in finding the perfect size either. So for me, going to a shoe store or a shoemaker is still the much better way if you want to find a very well-fitting pair of leather shoes without too many detours.
Quality
Quality is another aspect, and here it depends on what you as a customer want. A lot here therefore depends on personal preferences and the budget. So I’ll share here what I would pay attention to myself.
Construction
Normally, I wouldn’t buy fully glued shoes. I do have glued shoes in my collection too, but the outsole simply separates from the rest of the shoe at some point. You can have the outsole glued back on by a cobbler, but in this case I recommend having a leather outsole stitched on by the cobbler, so that you, so to speak, move your shoe into the so-called Blake construction . You can still have an additional thin rubber sole glued over the stitched leather sole if you prefer that.
My recommendation for new shoes: shoes in Blake-Rapid construction or in welted construction. These are, after the glued construction, among the most common constructions in addition to the simpler Blake construction. You can especially choose shoes in Blake construction if you value very flexible shoes. But for resoling, the other two variants are a bit more practical.
Welted or Blake stitched in Blake-Rapid?
Both variants are quite similar, and especially if you compare welted shoes with Blake-Rapid construction to welted shoes, you can only notice a marginal difference. Between these two, I would prefer Blake-Rapid, because you have the most transparency here: If you recognize the so-called Blake stitch inside the insole, then you know that the shoe is Blake stitched.
Welted shoes are much harder to identify. And even if you have a welted shoe in front of you, there are still different quality levels of welted shoes - hand-stitched, machine-stitched, glued-stitched. In my view, the glued-stitched version of welted shoes is especially widespread and sits at the lower end of the quality scale. If you own welted shoes that are too stiff, that may be part of the reason.
Which upper leather?
The choice of upper leather depends heavily on the occasion and on your personal taste. If you are looking purely for functional hiking boots, then there are suitable robust and dirt-resistant leathers such as oiled nubuck. For fine, upscale occasions, calfskin will serve you very well. Many exotic leathers are quite suitable for casual wear, where you have the most options for choosing your favorite leather, if you want to stay appropriate for the occasion.
If I had to choose a pair of leather shoes for leisure wear with a specific leather, then I would go for plant-based tanned smooth leather from cow or calf. - Specifically aniline leather, meaning dyed through rather than just on the surface. That gives you the best leather experience there is: the leather remains especially permeable to air and moisture and has a very pleasant feel. It is, however, prone to water and grease stains, especially when it is dry. But this leather develops a particularly beautiful patina. And when caring for it, the leather gives you especially good feedback on whether it has absorbed the care product well, which you can see in the dark spots. And at the end of the care routine, you get the biggest wow effect in the before-and-after comparison.
One more thing about possible stains: You can actually get rid of water stains quite well over time, and they are the smaller problem. Grease stains, on the other hand, can be a very big problem, although they can also be treated with more elaborate products. - So much for my detour into the world of plant-based tanned smooth leather, which is by the way my personal favorite leather.
Things for shoe care
Especially if this is your first shoe purchase, you should also get a few other things besides the shoes. You may not need a belt in the same color, in my view, but you do need
- a pair of shoe trees
- a shoehorn
- shoe polish (for the leather)
You should have these things and use them regularly so your shoes stay in good shape. Optional but useful, in my view, are
- an application brush for hard-to-reach spots on the shoe
- a horsehair brush, so you do not have to polish with your hands
- shoe wax to achieve especially strong shine on smooth leather
If you want to buy a pair of suede shoes, some things change here: Instead of shoe polish and shoe wax, you should buy a shoe care spray. And instead of a horsehair brush, you should have a suede brush, which you use exclusively for suede shoes, so that no wax residue from smooth leather shoes mixes into the bristles of your suede brush. Otherwise, this would unnecessarily clog the fibers of the suede as soon as you use the brush on suede.
One of the first steps after buying shoes
Here you should treat the leather with a leather care product or shoe polish so it does not dry out further and, in the worst case, crack. Dry leather can be a big problem with many new shoes, although the causes vary. If you are unsure about this, you can first test it on an inconspicuous spot. Plant-based tanned smooth leather in particular reacts strongly to a nourishing cream when dry and darkens in those areas. But that is not a problem as long as you spread the cream over the whole shoe so the leather becomes uniformly darker.