Recently I saw an article on the blog http://www.yournextshoes.com/2012/09/cap-toe-pump-collision-steven-fearles-vs-nicholas-amore/ , “Cap Toe (Pump) Collision: Steven Fearles VS. Nicholas Amore, Which Would You Grab?”. I would call it:

Quality shoes vs crape or quality shoes – here you can see the difference.

Two similar pump shoes and here are out contenders:

Or how they have called it: “Suede vs Leather” (by the way suede is also a leather!) or even more spicy “Gold vs Silver”.

Let’s start with the price. The left, the gold one, is a fair 149 USD, the right one, the silver one, is a whopping 259 USD. Price doesn’t matter? I agree, provided we get quality shoes for our money and these two shoes are giving us a good example for what makes good quality shoes and what are rubbish quality shoes.  Start to open our examination’s.

Let me start with that, that the adhesive is not removed properly. This is not a big deal, we can hardly even make it out and it’s not doing any harm to the shoe. But it says already something: careless. This continuous with the lining not been trimmed. My question is, how blind a final inspection in the factory must be, that they don’t see these two very obvious problems? I’ll bet, they don’t care. Now before we continue with more serious problems, let me mention to you: mistakes happens and if you find a pair of shoes with such small issues and everything else is fine, you certainly have a good opportunity for a great bargain. May be 10% for each issue like this to start with. Take a rubber, clean the adhesive and take a good sizzler and trim of the lining yourself or just leave it like that.

Unfortunately, my experience tells me, that it’s not stopping with these small mistakes and so it’s here the case too. Look at the opening off the top line, it’s ugly bend and this can not be fixed, not with a hammer or a pincer, this will be forever like this. What happened is, while operating the folding of the leather edge, it got too much tension and it bended. This is clearly an operator mistake and should not have passed any final inspection – again. A shoe with such an error is normally to be considered as a rejection!

Let’s have a look from the back off the shoes:

Just compare the two back seams of the shoes. The left one is straight and flat, good job. The right one is twisted and fat, urgh. Look at how the heel are closing the back of the shoes. The left one looks smooth and elegant and now look at the right one, it’s too short and the heel is not fitting at all. Than look at poor lasting work. Wrinkles everywhere. Who has manufactured this shoe must have done before my be trainers, but certainly no ladies shoes. We come now to our final round of the contest:

Let’s have a look at the width of the shoes. Who has designed the left, gold shoe, had for sure not in mind an older lady with brought feet. For sure, they wanted to design a reasonable slim shoe for younger women. So we can certainly assume, that they have chosen a slimmer shoe last for achieving an elegant statement. Now, if you look at the right shoe, we can clearly see, that may be only a baby doll with super slim feet would fit into this “shoe”. It looks extremely narrow, like almost unwearable.

I certainly do love shoes with cool designs, but quality shoes should not only look great, they need to fit and the workmanship should speak for itself. Quality of the materials and  workmanship must be considered as more important than a silver or gold toe cap. Never mind, some small mistakes here and there can happen – shoe making is really a complicated manufacturing process and it shows also that shoes are still made by manual processes. Yes, of course we use machines for industrial, manufactured footwear, but still the manpower is the most important part. The operator is doing the stitching and operator is doing the lasting process, they both use machines for that, but they need skill for the operations to achieve great quality shoes.

I hope, that I could give you some valuable information’s, which are might be useful at your next shopping for a great pair of quality shoes. Please feel free to comment or leave a reply.

Andre Gerdes ( The pumps-lover )