I was communicating with someone the other day via email. The guy had concerns about the fit of Chippewa high-shine engineer boots (model 71418). He said that he bought a pair of the boots and that they caused severe, bleeding blisters and injuries on his toes. Through ongoing dialogue, he was blaming the steel toe and inflexibility of the boot’s foot to cause these problems. He asked more about fitting of the boots and differences in choosing larger, smaller, wider or medium-width sizing.

What I told him is a dirty little secret of boot manufacturers. Read on to learn what that secret is.

Here is the background.

The physical form (shaping tool) of a boot or shoe’s foot is called a last. (More info here). A last was usually made of wood, because wood lasts can be shaped. These days, particularly in mass production footwear, some lasts are made from plastic.

Boot manufacturers use machines to stretch leather (or exotic skins) over the last to form the vamp (visible topside of the boot). The leather or skins are sewn to the sole.

The problem is that there are no sizing standards for lasts. Each footwear manufacturer, shoemaker, and bootmaker makes and has its own lasts.

Because there are no standards for lasts, it is common that there are sizing differences in both length and width of the footbeds of footwear, including boots.

That’s the “dirty little secret.” No boot will fit the same from manufacturer to manufacturer. Or worse, even within lines made by the same manufacturer.

For example, my personal experience with the foot sizing of Chippewa “high-shine” engineer boots (71418) is that the feet run true-to-size for how my feet measure on a Brannock device, the official and best device to truly measure foot size (both length and width).

However, I have found that the foot sizing of Chippewa oil-tanned engineer boots (27909) seems to me to be a little large in both the length and width, so I have ordered them a half-size smaller with my usual “D” width, and they fit me better.

More confusing to the matter, my favorite Chippewa motorcycle boot — the Chippewa Firefighter — fit perfectly in the foot in my measured size.

The Chippewa “high shine”, oil-tanned engineer boots, and Firefighter boots all have steel toes. The problem with steel toes is that they are inflexible, and some men with large spreading and almost equal-length toes (from the little toe to the big toe) have trouble wearing steel-toed boots because the toes get crushed together in the boot’s toe box.

If you have that situation — your toes are fairly even in length — then you probably don’t want to get steel toed boots, or boots with a strongly curved or pointed toe. That may be why square-toe boots are now more popular.

Back to the message of this post — not all boot foot sizes are the same because boot lasts are not standardized across or within manufacturers. What I recommend is the following:

1. Have both feet professionally measured using a Brannock device. You may think you know your foot size, but with age, your feet enlarge as your arch collapses with relaxation or degradation of ligaments that occurs naturally as a person ages. If you haven’t gone into a shoe store and have your feet measured within the last two years, do it again. You don’t have to buy anything. Even I, who abhors the look of dress shoes, went into a shoe store in a mall recently and had my feet measured. I thanked the guy who measured me and just said, “I’m not quite thinking about buying anything right now, but I wanted to know my foot size.”

2. Best option is to find a store that actually carries the boots you want, or the same style and brand. Try them on for size. Stand, walk, bend, flex your foot. Determine how they feel. If possible, give local businesses your business, even if you may be able to find the boots cheaper on the internet. If we don’t support local boot vendors, they’ll go out of business.

3. If you can’t find a local store that carries the boots you want and you have to order them on-line, then find a vendor with an acceptable return policy. Order the boots in the size determined by your most recent Brannock device measurements. Try them on, but do not walk outdoors — only on carpet. If the boots fit, great. If not, you’ll have to return them. Gone are the days when vendors prepay return shipping, but a few still do. Avoid vendors that impose a restocking fee. The middle-ground is that you would have to pay return shipping, but shipping back another size pair of boots to you is at the vendor’s cost.

4. Remember, unfortunately, that a pair of boots that are size 10D by Manufacturer A may be different from a pair of boots marked 10D from another manufacturer. The only resolution is trial and error. Sad this is the case.

Summary: boot sizing is more of an art than a science. There are no standards for sizing of lasts used to form the foot of boots.

Life is short: realize that some boot fitting problems are not yours but due to lack of standardization with lasts used to form the boot foot.