Introduction
A few months ago /u/nicholashurtado contacted me and offered to send me a pair of shoes. He had a few pair of samples available and the first pair he let me try out was too small. I sent those back to Nic and he sent me a pair of black Bolton chelsea boots instead.
I’ve owned a lot of shoes over the past several years. I love shoes and I’ve looked high and low for shoes that offer a good value at a fair price. There’s a few brands that I think do a really nice job at around the $200 price point which I think is right at the tip top of what a regular person can afford to spend after saving up a bit on for a nice pair of shoes. Boots in particular have remained particularly elusive, where finding the right combination of pattern, last, color, outsole, construction and price can’t really be done. A few of the shoes that have impressed me over the last couple of years, like Meermin’s grained cap toe boots and LL Bean’s signature hawthorne cap toe boots, (disregard LL Bean’s current mis-step with the padded collar Hawthorne) were both contenders for high a high value product because both models offered a solid construction with a real leather innersole (the foundation of stitched leather footwear is the leather innersole) but still where slightly off the mark with minor proportion, hardware, or outsole issues.
So enter Beckett Simonon. A company with an odd name and a few odd shoes to their name. Hanging around the forums a lot from time to time I’ll get messages from people asking me to review their shoes. /u/nicholashurtado of B.S. had caught my eye with really insightful comments into his manufacturing costs (good read if you'd like some insight into supply chain stuff) and probably about a year or so later he happened to PM me and he offered to send me a pair of shoes. He had a few pair of samples available and the first pair he let me try out was too small. I sent those back to Nic and he sent me a pair of black (Bolton chelsea boots instead)[http://ift.tt/2rqJdMB].
Boots
B.S. does a nice job with this model is the wearability and overall versatility due to the combination of last and outsole thickness. A lot of slip on boots now follow the trend of being really sleek in the cocaine rockstar aesthetic but these are not those boots. You can throw these on with a pair of jeans and not have to worry about matching the rest of your outfit to silhouette the boot creates. I thought that the outsole was a bit too thick, and I think that you could shave off a few millimeters from the outsole thickness and you’d arrive at the perfect thickness.
Leather & Construction
A lot of shoes and boots look nice but there is where B.S. sets themselves apart from their competitors in my opinion. I really think that B.S. uses some very nice calfskin for the price point. While this sounds like every other review written, the calfskin creases very tightly and does not exhibit signs of scarring, bruising, or veining, or other deposits that while may be natural don’t add up to a nice shoe. In my experience over 4 different pairs of B.S. shoes (I’ve bought a few pairs after receiving this pair to review) The calfskin uppers are slightly stiffer out of the box than higher tier English shoes or luxury sneakers. The boots are fully lined in a leather that has a supple hand. There was no skimping on the soling components, the heel stack, top lift, and sole are all leather.
As far as construction goes these boots are blake stitched with a faux welt. (As an aside, a lot of the structural components are made in house rather than sourced). The innersole on some of the B.S. shoes I’ve worn can be pretty rigid and needs to be broken in to feel comfortable (partially a product of the construction method). The blake stitching through the innersole is somewhat prominent and you can feel it underfoot in some cases, which is somewhat common with blake shoes but this dissipates as you break in the shoe. The shoes are pretty light weight, and become comfortable on foot. They don't have the heft of goodyear welted boots which is a plus on the wearability end.
I can give more in depth thoughts on this topic if anyone is curious about particulars.
Closing
All in all a B.S. is a company that I’ll come back to because they combine good construction and materials with good aesthetics at the a very fair price point. Nic also seems to be truly invested in steering his company in the direction of making good shoes while not spewing a bunch of crap, so I give him a lot of credit for that.
I didn’t put this in the title but I’m giving away this pair of shoes, per the agreement that I made with Nic when i agreed to do the review. I’ll be picking someone at random, but in order to be a qualified entrant you must have a /r/frugalmalefashion account that is at least 3 months old, you must make a comment that includes a number in sequential order (first commenter starts at 1, second commenter takes 2 etc…) AND link to an unedited comment that you made to /r/frugalmalefashion that in some way talks about shoes. (These shoes are size 10D btw, although I they are marked as a size 9, I think due to the fact that these were samples Nic had made up, not exactly sure though.) Boots have been worn about ten times while owning them for about 6 months.
Submitted May 27, 2017 at 07:31AM by 6t5g http://ift.tt/2r6HNE2
