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The Quest for the Perfect Sneaker: Feit Classic Lows
Certification of authenticity. Cork footbeds. Woven laces. Very minimal care guide. Vegetable tan leather footbeds. It doesn’t feel like a vegetable, though.
This sneaker would have been easier to make 150 years ago, and apparently, now, these can only be made in one factory in the entire world.
When I spoke to another shoemaker, he said he brought in one of his shoes to be copied, and they copied every single detail down to a single stitch with an incorrect tension that caused a slight, barely noticeable crease in the leather.
A Vintage Look in Modern Times
I’m talking about the Feit Classic Lows. Upon looking at these sneakers, you may notice some indescribable quality to them that feels like an old baseball game photograph specifically or like old leather cleats.
They’re very much giving a vintage cleats or running shoes vibe. They have a vintage warmth to them that these Feit sneakers also have.
What’s interesting, though, is that the brands that made those vintage running shoes, cleats, and sneakers now say it’s impossible to perfectly remake those exact same things that they used to make.
There’s always something missing; they don’t feel right. So why is that? That’s our goal today – figure that out. Also, this is an obscenely high-quality sneaker, one of the best in the world, and the price reflects that a lot. So why the heck does it cost that much, and what goes into it?
If you look closely, you’ll see the leather strip that Feit is famous for. The leather strip has a secret behind it, and it hides how the shoe was made, which we do need to talk about if you’re a shoe nerd ’cause there are some things you should probably know. Let’s get into this Feit shoe review.
Welcome to the World’s Most Fantastic
So, with all of that, I would like to welcome you to the first article in the World’s Most Fantastic, a series where I will travel the world trying to find the highest quality, craziest-made apparel items that I can possibly find anywhere.
Part of the draw with these sneakers, by the way, is that they age beautifully over time. So I’ve worn these for like 2 months or so. They were, of course, in perfect condition when I got them. They aged a tiny bit, in the best way! Then I cleaned them up, and they look, no surprise here, aged but cleaner.
Very important disclaimer: I paid for these 100% with my own money. These popped up on an Instagram ad, and I thought they were the cat’s meow, so I bought them.
And then I fought tooth and nail to get in contact with Tull Price over at Feit, the founder of the brand. I only connected with Tull to get more information on this, confirm things, and make sure that I was right and not telling you incorrect information.
The Basic Ingredients: Cork and Leather
What’s up, guys? It’s Michael, I hope you’re doing well. The first thing that goes into these sneakers is basically cork – both cork that looks like peanut butter and compressed cork.
That is why, at a comfort level, these sneakers feel like you’re wearing Birkenstocks most of the time. You can write a whole article on cork because it’s used to insulate missiles, spaceships, and your feet, but that article is not today, so stay on topic.
There are really only two ingredients that go into these sneakers. One of them is cork, as I mentioned, and the other one is leather. There’s also a lot of glue and wax cotton threads that we will talk about in a second, but what about this leather? It’s from Maryam Tannery, an Italian tannery.
Tanning is the most important part of the process because it’s where we take animal skin, which can rot and decompose and get gross over time, and turn it into something stable that we know and love that also, in this case, smells very, very good.
Understanding the Tanning Process
Leather – there are two major ways to do it. There is vegetable tanning, which is the original OG way of doing things with tannins from organic materials. A lot of times, it’s bark or acorns or leaves or a mix of all of that stuff, and the word tanning is used because we’re using tannins from organic materials to make animal skin into leather. A
nd then there’s chrome tanning. Chrome tanning, instead of using tannins and organic things, uses chromium salts, which are very, very harsh, but they tan leather incredibly fast. That’s why you see chrome tan leather everywhere.
It has a lot of things that you might like about it, too – it’s very soft, more water resistant, and it can take on color easier. The bad part is that it’s not the best for the environment, especially compared to vegetable tanning. But vegetable tanning also has its own pros that are very fun and that you might like. There are some negatives, but the pros are cool. If chrome tanning is really good at being water resistant, vegetable tanning is not as good, but it is far more breathable than chrome tan leather, so that’s a plus.
It’s also generally – and I have to say generally because there are always ifs and buts and things like that – more durable and very, very tough. It’s a harder leather, and it’s very creaky leather. Or it was, at least, when I first got the shoes, and the creaks went away after I treated them a little bit. But it patinas absolutely stunningly, which is why I got these shoes and why I bet a lot of leather nerds get these shoes.
The Secret Weapon: Horse Leather
But these shoes have another trick up their sleeve. They are not made of cow; they are made of horse leather. Horsehide, unsurprisingly, got a lot more expensive after we stopped riding horses into town every single day, but it also has some really cool properties when you compare it to something like cowhide.
It’s a very dense leather; it’s denser than cowhide, and you can feel it. Everything feels tighter, as in the grain structure of it all. So it does crease, it doesn’t roll like cordovan would, which doesn’t crease at all and is very shiny and stuff. This is definitely a different leather than that.
The point is that you can use a thinner leather that will break in very quickly and still have it be incredibly strong like a thicker cowhide would be, so you get the best of both worlds. The whole point of Feit is that you wear these very naturally – you’re supposed to wear them without socks.
They don’t use metal in the tanning for that reason because it can irritate people’s skin. It’s more natural and breathable, but by using horse hide, you can get a lot of beautiful characteristics out of the leather and still retain a ton of insane strength while you break in your shoes.
Handcrafted from Start to Finish
Now the cool thing is that this is also completely built by hand – they don’t use a single machine in the entire process. So how does that work? If you’re a footwear nerd, you probably saw the $850 price tag and thought, “Whoo, that’s very expensive, maybe a little too expensive,” until I said these shoes are completely hand-lasted and hand-sewn. So, what the heck is happening on the construction end?
A quick rundown of how these shoes are made – like I said, they’re hand-lasted. A last is a little foot-shaped thing that is made of anything basically besides foot because you don’t want to nail something into your foot to make a shoe.
Machine lasting typically works like this: the last goes down, a machine goes over it and shapes the leather into the shape of the last. Hand-lasting means instead of a machine doing that, a person is yanking the leather or other material around the last, nailing it at the bottom, and then they put it in a steam room for like 5 days, and then it takes the shape of the last.
Then what they do is they take the upper and sew it onto the gemming of the insole. This is not Goodyear welt construction, which involves another strip of leather that goes around the shoe.
Some people may actually like the welt to be there because, say, you can resole the welt twice, and then you have to replace the welt once. That means you’re only touching the important leather once for two resoles instead of twice, so shoes may last a little bit longer.
The Construction Process
The rest of the process is actually very simple. So we have a little gap from that gemming, we fill that in with cork, then we glue on another chunk of cork, then we glue on a leather strip whose job is to hide all of that construction, then we glue on a vegetable tanned leather outsole, then we glue on Vibram pads.
I’m saying glue a lot for a reason – these sneakers really use a lot of glue. Glue, as you probably know, is used very heavily in modern-day sneaker production. We’re going less and less on the sewing route and more and more on the glue route.
People who pay $850 for sneakers, though, may like more stitching because there are more points of failure instead of the glue coming undone – one stitch at a time might unravel if it’s hand-sewn, for example. These are obviously very functional sneakers. I wear them every day. I love them, and they’re my favorite sneakers. Every time I put them on, I look at my girlfriend, Taylor, and I say, “I love these shoes, okay, let’s go.” But they also balance this minimalist art thing that they’re going after more than, like, dress shoes or really heavy-duty leather boots, so they use glue around the side seams here and in certain other places. And that’s not to say other brands don’t use glue, but Feit does use a lot, mainly to keep them still stylistically minimal.
The Price Tag Explained
And finally, before we take all of this information and then we translate it into why new sneakers cannot look like old sneakers, we have to talk about the price.
These are $850 like I said – expensive, but technically, they should cost $2,500 if they’re made anywhere else besides where they are made: China. Oh, pause, wait a minute, we’re going to revisit what I just said with other examples.
This factory in China is kind of a unicorn of the world. I spoke to five shoe and boot brands before I got in contact with Tull, and they all said, “Oh yeah, stuff is definitely made in this factory.”
And when I spoke to Tull about this and asked him about it, he said basically: one, he’s not sure if there are even enough hand sewers in Italy to make these shoes; two, they would be stiffer and constructed differently; and three, they would start at $2,500 instead of $850 to be made. That’s where I got the number. That’s what he said.
The Manufacturing Reality
Plainly, this is always a very hot topic, so I just wanted to show my homework so we’re all on the same page with things. Feit doesn’t really have an exact comp in the market – no one’s making something super similar to them. However, there are a bunch of boots and sneakers that have some similarities and some differences, and the prices go with those.
When I spoke with Tull specifically about manufacturing and this factory, he said that after working in the footwear industry for decades, this is the only factory that could produce this shoe and hand-sewn footwear to his exact specifications and stiffness and everything like that – the only factory where things worked.
All of that is to say that I now have confirmation that something similar to this can be made in the US, for example – that’s where my contact that I asked was for – for a similar price that is listed on the website right now.
But that does not include the custom box, the extras that these come with, the custom small batch Vibram outsoles that they use, custom leathers, and all of those things. With all of that, Tull says if he’s going to mimic that exact process in Italy, it will cost $2,500.
You can make something similar in the US to this for what they retail for now, but it might not have the exact little nuances or specifications or something that Tull is looking for. I’m not saying these are overpriced or underpriced. I just want to give you context because sometimes this is a very hot topic.
That is everything that I have and that I know, and I reached out to a few manufacturers to confirm. Either way that is that – they make their latest shoes in Italy, and I make my clothing in America.
Why Modern Sneakers Can’t Capture Vintage Magic
So, with that, we finally return to the question at the beginning of this Feit shoes review: why do vintage sneakers, cleats, and running shoes look different than modern ones, and why is it virtually impossible to recreate them one for one? In the ’60s–’70s, when the running boom happened, all of a sudden, we had Nike, Puma, and Adidas all racing to be the de facto running shoes.
So they were all using very, very high-quality materials from their inception, and those very high-quality materials used early on -–yes, certain things like foam on sneakers degraded over time and stuff like that, but the leather was a higher quality, so it creased different, it yellowed over time, it might not have disintegrated or flaked or chipped or something like that, so it had a different look to it.
But also, at the same time, these were not the billion-dollar brands that we know today. The sneaker game now is absolutely insane. We’re doing Flyknit stuff with Nike – I forget what Adidas calls theirs. ON just debuted that LightSpray sneaker. It’s insane. We have brands adding billions of dollars into their manufacturing when, in the old days, there were a lot more hands-on processes, and that is the key to everything besides the materials aging.
When you are hand-lasting a shoe, for example – not that that’s what Nike was doing when they debuted – the person doing that is making a ton of decisions. Should I pull the leather this tight? Do I need to do this? Work that changes the way something looks at the end, even if you can’t notice it. There are certain things that are not perfect but are very attractive, right, Taylor?
What if we look at it from a nerdy perspective? If you’re machine-lasting, you get a different characteristic, which Nike has to account for. Machine-lasting, when compared to hand-lasting, has a very tight, slim, stretched look. So what does Nike do?
They modify the material, the leather, so it can be a little thicker, have a little bit more life to it, a little bit more kind of bulbous characteristics to it, or they modify the last that it goes around to make it thicker and more bulbous and look more like it should.
And all that is to say, those tiny little things that someone is not working on themselves and that Nike and big brands have to account for means your sneaker loses that sense of handmade warmth, both from lesser quality materials being used but also the way it’s interacted with when it’s being made.
Watch This Review
That’s a Wrap!
Thank you very much for tuning in to the World’s Most Fantastic Ep1. Feit Shoe Review. This job is a literal dream of mine and has always been, so thank you for that, and I will talk to you very soon.
This article was adapted from Michael Kristy’s video on The Iron Snail, with edits from FashionBeans, and was reviewed by Michael to ensure the integrity of his original content. Watch the full video here.
The Iron Snail is a men’s fashion vlog (and now article series!) starring a young man named Michael and featuring a snail no bigger than a quarter. The two are set on taking over the world of fashion by creating a clothing line to end all clothing lines. Until then, we’re here to tell you EVERYTHING you need to know about the best clothing out there, from the highest quality raw denim jeans to the warmest jackets to the sturdiest boots…the Iron Snail has got you covered.
