I'd been selling boots for two full years before I understood what I was doing wrong. Embarrassing to admit, but it's true.
What I was doing was matching guys to boots based on what they asked for. They'd say 'I need a steel-toe' and I'd put them in a steel-toe. They'd say '6-inch' and I'd put them in a 6-inch. I thought that was the job — translating the request into the SKU.
Then a Red Wing rep came through in 2019 to do a fitting demo for me and one of my employees. She spent forty-five minutes with one customer. Forty-five minutes. I'd been doing fittings in eight.
What she did differently was she watched the guy walk. She had him put on the boot, lace it the way she said to lace it (which was different from how he'd been lacing his old boots for fifteen years), and then walk to the back of the store and back. She watched his ankle. She watched his arch. She watched whether his heel slipped. She had him stand still for thirty seconds and asked where he felt pressure. He pointed to a spot on the outside of his right foot. She said 'okay, that's a wide spot, you need an EE width, not a D.' She pulled an EE off the shelf. He walked again. The pressure was gone.
He bought the EE. He'd been wearing D-width boots for fifteen years and his right foot had been screaming at him the whole time. He didn't know boots came in widths. Nobody had ever told him.
I sat there feeling like an idiot. Two years of fitting customers in D-width because that's what I had on the shelf in their size. Two years of guys walking out with boots that were wrong for them and probably blaming the boot when their foot hurt three months in.
"The fitting is the actual product. The boot is just what I hand the customer at the end of it."
What I learned that day, and what I still tell every new employee:
1. Lacing matters. The pressure point on top of the foot, the heel-lock at the ankle, the difference between over-and-under and straight bar lacing — guys think it's all the same. It's not. Properly laced boots fit differently than improperly laced boots, in the same size.
2. Width is a real variable, not a sales upcharge. Most retailers don't stock wide widths because they're harder to inventory. We stock D, EE, and 4E in our top-five styles. EE is more common than people think.
3. Watch the customer walk. You'll see things he can't tell you because he's been compensating for them his whole life.
4. The right boot in the right size in the right width is one boot. The wrong boot in any other configuration is going to be uncomfortable, and the customer will think it's the boot's fault.
Red Wing reps still come through every couple of years to retrain me. I still pick up something each time. The fitting is the actual product. The boot is just what I hand the customer at the end of it.