Huntsman Boot Explained by Dave
WARNING: Turn back now, stop reading and live your life in blissful ignorance if you can’t afford high quality shoes and boots, because once you learn what you’re about to learn about the differences between a mid-level and a high level boot, it will bother you until your dying day and you’ll never be happy with regular shoes again. I’m speaking from experience.
If you’ve ever wondered WHY one pair of leather boots only costs $350 and one, that looks a whole lot like it, costs anywhere from $600 to $1600, and if you’ve ever wondered why hundreds of thousands of people each year buy those expensive leather shoes from various companies, and if you like to nerd out on the details, then you’re going to LOVE what you’re about to learn. BTW, we don’t wholesale our shoes and boots to physical stores, but if we did, they would likely be priced at around $1100 to $1300.
High quality leather boots save you money. Low quality ones cost you money. High quality shoes change your life. Sadly, low quality ones do too. Each of these points is expanded on, further down the page to deeply understand why.
• Comfort - High quality materials and over engineered construction are comfortable and expensive. Most people say our leather boots and shoes are comfortable right out of the box, for all day wear, minus the occasional odd shaped pinkie toe that needs to develop a light callous before extended use. If someone’s muscles are severely weak or bones are out of alignment then that needs a little getting used to, but otherwise quality shoes are comfortable and get more comfortable each decade you wear them. They were designed with a high quality solid leather footbed and midsole, which forms your footprint deeply. Low quality leather boots use cardboard footbeds with a thin leather stickers-equivalent on top and a synthetic midsole beneath. They never get truly comfortable, just tolerable.
• Healthy Shape - Using an expensive high quality last to form the shoe can be very expensive because it takes longer to manufacture by hand. A high quality shoe or boot is shaped and designed based on orthopedic principles and therefore can strengthen your feet, align your body and so take away pain in your feet, ankles, achilles tendons, shins, knees, hamstrings, hips and back. Low quality shoes, even ones with high quality materials, can cause pain and surgeries over time if their shape is cheap. More on this subject below.
• Construction - Those Italians charge for their perfection, expertise and expensive machinery. High quality leather shoes have technically challenging construction methods requiring highly skilled labor, so they don’t fall apart in just a few years. The high quality mindset and skillset is why we make our shoes and boots by Italians, in Italy. And our quality rubber soles are made with high quality precision machinery in Italy too, so they are perfectly level from day one, not leaning a millimeter or two to the left or right, like they do when made with low quality machinery.
• Materials - High quality leather boots can have 4X the cost of leather than low to mid quality shoes. High quality leather keeps the shoe shape so they look great 20 years later because it has such a tight fiber structure. And, we only cut one or two pairs from the whole hide because there are only a few spots with the tightest fibers. Low quality shoes flatten, stretch out and start looking dumpy in just a year or two because they are made from cheaply tanned loose leather and they cut out triple the number of shoes from the same size hide. They also cut from loose areas of the hide that they should throw away. Not to mention they don’t care about whether or not they cut certain pieces of shoe from the tightest places or in the direction of the stretch of the hide. Our vegetable tanned leather from Tempesti is recognized in Italy as one of the finest and tightest in the world.
• Sole - Good ones will last twice as long, but they’re two or three times the price. I extensively interviewed the PhD chemist and lifelong sole makers at the sole factory in Italy to understand what goes into a high quality sole. Two identical looking rubber soles can give you totally different results. The rubber recipe may be the same as the low quality sole, but the higher quality ingredients are more expensive. And if they take shortcuts in the cooking and curing processes to save money, then they’ll also get a seriously inferior rubber sole. Quality soles grip nicely in cold weather, don’t crack, chip or harden, don’t deform or wear away on hot roads and sidewalks and are highly resistant to oils and chemicals on the ground. More on that below.
• Designed All Natural - Using all natural materials costs far more than using synthetics. High quality leather shoes and boots do not use petrochemical synthetic padding, footbeds, lining, midsoles, tongues or even uppers because those things leach chemicals into the bloodstream, wear out quickly and also make feet sweat and stink. Stinky bacteria grows on synthetics, not on leather. High quality natural materials let your feet breathe through the fibers and therefore regulate temperature. After many years, my boots still smell like leather.
An orthopedic surgeon came into our solid leather Texas showroom the other day and said, “If all orthopedic surgeons knew about your shoes, they would recommend them to all of their patients. The number one question we get is, ‘What kind of shoes should I buy to help me get re-aligned?’” He said, “Right now, I just tell my patients to walk barefoot as often as possible.’” I read that there are about 1,000,000 knee surgeries, 500,000 back surgeries and 300,000 hip surgeries each year in the United States alone? A lot of those are because of badly shaped shoes.
Every shoe and boot should be built based on Orthopedic Principles, but they’re not. Because ours are, so many of our shoe and boot reviews say the same two things:
1. “They were comfortable right out of the box with No Break In Period”. The shape of our leather boots and shoes were anatomically designed to wrap around the non-symmetrical shape of the foot, which costs us a lot more in labor because we have to last them by hand. Most boots are conveniently shaped symmetrically, for fast manufacturing with a lasting machine, but require our asymmetrical feet to get used to, and form to, the symmetrical shape of the boot.
2. They don’t help everybody, but many say the pain in their back, hips, knees and feet is either gone or way way better after wearing our leather boots for a few months. That’s what happened to me, personally. My 15 years of on and off plantar fasciitis, achilles tendon pain, shin splints, knee pain (both knees) and hip pain disappeared after wearing my first pair of boots for 4 months, almost daily.
We, and most “Barefoot” type shoes, adhere to these key principles:
1. Wide Toe Box - Feet naturally spread out, between the big toe knuckle and little toe knuckle, up to ½” with each step, but most shoes damage feet by not allowing that. The wider your feet and toes are spread out, the better balance, foot strength and comfort you’ll have and the less your foot will roll too much when it shifts the body’s weight to the exact place to push the body forward. When your foot over-rolls the body’s weight over the big toe too much before it launches the body forward, it weakens and flattens the arch. It’s called OVERpronation.
2. Straight Big Toe Line - Our boots keep the big toe naturally straight in line with the bones of the foot so pain and bunions don’t form or so they go away. Shoes that bend the big and little toes in towards the middle toes, weaken the arch by stretching out its ligaments, tendons and muscles for 12 hours a day.
3. Absolutely ZERO Arch Support - They say that arch support is from the Devil himself, because he hates you. It keeps your arch from extending and contracting all day long, which makes it weak from lack of exercise. You usually end up getting either a flat arch or high arch, which means a weak arch. It’s rare that people need arch support for medical reasons, but it happens. The orthotic-arch support industry is an over $4 Billion per year industry.
4. Absolutely ZERO Padding - Many doctors say padding weakens ankles, misaligns natural angles and lessens bone density. It stuffs up under the arch and keeps it from fully exercising as you walk. It also dangerously weakens some ligaments, tendons and muscles because they’re living the easy life now, which forces other weaker areas to compensate by strengthening. Padding can mess up the feet and therefore can misalign the whole body.
5. Low or No Heel - Barefoot shoes say to go for zero heel height (drop), but medical science says that as long as the height difference between the ball of the foot and the heel is not too much, then it’s not going to lean you forward and put too much consistent weight on the weaker muscles and tendons of the ball of the foot. Our height differential is within the accepted height difference.
6. Flexible Sole at the Toe - You want the toes to be able to bend and flex when they push off to propel the body forward. It’s how they exercise and stay strong. When the sole is too stiff, the toes don’t exercise, so they atrophy and get weak. This forces the ankle to take on work that it wasn’t designed to handle.
Our leather shoes and boots allow the arch, feet and ankles to strengthen with each step, which lets your body get back into alignment from years of poorly shaped shoes that weren’t designed in accordance with basic and healthy orthopedic principles.
In order for our shoes and leather boots to technically be certified as orthopedic, we would have to submit 50 pairs to some bureaucratic government agency to be tested for three years. And who knows if people in those departments are paid off by Big Shoe to not certify. So, our boots and shoes are NOT certified orthopedic medical devices, but they are based on good sound and healthy orthopedic principles.
To add to the basic orthopedic principles, our shoe last, that the leather is wrapped around and that gives the shoe its look, is based on the first of six generations of the anatomically correct Munson last. My name is Dave Munson, and my relative, Dr. Edward Lyman Munson and his shoe board, engineered a shoe shape to fix the problem of 37% of the soldiers could not finish an 8 hour march, rest for 24 hours, and then march 8 hours back. After four years of experimenting and thousands of pairs of shoes later, 100% of the hundreds of soldiers wearing boots built on the twisted and orthopedic Munson Last, finished a 120 miles march in ten days. Munson’s understanding of the biomechanics of a human’s natural step made all of the difference.
Shoes and boots built on the twisted Munson last make us mimic the mechanics of how we step when we are barefoot. Hundreds of millions of US soldiers wore Munson’s boots from 1912 to about 1970 because they could stand or march all day long and almost 100% of their pain went away and the boots even corrected almost everybody’s pre-existing problems. Any U.S. soldier you see in a photo or movie from 1912 to 1970 was wearing boots made on the Munson last. Only the toe of the Munson Last was adjusted for aesthetics. We have the only known original 1st Generation Munson Last on display at our Texas showroom. We found it in Paris several years ago owned by a rare collector who didn’t really know what he had.
Saddleback’s custom patent-pending Good Sole is one of the longest lasting, most resistant, highest performing and most functional rubber soles that we could make.
Our Good Sole is patent pending for three innovations:
1. Our boots can be resoled over and over and over and over and over again without wearing out the welt. It is our eternal sole. How is your sole?
2. They are more shock absorbing without sacrificing abrasion resistance.
3. The way the two pieces of rubber are affixed to the leather mid-sole, it won’t let them separate from the leather and allows the tread to go all the way out to the edge of the shoe for better traction, balance and appearance.
There are THREE HUGE QUALITY FACTORS that determine how a high quality rubber sole outperforms a low quality one over time and how long it lasts, even if they look identical.
1. The rubber recipe
2. The quality of ingredients
3. The method of manufacturing
For example, Vibram Soles are the highest all around quality rubber sole we know of. But there are shoe factories in other countries who make knock off Vibram soles, that look exactly the same, but they don’t last very long. Our quality rubber sole has the following characteristics:
• Strong Abrasion Resistance - Quality rubber doesn’t rub away easily. Ours are an 80 hardness on the heel and 70 hardness on the half sole where rubber meets the road.
• Oil Resistant - Doesn’t absorb oil from the road easily.
• Chemical Resistant - Doesn’t absorb chemicals easily.
• Resistant to UV breakdown
• Resistant to oxidation
• Our rubber has lively rebound so it pushes your foot back up with every step making it easier to walk.
• Great grip in cold and wet conditions
• Don’t harden or get brittle
• Don’t tear or crack in cold weather or on sharp rocks
• Don’t build up heat on hot pavement
• Don’t get soft or deform on hot pavement
The harder the rubber, the longer the sole lasts. The softer the rubber, the faster it wears away. Our patent-pending soles have the best of both worlds. We have a softer 60/100 hardness shock absorbing layer sewn to the leather, beneath a harder 70/100 hardness abrasion resist layer where the rubber meets the road. I chose to use a half sole so the waist of the shoe can breathe through the leather and keep the foot cooler.
Rubber and leather don’t bond well together, but rubber and rubber stay together forever. That’s why we glued and sewed the 60/100 shock absorbing rubber layer to the leather and then permanently bonded our highly resistant 70/100 outer traction layer to the sewn on leather. Now, they’re together forever… until it’s time to resole without sewing.
We have an 80 hardness rubber heel because that is where most abrasion and pressure occur and the shock is absorbed by the stack of leather above it. And the rubber is screwed down deep into the leather with Italian brass screws, for just in case.
This one is a 20% difference maker to me and how the patents came about. I wanted a boot with tread, but I didn’t like the Vibram or Commando or other rubber soles that You can see the tread along the edges. This tread is not too aggressive, like a logging boot, nor is it too tame, like a flat rubber sole. The lugs are exactly the right height and width, and with just the right amount of angle and chiseled shape to give the boot a chiseled and stout look. They work in a canyon or at a cafe.
We gave the Munson last a slightly more aesthetic upgrade with a cooler looking toe. The Huntsman Boot toe is more rounded and playful, which makes it look more casual and rugged. The Officers Boot toe is flatter and a little pointier, which gives it a little more stylish, semi-dress-ish appeal.
I was looking for a boot I could wear on in the field and on a date. I found it!
I just received my boots. So lovely and very comfortable. I am very pleased with quality and fit. I also have Black Officers boots. If you make the Huntsman in black notify me immediately and I will buy a pair.
