Thanks. This thread has really drifted all over the place, mostly do to me, and I apologize for that. Sold a fair amount of Danners too, good shoes but drifting up in price and some of the styles have gone backwards in design I feel. Soles mostly, and that's only on the imports.
Allow me to ramble on a bit more. I really get a kick out of the fact that the Asolo's are designed and uppers cut in Italy, then everything is boxed up and trucked to Romania for assembly and boxing, then sent back to Italy for distribution around the world. Pretty unique. I sometimes, with the right customer, joke that you get a free AK with each purchase. If you punch in the coordinates shown on the tongue label (45'48'53"N 12'13'03"E) you can see the company HQ.
And I'll add my two cents on shoes like the Vibergs that Redneck44 asked about. They are beautiful shoes and appear to be very well made. A little further looking on my part showed me that they cater to two different markets. They are not alone in that respect as the title of this thread indicates as well. The first stuff from them I saw the other day was the urban fashion lines, very nice and very expensive. Today I found their workboot line. Looks very good, many are so similar to Danners, Whites, and a Red Wing or two I'd have to look closely to tell them apart on somebodies foot. The pricing is right in like with those brands too. Looks to be a good value for your dollar. I see a few imports in the line, but that's an economic reality these days. I will say that their urban line is in my experience way too expensive for what it is. There is nothing in a shoe like that to make it that expensive other than cache and marketing. The assembly methods are no different from the RW Heritage or Whites/Hathorn or a Limmer for example, and those boots sell for substantially less. I've been in shoe factories and seen the "old fashioned" build methods used in these types and the "new" methods used in less expensive shoes as well. The actual cutting, sewing, adding hardware, etc. is really the same operation no matter what the shoe. Material qualities can of course vary all over the place based on the manufacturers specs and the price does correspondingly. Shoe making, unless done by one guy by hand all the way through, is a sort of hybrid of new and old craftsmanship. Some machinery is of newer design and can speed the process up a bit, but by and large almost all operations involved require people to stand or sit at a machine and do something by hand that takes a bit of time to get good at. Lasers nowadays project a cross hair on the last so the guy pulling the upper on and stapling it to the last can get it straight 99% of the time, and scanners and computers tell the cutter how to get maximum use of a hide by arranging his dies. But it is still by far a hands on operation and labor intensive, and that is the most costly part of the process, labor. In the US, heavy native steer hides as used by all the rugged boot builders sell for approx. $1.08/lb wholesale. It's a commodity you can track for fun. Other parts of shoes and boots are typically priced in the cents range at cost, not dollars, other than the outsoles. Transportation costs figures in to get that stuff to the factory too. To any of you in manufacturing this is no new news. Then there is marketing, distribution, health plans, etc that add to the wholesale cost. I'm drifting here, but my point is that $400-$500 and up shoes are not valued at that level because of how they are made and how long they will last or perform. You are paying for something else.
