Identifying a faux welt (and other elements of deception).

The shoes we will examine today are a pair of Brooks Brothers size 10D Italian made moc toe derbies.. I've had some good candidates for this post but this pair takes the cake.

Exterior Elements-Identifying a pre-stitched welt

Welt Photos

• Starting with exterior elements, we notice in image one a (non leather) wheeled welt stitched approximately 5 SPI. There is some residual glue seepage that should right away tell you that this may be a bonwelt. This is not a conclusive factor, but one that should tell you to investigate further.

• In image two you will notice a single stitch that spans three wheeled sections of the welt. A machine stitched welt stitch that joins the welt to sole is a two thread lockstitch. So either we are looking at a glaring stitch failure or a sloppily stitched pre stitched welt.

• Image three, we are looking at the welt seam. It's a crappy photo but if you look closely you should be able to see that the thread on both sides of the welt seam is cut and that there is no stitch joining welt at the seam. Frayed, disconnected stitches at the welt seam are the hallmark of a pre stitched welt.

• Image 4 is not highly relevant for discussion but I tossed it in anyways. The midsole is genuine, appears to be celtec or similar, like what Thursday Boot Company uses for their midsoles. It's very easily impressionable and I can easily damage it by pressing my nail into it as you can see from the nail marks.

Conclusion: faux welt

Outsole Stitching

• Photo one, just a shot of the outsole. There are some odd things going on here, but we can get to that later.

• In photo two, take a look at the SPI of the welt and the outsole. You'll notice a clear discrepancy, approximately 3 SPI on the outsole to 5 SPI on the welt. Furthermore, look at the spacing of the stitching relative to the edge of the sole. The suspected fake welt stitching is roughly one third as close to the edge of the welt as the outsole stitching is to the edge of the sole. Clear indicator that the stitching atop the welt and the stitching visible on the outsole are not conjoined. This definitively rules out blake/rapid and goodyear construction and we pretty much know that this is blake.

For the above reasons we can definitively say that the welt is pre stitched and bonded to the midsole.

Interior Elements

Sockliner

• Image one, we see a branded BB insole. There are a lot of words thrown around to describe this component. Heelpad, full length heelpad, insole, sockliner, removable insert, more or less the same thing. I call this a sockliner or a full length heel pad. I don't know what the OEMs call it.

• Image two. I pulled the sockliner out.

• Image three. What was very curious about this sockliner is that there is 180 degree stitching around the toe. This was quite deceptive upon looking into the shoe because it makes it looks like blake stitching if you are not looking closely.

• Image four, I thought perhaps that the stitching was functional, to secure the padding to the leather liner around the toe, and maybe it is intended to be, but the stitching misses most of the padding. You're free to draw your own conclusion here.

I included this because I thought it was interesting, it does not attempt to represent the shoe as goodyear construction because in goodyear construction you would not see any stitching atop the innersole.

Innersole

• Image one. Finally, beneath the sockliner we find the innersole and the blake stitching. Notice that the blake stitching only extends to the midfoot, approximately 180 degrees.

• Image two, On the outsole of the shoe, you'll notice that the stitching extends well past midfoot at least to the heel of the shoe. From the outsole the blake stitching looks at the very least 270 degrees even though the innersole stitching indicates otherwise.

• Image three. You can see a distinctive difference between what looks like the waxed blake stitches and the unwaxed blake stitches. It appears that somehow the manufacturer extended the outsole stitching without stitching through the innersole. This is really strange and is not something that I've seen before. I'll have to investigate this further. I do not want to do a tear down but from this point forward I cannot determine why there is a discrepancy between the innersole and outsole stitching without further investigation.

To conclude, we determined that this pair of shoes is blake constructed and has a pre stitched faux welt that is bonded to the midsole.

If you look at enough blake shoes you'll notice that manufacturers employ a host of tricks to attempt to make their shoes look as if they are goodyear welted. Some manufacturers are better than others at obscuring the method used, but when armed with a little knowledge it becomes easy to see through the tricks.