He Sawed $100,000 Worth of Shoes in Half. Here's What He's Learned

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Weston Kay didn’t set out to become YouTube famous, and even now, with close to a million followers and tens of millions of views, he still doesn’t particularly love being on camera. What he does care about is well-made boots. And that’s why he spends his days spreading the gospel of Goodyear welts, vegetable-tanned leather, and hand-lasting by bandsawing shoes and boots in half to reveal how they’re made.

Raised on a farm in central Utah, Kay grew up around guys for whom workwear is a tool like any other, and learned the value of a good pair of boots through stints on construction and firefighting crews. He was partway through a degree in metallurgy (and funding his tuition through selling plasma) when he hit on the idea that would, half a million dollars in crowdfunding later, become Rose Anvil, a leather goods brand specializing in professional-grade camera harnesses. When the pandemic stalled the event photography business (and, by extension, the camera harness business) Kay needed a way to keep things running, so he cut a pair of Doc Martens in half, uploaded it to the internet, and a YouTube star was born.

After shooting nearly 1,000 videos and destroying $100,000 worth of covetable kicks, from Alden Indys and Clarks Wallabees to Nike Dunks and MSCHF’s infamous Big Red Boots, he’s become one of the internet’s foremost footwear reviewers. With a leatherworker’s eye for quality, a nose for marketing spin, and an array of DIY testing gear (the waterproof test involves an aquarium and a rock), he serves his audience a rare glimpse at what goes into making a pair of shoes, and the ways in which brands often don’t live up to their promises. While he’s best known for debunking the quality of the worst offenders (you might want to think twice about buying those Gucci Aces), he’s equally vocal about brands that get it right, particularly indie makers like White’s, Nicks, and Goral. We chatted with Kay about his most surprising discoveries, his favorite boot brands, and the best way to tell if a pair of shoes is worth the price on the tag.

Weston Kay: I think the value we provide is down to our blue-collar background and my leatherworking background. It’s a function-first approach to footwear instead of the sneakerhead hype-culture perspective. It's not bad to have a hype culture—that’s what we’re actively trying to bring into the high-end footwear world, along with education and holding brands accountable.

Ever since boots and shoes have been manufactured, people have been cutting them in half because it's the most foolproof way to show the quality. It also makes it impossible to hide what you're doing and what you don't want the consumer to know.

It's tough because there are so many variables, and brands are so good at faking it. Like, you could look for that stitch around the toe that tells you it's traditionally made, and then you cut it in half and they just glued that on. But as a general rule, if you're looking for durable, high-quality footwear, the more leather, the better. The more leather they have, the more expensive it is to make those boots.

One of the biggest surprises was early on when I still wasn't as knowledgeable as I am now about the footwear industry. We cut apart a pair of Common Projects Achilles, which were the white sneaker to have, and people love them. So I cut them in half, and I was like…these are garbage. The Common Projects were clearly built like a $200 shoe, not a $500 sneaker in any way. We’ve cut apart plenty of $500 sneakers, and some of them are handmade with the highest-quality materials, so in my opinion we pretty well proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Achilles is overpriced.

In my opinion, the end consumer just wants high quality for an affordable price. And when a brand is not doing that, and they're positioning themselves as a premium ultra-high-end brand, they’re taking advantage of people. It’s especially true for blue-collar workers who are buying stuff as equipment to complete their jobs. The big brands and corporations are taking advantage of those people and spending thousands on advertising to set up a certain blue-collar image, but there’s nothing about that branding that’s represented in the actual product.

One of my favorite brands is Russell Moccasin, and they're one of the last true moccasin makers left in the United States. Their boots start at, like, 700 bucks, they're all handmade, and they take, like, six times as long as any other footwear to make. It's a bunch of older dudes just lasting boots by hand day after day and that's why they're so expensive, because they're not machine-made. In this true moccasin style of construction; you cannot make them with machines. You have to do it by hand.

With any footwear, there's always a point of diminishing returns. Like, if you start at $0, for every $50 you spend, you get a huge increase in quality, comfort, and value. Then, as you get to $500 or $700, it's really plateauing. I don’t know if you get seven times the boot from Russell moccasins at $700 compared to a $100 boot, but there are certain things you just can't get anywhere else. There's really no substitute for stuff that's handmade using the highest-quality materials, and that's why some of these old-school brands have stayed around.

It’s usually people wanting to know what's inside a specific pair of shoes. To me, it's a good sign that people are learning that you shouldn't trust every single brand, and they’re starting to double down on investing in quality footwear instead of, like, the cool brand. It's like that quote about mattresses: You should invest in the two things that you're always in contact with, your bed and your footwear, because if you're not in one, you're in the other.

I think there's a trend there, but it matters more how people are utilizing manufacturing in different countries than what country it is. Is everything that comes from China garbage? No. There's a brand called Grant Stone that makes some of the finest footwear in the world in China, so there are always exceptions. It's just that for the last 30 to 40 years we've moved all of our domestic manufacturing to Mexico, China, and all of these other countries with lower labor costs. When you look at the whole market, a lot of the cheap stuff does come from China, but that doesn't mean that China is only capable of making terrible footwear. It means that most US companies that are contracting out to Chinese factories are doing it to maximize their profit margins.

Once we hit that million subscriber mark, we're going to really double down on the testing. We couldn't do it up until now, because it's going to cost us a couple hundred thousand dollars just to buy the testing equipment, but we’ve finally gotten to a point where we can afford to actually bring some legitimate testing and information to the footwear world. It’s gonna be sick.