Quoddy

When it comes to American-made handsewn footwear, there are really three names that consistently come up: Quoddy, Rancourt, and Oak Street Bootmakers. Over the last few years, each of these brands have grown from relative obscurity to being the faces of this classically American style.

Background Leather outsoles have gone through a bit of a wild ride. The true OG of footwear, leather soles were…

There are few places as synonymous with a shoe style as Lewiston, Maine is to the beefroll penny. It’s like Detroit and the car, or Washington D.C. and politics – being born there seems to make you an inherent expert. However, like the GM vs. Ford battle in Detroit or the Democrat vs. Republican battle in D.C., battle lines exist in this small community. Turf wars break out between kids whose dad works at Rancourt vs. their classmates at Quoddy. Slings made of Horween’s Chromexcel can be seen in every grocery store.

The one question I often get asked that I don’t answer in reviews is how I pick which shoes to wear. How I style them, when I pick one over the other, etc. With 100wears hitting the one-year mark, I thought it might be worth providing a mini update on the current collection from a personal viewpoint.

The Quoddy Blucher is really a combination of two styles of shoes – the boat shoe and a ranger moc. Taking style ques from each, and sometimes splitting the differences down the middle, the shoe acts as a bridge between the two styles and can have a very different impact based on the color choices the consumer selects.

Shoes with Quoddy stamped into the sole have been around since just after the end of WWII, but like many of the other Maine-based companies, that iteration of the brand doesn’t exist today. The current owners of Quoddy started far more recently in 1997, with the goal of reviving the nameplate in order to sell shoes in their small knick-knack store that also had “Quoddy” in the name.