Guide

How to pick a size when every pair runs its own way

Measuring your foot, reading a size run, and what to do when your size is not in it.

Measure your foot in the evening

Feet swell across a shift, and a work shoe has to fit the foot you have at hour ten rather than the one you left home with. Measure in the evening, in the sock you actually wear at work.

Stand on a sheet of paper with your weight on the foot, mark the heel and the longest toe, and measure the line between the marks. Do both feet and use the longer one. Most people have a mismatch of a few millimetres and buy for the smaller foot by accident.

The national health library is blunt about what a bad fit does over time, and it lists the results before it lists the causes.

“Ill-fitting shoes often cause these problems.”
MedlinePlus, U.S. National Library of Medicine, Foot Injuries and Disorders. Read 13 September 2026.

What our size run looks like

This catalogue holds 159 individual sizes across 63 pairs, and they are not spread evenly. The table below counts how many pairs carry each US size today.

The shape of that table is normal for footwear and it has a practical consequence. If you wear a size at either end of the run, start from the table rather than from a product page, because most pages will disappoint you and a few will not.

US size	Pairs	Count
6		2
6.5		3
7		10
7.5		10
8		14
8.5		20
9		17
9.5		18
10		15
10.5		10
11		12
11.5		6
12		12
13		7
14		2

Standard and wide

Width is a separate axis and it is easy to miss. Where the maker cuts a wide fitting, it appears in our size table as its own row with its own price, not as a note under the size.

Right now 1 rows in the catalogue are wide fittings. If your foot is wide, that number is the honest picture: the option exists, and it is rare.

Reading a pair before you buy it

Every product page here lists the upper, the sole and the lining in the maker's words. Three of those lines predict fit better than the size number does.

A mesh upper gives a little across the ball of the foot after a week. Leather and synthetic suede hold their shape and forgive less, so a tight leather pair stays tight. A lined winter boot eats half a size before you have put a sock in it.

When your size is not there

Sometimes we simply do not hold it. A missing row in the size table means the size is not available to us, not that the page ran out of space.

The useful move then is sideways rather than up. The same shift page usually lists two or three pairs built for the same room, and one of them will carry your size. The alternative, buying half a size off and hoping, is how most bad work shoes get bought.