These Boots Will Last Longer than Your Child Can Wear Them

An icy wind stings my cheeks as I sprint from my warm Subaru to the front porch of a stranger’s home in my suburban neighborhood. I look between the milk delivery box and a patio chair and locate my prize, wrapped in a plastic grocery bag.

Back in my car, I pull up my phone, open Venmo, and send $30 to someone named Julia. I unwrap the bag and marvel at my loot: a purple and pink pair of girls rubber snow boots, dotted with a stylish flower print, in child’s size 12.

These are no ordinary boots—they are a pair of Bogs Neo-Classic winter boots. Parents everywhere, including yours truly, have come to appreciate the brand for keeping our kids’ feet cozy and dry on the coldest winter days. We also love Bogs’ extreme, eye-popping durability. In my experience, Bogs rubber-soled winter boots are virtually impervious to the highly destructive forces that a typical child can muster. Bogs can survive the harshest sandbox grit and cheese-grater-like playground equipment. Take a belt sander to the sole of your kid’s Bogs and the vulcanized rubber may still grip icy pavement.

I want to stress how unusual this is to all of the child-free readers out there. Should you someday welcome a small human into your life, then you—like me—may marvel at your child’s ability to immediately transform new apparel or footwear into thread-bare rags.

Bogs’ extreme durability creates a dynamic that fans of the boots know well.  Your kid will outgrow his or her Bogs long before the boots wear out. Thus, you can sell them online when they no longer fit your kid’s feet and fetch a good price.

A thriving secondary market exists for Bogs on websites like Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist. If you check out the “Kids’ Bogs” page on the online re-selling site Poshmark, you will scroll past hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of used pairs for sale.

My wife and I began buying and selling our daughter’s used Bogs on Facebook Marketplace a few years ago. Our five-year-old is on her fifth pair. Here’s the thing: we’ve only purchased one pair new. The MSRP on a pair of Bogs kids winter boots is $85, but you can easily score a set with plenty of life left in them online in the $30-50 range.

For years I wondered whether this dynamic was hurting the company’s bottom line, since so many customers, like me, simply buy them from other parents.

I posed this question (does Bogs’ extreme durability hurt sales?) to Megan Vinton, Bogs’ senior director of product, during a recent phone call, and I got a murky answer: probably not, but honestly, who knows?

“We’ve never really analyzed the secondary marketplace that way,” she told me. “But the price that people can command for a used pair is pretty impressive.”

Vinton told me that the company has long known that used Bogs are sought-after items online. A few years back, she said, there was an internal conversation among company officials about creating Bogs’ own re-selling marketplace for used boots. But employees struggled to find the right e-commerce infrastructure and model to pursue. Plus, there was a decent argument that Bogs’ popularity on Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace actually boosted the brand’s popularity. So the whole project was scrapped.

“We’re content and happy to let the online community of used sellers thrive,” she said. “So many people’s entrance to our brand is from word-of-mouth and community purchasing.”

Bogs Neo-Classic Solid Kids’ Boots

$90 at Bogs

Instead, Vinton said, Bogs has found ways to lean into its reputation for longevity. Each pair of Bogs kids’ boots comes with a name tag inside that has room for three different names. And a few years ago, Bogs started a program called ReUse a Boot. The company will cover the shipping cost for customers to mail their used boots to the Portland, Oregon headquarters. Employees will then freshen up the footwear and donate them to outdoor kids’ programs and preschools.

“We want to keep them out of landfills,” says Chris Enlow, the company’s head of sustainability. “Creating a plug-and-play method to give them to a charity is how we prefer to engage in re-circulating boots.”

So, why do these kids boots last so long, when a typical child may only wear them for one or two seasons? Vinton said that, years ago, the company committed to using the same durability standards for a toddler’s boot as for the ones it manufactured for ranchers and dairy hands. Employees lay vulcanized rubber strips by hand over a neoprene sock to construct the waterproof lower. The company seeks out the strongest rubber compounds that won’t crack after a year spent in the sun, wind, and rain.

The company applies its latest technology to all of its boots, not just the ones made for lumberjacks or ranch hands. The newest models are made from vulcanized rubber that’s injected into a hard mold to create a seamless sole and lower area. And yeah, your three-year-old nephew can stomp through puddles in rocket ship-emblazoned boots that are made this way

“You don’t want people saying ‘Oh, these boots used to last longer,’” Enlow said.

The lifespan of the pink and purple Bogs are far from my mind as I park in my driveway and hurry indoors. I find my daughter scribbling in a coloring book, and I slip her feet into the new boots to make sure they fit.

Then I step out of the way and let her gaze at the color scheme and the fancy flower print. It’s somewhat similar to the design of her older pair, which sit near near our front door, ready for me to post online.

“Good,” she says, and then returns to coloring.

Fred was the editor-in-chief at VeloNews from 2016 to 2021. Prior to that he was a regular contributor to The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and The New York Times. Fred is the proud father of his five-year-old daughter, Magnolia, whose feet are growing like weeds.