Selvaine

The store in Annapolis closed and nobody talks about it

A guy named Thomas Christopher wrote me last month.

Said it better than I could.

That's not a complaint about a retail location.

That's a guy telling you the brand walked out of the harbor town the shoe was named for.

Liz Smith wrote me about Fawcett's chandlery in the same town. Gone too.

Bruce Terry wrote me about the Boatique on the Ortega River down in Jacksonville. Gone. Graham's Boat Yard down the road from it. Also gone.

Carl Peterson wrote me about Spags hardware store in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. Sold Sperrys for under $20 alongside boom vangs and winch handles in the 80s and 90s. Gone.

They kept the rope-knot logo. They kept the catalog photos of guys on sailboats. They closed the actual stores in the actual port towns. That's the whole script.

Their daughters keep showing up with Hey Dudes

I've heard this story from at least 40 guys in the last six months.

The grown daughter shows up at Thanksgiving with a shoebox.

Inside is a pair of foam slip-ons in a color the guy would not have been caught dead wearing in 1978.

She tells him the boat shoes are dated.

She tells him to get with the times.

The guy doesn't need to get up to date.

The guy needs the shoe his daughter's father wore when he taught her to sail.

That shoe stopped being made in 2012. The guys who lived through that disappearance aren't switching to foam. They're switching back.

They've been holding the old pair together with duct tape

This was the part of the comments I wasn't ready for.

Grown guys in their late 60s writing publicly that their pre-2012 Top-Siders are still on their feet.

Held together with whatever was in the garage.

That's not vanity.

That's a guy who tried the post-2012 replacement, watched it fall apart in 14 months, and decided the duct tape on the original was the more honest option.

Four named guys have said some version of this in my comment sections. Pattern's too consistent to be coincidence.

They paid $185 for the Gold Cup and the sides blew out

The Sperry Gold Cup is supposed to be the premium pair.

Higher-grade leather. Better construction.

The shoe a guy buys when he's decided to do it right.

The post-2012 Gold Cup costs about $185. The mental ceiling for this category.

Guys paid it because they trusted the name.

Three different guys.

Same shoe.

Same outcome.

Guys who got burned at $185 aren't paying $185 again. They're paying $45 for the spec they actually wanted in the first place.

The widths they wore for 30 years got quietly killed

This was the loudest unprompted complaint in the comments.

24 separate guys.

Same complaint.

The wider widths they wore for 30 years aren't made anymore.

The current run is medium only.

You either fit the new last or you stop buying the brand.

This is what every hollowed-out heritage company does. The lasts get simplified. The widths get cut. The leather gets corrected. The construction gets glued. The price stays the same and the guys who built the brand's customer list for 40 years get told they're too narrow a market to serve.

I run the Marlin true to the original last. The width that fit the guys who actually wore boat shoes before this turned into a department store category. Wide and narrow are on the supplier list for the next production. If yours is on the list, drop your size and I'll lock you on the waitlist.