>>1700576Meant the "wide" version, sorry! Women’s shoes are obviously much narrower
>>1700586That’s a bit harder to answer. I work at a company called "Intersport" and we have our own house brand called McKinley. They’re not extremely terrible, given that they’re usually dirt cheap, but if you plan on hiking for more than 2 days a year, avoid them. They do make up most of our returns as well since they’re not really high quality but I don’t count them since they’re not part of the mainstream brands.
With any other brands, to be honest, it really doesn’t matter. You’ll always encounter a faulty model because a lot of parts are still hand made, and where people work, there will be mistakes.
Our best selling model is actually the Lowa Renegade because it’s the perfect shoe for where I live but again, if you plan on hiking on difficult terrain, it’ll be too soft and won’t be comfortable in addition to being too fragile so there’s a chance people will ruin them on their first trip to the alps or something. People love to get them to walk their dogs because they’re relatively lightweight, "sturdy" (again, mind what I said before), waterproof and made of leather. But even then we recommend against it because no hiker uses their shoes as much as dog owners do, if you go out and about 2-3 times a day you can expect like 2 years max with the Renegade and like anons said before, you can’t resole them, which you can with most of the more sturdier mountain boots.
There certainly are a lot of other good boots but the 3 best ones in my opinion are the Meindl Kansas (or Vakuum), the Lowa Camino and the Hanwag (Lowas sister company) Tatra.
It’s not just about quality per se because they’re all superbly made our main problem is to accommodate to all shapes and sizes of feet but one of the aforementioned models will definitely fit. Keep in mind that if you have really wide feet you’d have to go for the wide version of the Camino
