Wide feet and ready-to-wear shoes: why sizing up is making things worse

As an Australian shoemaker, the wide feet struggle is one of the most common problems I see in my Sydney workshop. I want to explain what's actually happening to your shoe — and your foot — when the fit is wrong, because most people don't realise the damage goes both ways.

When a shoe is too narrow, the leather is under constant tension. This doesn't just hurt; it causes the leather to crack and degrade far sooner than it should. A quality shoe that should last 20 years can be ruined in three.

The instinct most people have is to size up to get the width. It feels like a reasonable compromise. But here's the problem: when you do this, the proportions of the shoe relative to your foot are now incorrect in ways that matter a lot.

The ball of your foot — which should sit directly at the flex point of the shoe — ends up sitting behind it. Every time you take a step, the shoe is flexing in the wrong place. Over time, this breaks down the construction at a point it was never designed to handle.

More noticeably, the heel counter no longer captures your heel correctly. Your heel lifts inside the shoe with every stride. This isn't just uncomfortable — that movement is what causes blisters, destroys the heel lining, and eventually collapses the counter entirely.

So you're left with a choice between a shoe that's too tight and ruins the leather from the outside, or a shoe that's too long and ruins it from the inside while hurting your feet in the process.

The answer isn't to size up. It's to find shoes that are actually made on a wide last.