Carina Wolff, a content material creator in Los Angeles, was impressed to purchase Blundstone boots in 2021 after always seeing her husband in his pair. “I put on them with overalls or mom-jeans-style pants,” she stated, “throughout the day, operating errands throughout.” Ms. Wolff, 32, added that she will put on her pale brown-leather boots out to dinner, too.
The frequency and zeal with which product suggestion web sites, together with these of GQ, New York journal and even The New York Instances, have written about Blundstone’s boots over the previous few years could recommend that the model is a few sizzling new label. However as a few of these web sites have famous, the corporate was based greater than 150 years in the past, in 1870, by the married couple John and Eliza Blundstone.
Again then the founders imported Chelsea boots made in England, the place the type originated, to the Australian state of Tasmania, the place they lived and began the enterprise. By 1900, the corporate had opened its first manufacturing facility in Tasmania, and in 1932 the enterprise was acquired by the brothers Thomas and James Cuthbertson, whose descendants are its present house owners. Although some Blundstone footwear remains to be made in Tasmania, it’s additionally made in Vietnam, China, Mexico and Indonesia.
Tim Engel, the vice chairman of gross sales at Blundstone, began working for the corporate 17 years in the past. He stated that curiosity in its Chelsea boots, which begin at about $200, started to surge during the last 5 to eight years due to a confluence of traits.
“Just a few years again heritage manufacturers bought actually sizzling, after which Chelsea boots bought actually sizzling, and right here we have been, with this 150-year-old firm that makes Chelsea boots,” Mr. Engel stated on a video name.