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Everything That Goes Into Making a Danner Boot

Photo credit: Danner
Photo credit: Danner

From Popular Mechanics

Nestled in the back of Danner’s Portland, Oregon factory, tucked near the baskets holding thousands of shoe lasts, is the best-smelling spot in the 59,000-square-foot plant, if not the entire Pacific Northwest: the leather room.

Danner, the maker of work, duty, hike, and hunt boots, brings in leather from at least six tanneries across the U.S., inspecting every single piece of hide by hand with a five-point process. While that attention to detail gives this section of the factory an aroma like no other, the meticulousness extends to the rest of the facility, which churns out about 40 percent of all Danner boot product. Here, craftsmen combine modern machining like laser-scan cutting with World War II-era machines to build each boot, because the old saying is true: They don’t make them like they used to.

Photo credit: Nemo Design
Photo credit: Nemo Design

While Danner started in Wisconsin in 1932, founder Charles Danner knew he’d have a better shot at bringing his logging-style boot to the masses if he relocated to Portland, where he moved operations in 1936. Steadily growing ever since, but always in the same area of northeast Portland, the latest factory, which opened in 2010, is the company’s seventh in the area and its largest, handling the American-made portion of the Danner portfolio by focusing on stitchdown construction.

Along the way, Danner added Gore-Tex to footwear in 1979. Last year, the company celebrated 40 years of the initial result of that relationship: Danner Light, the first Gore-Tex boot. In 2019, Danner unveiled a special edition of the design, which takes a one-to-one aesthetic of the original right down to the logo, but with modern materials. The Danner Light epitomizes the Danner production, mixing heritage with modern technology.

Photo credit: Nemo Design
Photo credit: Nemo Design

But no matter the boot, it all starts with that leather. Most companies in this space inspect only 5 percent of leather used—just one hide off a pallet. Not Danner. The company inspects every single piece of leather on site. The process not only grades the coloring of the leather while looking for blemishes, but also tests thicknesses and strength so Danner can use the best leather suited for the task. The toughest, densest leather can cover a toe for durability, while thinner and softer leather might work best for a pliable tongue.

From there, Danner uses a Comelz automatic cutting machine to optimize the use of every hide. Workers highlight the unique aspects of the leather, and that marking is then laser-read by the machine to run an algorithm optimizing the best cutting pattern on each individual hide to eliminate the use of imperfections and to maximize dimensions. The 10-camera system gets the most—and best—out of the leather.

Photo credit: Nemo Design
Photo credit: Nemo Design

With leather pieces cut to pattern, workers must sort and pick the pieces for each of the dozens of Danner boots, with anywhere from 10 to 25 styles running through the plant at any one time. Danner then takes the leather to a splitting machine—commercialization engineer Brad Pabst says this is a step almost everyone else in the industry skips—to thin out the pieces joining together on overlays. “This minor detail makes a huge difference in the overall quality of the product,” by smoothing out areas that would otherwise bunch or create uncomfortable wear, he says.

The Gore-Tex liners are cut by a hydraulic cutter, and then workers stitch the one-piece liner together by hand and cover the seam with tape, ensuring waterproofing. (The one-piece design eliminates needless seams that come with a typical four- to six-seam design.) Danner then tucks insulation inside the Gore lining.



Automated stitching programs work to stitch together smaller pieces. With dozens of boot types and size ranges within each boot, and plenty of smaller overlays needing everything from additional leather pieces to interior insulations, the machines run thousands of programed stitching patterns.

With all the components stitched together, the hand-sewing takes center stage, using both single-needle and double-needle sewing machines to construct the bulk of the boot. All thread that runs through the British High-Speed Stitcher machines comes pre-heated to ensure a consistent stitch line. The gusset piece (the tongue area) is the hardest to sew because the two pieces coming together don’t have the same curvature, which Pabst says ensures there isn’t any excess material when stitched together to create a better fit.

The only triple-needle machine in the plant—a machine still in operation from 1893—runs a triple stitch on the Danner Super Rain Forest Gore-Tex work boot.

Photo credit: Nemo Design
Photo credit: Nemo Design

Danner’s love of old machinery remains evident as the factory employs World War II-era cast-iron machines to punch through leather to install hardware, such as eyelets. “You can’t get old cast equipment like that anymore,” Pabst says. Danner employs a maintenance person in charge of keeping all the old equipment running.

The process of forming the boot and placing it onto insoles and outsoles follows a similar form to other factories with a last placed on a lasting post, and leather uppers stretched around the last. Part of the reason for the extensive leather testing early in the process is to ensure the leather has the strength to hold up to the stretch and isn’t ripped during the process, wasting all the effort leading up to that step.

The leather also receives the Danner logo through an embossing technique, which requires a slightly different pressure and length depending on the type of leather. The Danner Light’s 40th anniversary design, for example, requires 60 psi for six seconds for the throwback logo that highlights the brand’s roots in Portland.

Workers then glue the leather uppers to the insoles and add fiberglass shanks in the arch for support using Vibram outsoles. They then stitch the upper onto the rubber outsole using a T700 weight thread; the thread on the outsole is T90. This stitchdown process ensures no separation between the components of the boot. “We’ve been doing the stitchdown longer than anybody,” Pabst says.

Photo credit: Danner
Photo credit: Danner

For additional support, the soles and upper are bonded together using a machine that cement-locks the two and a bladder that pressurizes the two, contouring to the lug pattern of each boot for uniformity. The 75 pounds of pressure for 25 seconds ensure the bond.

Each boot’s outsole then gets hand sanded. “The craftsmanship in this process comes down to experience,” Pabst says. “Every boot is sanded by somebody individually.”

Following the hand-sanding, the boot gets heated to rest the leather. The clean-up process—extra glue and threads too long get removed, and workers melt the ends of threads to seal them and keep them from unraveling—happens before the boots get tagged, boxed, and sent the distribution center down the road.

Danner keeps the entire process in house, with the company headquarters housing the design team just a few blocks away. Designers and engineers will work together in The Nest, a corner of the Portland factory floor meant for prototyping and sampling.

Along with The Nest, an in-house lab tests shoes for a variety of quality issues: everything from lace and fabric abrasion, to bonding, to ratings for steel toe, electrical specifications, and more. Danner sends all its Gore product to Delaware for Gore to run additional tests before they go to the consumer.

Photo credit: Nemo Design
Photo credit: Nemo Design

While the testing machinery in the quality-control lab doesn’t differ much from those found in footwear labs around the world, Danner does go one step further by testing boots in a variety of conditions, such as having an abrasion wear tester that operates inside a freezer so workers can test quality at all temperatures and ranges of ice encasement.

Whether employing the latest in footwear factory technology or embracing an 1893 triple-stitcher, Danner’s decisions have always centered around crafting leather—and that won’t change, even if the rest of the industry does.

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