The Demise of Frye Boots

As I was doing my routine review of the pages on my personal website that are viewed each month and tally the results from the logs, I continue to see that for 24 months running, my pages on Frye Boots remain the most visited on my website. Thus, they remain ranked #1 on my Top 16 Boots ranking information. (BTW, I posted this photo for my buddy, AZ. It was this Frye-booted pic that put him in contact with me, and developed our deep and abiding friendship.)

In June alone, there were more than 16,000 unique visitors who viewed one or more "Frye Boot" pages on my website. About 70% of the visitors were referred by a Google search, another 15% by other search engines, and the remaining visitors came from other pages within my own website. That's pretty good, considering this is just a gay guy's personal, non-commercial website. But that number is an indication that lots and lots and LOTS of people are searching for photos and information about Frye Boots.

Frye Boots sure have a huge reputation. Those of us "about my age" remember fondly seeing guys in Fryes while in high school, and perhaps getting a pair of our own. Man, I went "Frye-crazy" when I was in high school. There was this cool-looking dude that everyone admired who strolled into class one day in olive Frye campus boots. I swear, the next day, ten more guys had on Fryes!

The classic and unique look, the sound of their clunkly heels on the floor, and the feel of those boots was just something else. Even today, searches for "Vintage Frye Boots" are what's driving lots of visitors to my website, to eBay, and to other sources on the web.

Pity that Frye as a boot-making company is no more. Yeah, that's right. You can find the Frye website, and see them advertise their boots. But let me quote from what I wrote on the HotBoots "Tutorial" a while back:

"According to Frye, the Frye Company is the oldest continuously operated shoe company in the United States. (Notice the careful choice of wording -- they no longer refer to themselves as a shoemaker or bootmaker.) The company was founded in 1863 as the Frye Boot Company in Marlborough (or Marlboro), Massachusetts, and continued to produce their shoes and boots in that location until 2003, when they closed the plant, outsourced bootmaking to other countries, and relocated the company headquarters to Great Neck, New York."

Yeah, that's right. Frye boots available today are not made in the U.S. any more -- they are mass-produced in China. Guys who have ordered the "new" Frye boots since 2003 have told me often how much they are disappointed with them. The quality is poor (compared with Vintage), the colors fade, the heels have come off, the threads have loosened, the insole is crappy, and the leather is not as thick.

So, if you are interested in Frye Boots, don't buy new ones. Search eBay using the term "Vintage Frye Boots." Then look carefully at the photos. Look for a "Frye" white label on the inside of the boot shafts. (Fryes made in the '70s and earlier had a black label on the inside of the boot shaft.) Ask the seller when the boots were purchased. Don't be fooled, and don't buy boots from a company that now is merely a shell for what it once was -- raking in money from a name, not the quality we once knew.