 G'day guys, how you going? You're good? Welcome to the Butlosophy channel, and if you're new here, my name is Tech. I live and work on budget country in Western Australia, and I acknowledge the traditional custodians of this land. Today, I'm taking a look at these Indonesian artisan hand-made SC service boots made by Fortis boots in Bandung, Indonesia. So these are my second boots from Bandung in Indonesia. I can't say that I was particularly ecstatic about my first pair. I mean, they are well-made boots, don't get me wrong. But I wasn't a fan of the last, and partly down to me, I chose an Indonesian natural veg tan rough-out for reasons I'll go into later. What I didn't know is that there are variations in locally tanned leathers, and when I asked for a veg tan rough-out, I wasn't particularly fussy and settled for what they suggested, which didn't turn out to be very attractive. Now that is down to me. I should have asked more to find out what was available, because there are some pretty good local pull-up tannages, and some of them reverse into a pretty attractive rough-out. All that is to say that I got a bit fuzzier with these boots, and the owner of Fortis and I had a lot of messaging back and forth before I chose this crazy horse leather. But let's focus. This is Fortis Boots' pretty standard SC service boot in Indonesian tanned crazy horse leather, using belt-scoring construction and built on a Vibram 100 deep lugged commander sole. Clearly it's a service boot design, plain toe, over six inches tall from the top of the heel, roomy round toe last, and in this leather, very much an outdoor boot, but so comfortable in or outdoors. I do like this boot, and I do like the earnest man who owns Fortis, Sani Ramdani, who really aims to please. So much so that Sani and I have been talking about a collab boot, which I'll talk about later in the video, so stay tuned. Since this is my first real look at Indonesian handmade boots, not an unboxing, I'm going to break with tradition and go straight into the way that they're constructed. I'll start from the bottom and work my way up. The outsole is a super thick Vibram 100 deep lugged commander full slip sole. You can see the sole right along the length of the boot. The heels are stacked, veg 10 leather stacked heels, each four nearly five mils thick, and it's topped with a Vibram commander top lift. The commando lugs are about 10 mils thick. The heels about 30 mils from the midsole to the lugs. So this boot gives you some extra height for the old school. That's an extra one and a half inches almost in extra height. The Vibram rubber is hard, so I expect some long term durability. While we're in the subject, you may not know that Vibram is an Italian company founded in 1937 by Italian climber Vitali Bramani, hence pronounced V-Bram, not Vi-Bram. Moving on up, the next layer is a veg 10 midsole, then the welt and then the uppers, but let me really unpack that. This boot is constructed using welt school construction. Many people lump welt school construction into the same boat as stitch down construction, but they are different. Both have the uppers turned out rather than in and stitched down, but welt school construction actually uses a welt, whereas the stitch down construction stitches directly into the midsole and sometimes the outsole. So in this welt school constructed boot, the front of the uppers are turned out, and they're stitched through a welt that goes all the way around the circumference of the boot and then down into the midsole. So the first 270 degrees of the boot is held down in this way, then a second stitch goes through the uppers, the welt, the midsole, and in this case the outsole, but this time the stitch is 360 degrees and goes all the way around the boot. You can see the 360 degree stitch under the outsole and on top around the boot on the welt. You can also see the second 270 degree stitch on top of the welt, but not going through to the outsole. This form of construction is highly durable, comfortable as all the stitches are outside, and recraftable as well as water resistant, because no stitches can leach water from the outside to the inside. Fortress boots do this by hand. This is a very laborious process, and as far as I'm aware, only the Pacific Northwest bootmakers like Whites, Knicks, Franks, JK Boots, and Wesco, or when Weiberg, do this by hand stitching. Being labor intensive, it's expensive, but when done well it's strong, and just look at the neatness of the stitching and the stitch density per inch. Inside the boot is a steel shank, a leather filler in the cavity inside the welt, not cork, because that apparently is hard to get in Indonesia, so they use veg tan leather as the insole filler. On top of that is a leather insole liner with a little bit of foam padding. The uppers are an Indonesian tanned crazy horse leather. I chose Indonesian leathers in these, and for my earlier Santalan boots on purpose. We all bang on about supporting local manufacturers and keeping the local economy going. I thought that if I'm going to try an Indonesian bootmaker, I need to try to help them keep it all in the Indonesian economy. Make it less about jingoistic patriotism, and more about actually really helping any local economy that we dip our figurative toe into. I have other crazy horse leather boots. My recent Jim Green boots are in a tan crazy horse, and my old Chippewa service boots are of a similar crazy horse leather to these in a kind of dusty brown. Crazy horse is not a horse leather, it's bovine, and it's called that only because it used to be made into horse tack and saddles. It's a corrected full grain leather, lightly buffed to smooth out the scars and tick marks of the animal, and then infused with waxes and oils to give it a smoother feel than newbuck. Because it is infused with waxes and oils, it's water resistant, and it does have a kind of a pull up effect. You can see the darker texture at the toe of the boots, and at the heel, because the lasting process has trapped some of the oils in those places, but as I keep wearing these boots, that's really starting to shift. It's a leather that can pertina quite aggressively, as the oils shift around and dry in patches. It's really easy to take care of crazy horse. It's already infused with oils and waxes, so all you have to do is keep it clean, and when you do need to condition it or reapply some oils, use a less waxy balm like leather dressing rather than wax. What I do is make sure you brush it after every use, especially to go outdoors and get it dusty. If it gets muddy, you can just wipe it with a damp cloth or wash it with a wet sponge, or saddle soap it if it's really dirty. If it needs conditioning, avoid anything that could give it a shine, and try instead Smith's leather balm or an Aussie product that I really like called Oakwood Leather Conditioner. If you really, really want to spend some money, and in the process keep the leather as matte looking as possible, a Saphir Renovator spray for suede and newbuck would be the gold medal winner. The stitching of the panels are single, double and triple, depending on how much stress each area is likely to experience. I chose a single contrast white stitch among the triple stitching at the heel backstay and the quarters. Back at the heel, there is an external celastic heel counter covered by a one-piece backstay. The toe box is also celastically reinforced but very lightly. It's almost unstructured and you can easily depress it. I chose a local pull-up full grain smoothed out brown tone, and it's semi-gusted up to the level of the fourth eyelet. The gusting helps with preventing the long tongue from slipping as some un-gusted tongues will do on my right foot. The hardware is antique brass, five eyelets, three speed hooks. They are quite solid and they are washer backed, but the speed hooks, which I just hand-pressed, are not all pressed flush, so some of them don't look like they're actually sitting properly on the leather. I don't think they're going to fall apart. I showed these to Sunny and he apologised for missing those, so I expect he'll keep an eye out in future production. The shaft and the tongues are all lined with a soft lamb skin leather, but strangely, the vamp is not lined. Usually in my American boots, the vamp is lined for comfort and the shaft is unlined. Talking to Sunny, he makes them this way because in hot climates, the vamp breathes better and doesn't need a lining for comfort. Having said that though, he's going to have a think about it and maybe in future that will change. You might reverse that around and fully line it. It doesn't affect the wear. It's not uncomfortable. It's just a little surprising. I'm very impressed by the quality of these boots. It struck me that in an almost bespoke, made-to-order model that Fortis uses, I could design a boot and try a collab with them because I'm more than happy with the quality to have a boot, philosophy collab boot with Fortis. Now, before I talk about the collab, because clearly I'll have an interest, I should point out that there are some shortcomings in the construction. I won't choose this crazy horse for the standard collab boot, but this may be indicative of local tannages. It is not an A-grade leather, but you get what you pay for. I think it's a beautiful distressed leather for a boot, but it does tend to crease easily. Now here on the shaft, Fortis will use the belly part of the hide, which is softer, but correspondingly less tight in its grain, so it will wrinkle. But on the vamp, just after the structure of the toe box, it's also wrinkling. Bear in mind I've worn these hard in the last month, going hiking in our scrubby bush and out almost everywhere with them, and I haven't used a shoe tree on purpose. Just left them in a corner in the evenings to see how they're going to go treat it hard. Other shortcomings are the wayward stitching that happens here and there. It's not structural, but it's not pretty. I've also shown you the speed hooks not sitting right, probably because they haven't been stamped down hard enough when done by hand. And there's also a little gap in the heel, just a little corner of the heel, leather stack in here. But again, it's not structural because the heel is glued and nailed. But to do him his due, whenever I pointed something out to Sunny, he's accepted it and apologized with no excuses, and gee, I think it's going to be a learning lesson for him, and I think he'll improve he wants to. So he and I have been talking about a colab, and I designed a boot. It's going to be called the Strider, as a tall 8-inch upland style walking boot with a local burgundy pull-up rough-out as the standard leather, using the same round-toed DACA last as this boot, and sitting on a comfortable Vibram 2021 wedge sole. After I drew some designs, Sunny did a mock-up, and we've continued our discussions to the point where I've ordered a sample boot in that design and configuration, and Sunny is hoping to price it at under $300 US. So stay tuned, subscribe to my channel, or follow me on Instagram, and I'll keep you up to date with what's going on. Now let's just talk a little about that corner of Indonesia that's Bandung. It's quite a big city, with a huge number of bootmakers there who all learned their craft during coming out of Dutch colonisation, making, of course, Dutch Veltskoen constructed boots and shoes. When I asked Sunny where he learned his craft, he said simply from the environment. He says the environment in Bandung is so thick with leather crafters and footwear makers that you just learn and you pick it up. He started Fortis in early 2020. Yeah, not the best timing to start a business, and pretty much as soon as he started, the pandemic hit. Obviously, COVID caused issues with lockdowns, lack of tourists, supply chain issues. It wasn't the best of starts. And yet here he is from sheer perseverance. You have to take your hat off to him, don't you? Fortis makes a number of service boot styles in different lasts, in plain-toe and cap-toe versions. They make some lace-to-toe monkey boots, mock-toes and engineer boots. He will make them in Indonesian leather, as well as leather from Horween, Badalasi Kahlo, and a few other European and American and Japanese tanneries. At a price differential, of course. Nevertheless, you can get amazing boots and amazing leathers for well under the US prices that you see from US bootmakers, and all of them handmade. You can check out Fortis on their Instagram account, which is fortis.bootsidn. Currently, he has three craftsmen in himself, just four people making the boots, and he looks after marketing. They do everything by hand, cutting and sewing the uppers, lasting and the bottoming. This means that the wait list can be over three months if he's busy, caused by the queue. Obviously, he makes orders on a first-in-first-out basis, and sometimes he has to wait for the availability of materials due to COVID supply chain hiccups. But in reality, once he starts on your boots, it really only takes them four to five days to make a pair. Mine took them about three and a half months, including about a couple of weeks delay due to an Indonesian postal error where they sat inside his post office without telling him that they hadn't actually got sent. Unfortunately, that's one of the frustrating things about dealing with Indonesian bootmakers, the communications. And I should talk a little about that. Fortis isn't lonely in this. They all don't have websites worth talking about, really. Their front-of-house is poor, and their communication is usually through WhatsApp and Instagram's direct messaging. This means that if they're really busy, you could wait days before you get a reply. And the language barrier is problematic. They know English, but I wouldn't call them proficient. So they will misunderstand syntax and context. The combination of the language barrier and the intermittent messaging means that you have to ask your questions clearly and one at a time, resolving one issue before you move on to the next. But if you persevere, you get some good stuff and you meet some great people. I really like Sunny and his brand. It takes guts to start a boot brand in the middle of a pandemic. As a management consultant, I've tried to help him become more commercial. Up until now, you're paid by sending your money direct to his bank account by international transfer from your bank account. I've coached him into getting a PayPal account so that he can send PayPal invoices and give some trust and comfort to someone ordering from overseas. He's also always used the Indonesian Postal Service, which is unreliable at the best of times. So I've coached him into getting an account with DHL, again giving the buyer some comfort. I've talked to him about responding to messages and keeping buyers in touch with where their boots are. This is going to be tricky because obviously they're shorthanded and he's busy and from time to time, he'll have some personal issues and some family issues. So this may continue for a bit until he's grown and has more staff, but hey, he's totally friendly and apologetic when he gets back to you. And to be clear, he's not the only Bandung brand bootmaker with quirky comms. Now on to fit sizing and comfort. The Fortis Round Darker Last is a roomy last. It's tall at the sides, high volume last. So fit it right, you'll have a pretty roomy toe box. They use the European Sizing Number System in Indonesia where taking my size and European 41 is equal to a US 8 which is equal to a UK 7. I'm about to confuse the hell out of you so listen carefully. Let's start with my true to size as measured on a Brannock device. I measure 8.5 in D width on a US Brannock device. That equals a UK or Australian 7.5. It also equals an European 41.5. I usually wear boots a half size down from my true to size. So that means in almost all my US boots I wear an 8D that equals a UK 7G that equals in turn and European 41 average. But Fortis runs true to size. That means I should really wear a 41.5 or a US 8.5 or a UK Australian 7.5. But Fortis don't do half sizes. So after a conversation almost as long as that explanation Sunny and I agreed that I would take a Fortis 42. This has also helped by me taking my foot measurements showing length and width at the widest point. I drew an outline of both my feet and later tape measure up and across and took photos and Sunny confirmed that if I took a 41 as I was tempted to do it would be too short. So the moral of the story is 1. Draw your feet lay up the tape measure and send photos to Fortis. 2. Be prepared to go true to size and go half a size up if you're between sizes. Having said all of that these boots at 42 instead of my expected 41 are a good fit for length but because of the high volume last and I have a low volume instep it's a little roomy in the instep and toes. I put in a foam insert that you can buy from a pharmacy and now the fit is actually perfect. It's snug in the heel and waist just right in the instep and roomy around my toes which is the way I like it. As for comfort really nice. The uppers in Crazy Horse is supple and so accommodating. The slightly padded insole liner is just enough and the thick outsoles are comfortable over any kind of rough terrain. I really like the fit. There was no break in literally after three or four wears in that first week I could have worn them to bed. Really the only thing that needed breaking in was to train the outsoles to bend where my feet bend still haven't quite got there so there is still a little heel slip until that happens but what about value? My mantra is you get what you pay for but it's always a surprise to get a little more overall. Let's start with these boots costing me US $270. I admit my choice to use local Indonesian leather meant that I didn't get a great leather which would have been more expensive but in my opinion it's as good as any Dominican Republic Brazilian or most Mexican leather tannages. Yeah it's not of the quality of a Halloween or a Seidel or a Budalasi but hey coupled with handmade quality I didn't pay what those leathers would have commanded in prices so I got what I paid for. What I did get was exceptional handmade bottoming in the Veltskoen stitch down process. Take a look at these hand-stitched stitches around the welt they are near perfect the overall construction is sturdy and using Vibram the sole is sturdy. I've gone up some steep scrubby rocky tracks in the last four weeks in these and I have never felt any problems either in comfort, grip, protection or the ability to withstand sharp rocks and trees and sharp sticks so under US $300 that's above the price of a Thursday captain about the same as a Thursday made in USA Vanguard less than a grand stone but built not unlike a mid $400 Truman I think they're worth that money and I would buy it again or hey I did buy it again in the form of a Strider collab boot stay tuned and I'll keep you informed on how that turns out how to summarize I think you have to appreciate the experience and DNA that seems to be born into Bandung bootmakers they produce good quality items but like anything else in life you get what you pay for you can like me make a mindful choice to keep things local and pay under $300 or you can decide to get a Japanese shell cordovan and pay five, six hundred dollars and above but you can rely on the construction being really, really good and they're handmade on the negative side communication is not great if you're a nervous buyer this may stress you out waiting is not good that might stress you out there's got to be some rough with the smooth that's a rough-out joke so there you have it I hope you liked this review I'll leave a link to Fortis' Instagram account in the description below and you can check out their other boots and contact them through the Instagram direct messaging app or on their profile use their WhatsApp number don't forget to like and subscribe this video it'll help me out and if you subscribe you can keep up with what happens to the Colab until then take care and I'll see you soon