Nicks’s, Italian Brown Cypress Falcons

After winning last year’s Patina Thunderdome with my LL64s, I wasn’t even planning on entering again, to be completely honest. I even pushed for an Esteemed Judge position but never heard back. I didn’t have a boot I wanted to make or a leather that I was in love with, and I felt like entering again might be overstaying my welcome. The competition is supposed to be fun, and I didn’t want to enter if it wasn’t going to be fun. My plan to not enter the contest was going so well that October 5th came and went, and I didn’t even have a boot on my radar. I did it! I missed the October 5th deadline. I was retired! 🤣 That’s when everything changed. The next day, I got word that a shipment of new leather from Horween was coming, and it was called Italian Brown Cypress. I had fallen in love with how the Cypress Grey looked and thought a brown version would probably look even better. So, sight unseen, I asked Shuyler, our owner, if I could get the first boot made from the leather. He said yes as long as I chose a standard model/configuration so we could get some photos. I had been wanting to get a redo on my first pair of pre-Nicks employee Falcons that I unfortunately built with a toe cap. So, I decided to go with our classic Falcon model. The following week, the leather came in, and it was more beautiful than I could have imagined. I immediately wrote out the order. I still didn’t want the pressure of coming out of my 5-week-long retirement, so there it sat, on my desk for another week. I was finally forced to put them into production so we could get photos for the site, and when they were done, I knew there was no chance that I wasn’t going to enter them. They were the most classic brown boots I had ever seen.

Working for a boot company has given me the opportunity to really dial in my size by trial and error with a mix of my personal boots and try on boots. I started as a mismated 11.5 A/B combo with my very first pair of Nicks, moved to an 11.5 B, then an 11B, and finally landed on an extremely comfortable 11C. My last few pairs fit perfectly and require little to no break in.

I put in an order for 10” Engineers in February of 23, switched to the Anthem a few months later, and in October of 23 landed on a Falcon. I wasn’t sure what I wanted and kept putting it off.