Best Baby & Kids Shoe Brands
These are my favorite baby and kids shoe brands.
There weirdly aren’t that many shoe brands for babies and kids, and generally they fall into three categories for me:
Cute and practical
Cute and super impractical / deeply unproductive for getting ready
Hideous and practical
I prefer shoes to fall in category 1, cute and practical. Some day I will write up a guide about planning for and buying shoes for toddlers because it’s truly a confusing and frustrating experience.
A note on babies: In general it doesn’t matter what shoes a baby wears, since they don’t really need shoes. I find that even then, buying unnecessary shoes for an infant, you run into category 2. An infant’s foot is like a soggy marshmallow, so trying to shove it into a SUPER cute structured timberland boot is really hard. I would say most of the time it’s way more trouble than it’s worth.
If you’re doing it for a great photo, here is my tip: Go with your gut, don’t doubt yourself during the screaming, and buffer time for their little tears to dry before the photo. They will never remember you did this to them.
A sizing tip: shoe sizes are not consistent across brands, while converse and Ikiki run really big, see Kai run, vans, run more true to size, and nike runs small. They also have varying widths. My suggestion is, order one of each size in each brand you are considering on zappos or nordstrom (something easy to return) and see how they all fit your kid. This is much easier than going to the store, because you can do it over a longer span of time. Then make note of how they fit so you know when to get next sizes / which next size to get.
It’s really not a long list - If I find more brands, I’ll update the list, I promise. Here are my tried and true brands that I always return to!