In February 2016 I bought a pair of Meindl boots (Alicante Mid GTX) from a shop in West Sussex. We were on holiday at the time and it was a bit of an impulse buy. The receipt and purchase details are lost, I'm afraid. They've had light and intermittent use - a couple of trips to The Lakes and maybe 100 miles of weekend walks around here in rural Essex and have been fine throughout.
A couple of weeks ago, on a third trip to The Lakes a friend told me he'd noticed that the toe rand on one boot was cracking up and on closer examination the other one was showing a small crack as well, though this rapidly got bigger during that walk. To me, the random angles of the cracking suggested that the rand compound had de-natured (as opposed to stress-fracturing) so I sent them both back to Bramwell's.
Today they sent them back with a reply that floored me somewhat:
They said that the batch number suggests they were around 7 years old and 'unfortunately this means that they are out of warranty' so they're sorry but they cannot replace them for me as a result.
Fair enough, I suppose, and if I can work out where it was I should now go after the shop for selling me 5-year old gear, as "new" (mind you, given they haven't got a 'best before date' on the box, when is 'new' not new?).
However, it does brook the question of how long the materials used in boots are supposed to last. I'm not talking about fair wear-and-tear here: The light wear on them is plain for all to see, they've not been stored in a light, hot or damp environment and nothing else on the boots is cracking-up, coming away of falling apart, just the rands. Given the light wear, it did worry me that Bramwell's didn't seem interested about how or why the failure might have occurred - just how old they were, and therefore out of warranty.
Has anyone got any light they can shed on the failure, or suggestions as to how I can usefully repair them myself? I'm tempted to use something like Shoe Goo and see what happens but I thought I'd ask here first.