Danner boot factory tours

The factory occupies a suite at 18201 NE Portal Way in Northeast Portland. It opens to the public only for scheduled tours. The tours are free, parking is free, and each tour takes six people. Each visitor signs up separately and signs a waiver on arrival. No one under 16 is admitted, and anyone under 18 comes with an adult. Closed-toe shoes are required on the factory floor, and the company hands out safety glasses and earplugs. Danner puts the walk at about an hour and fifteen minutes. The Oregonian, which went along on August 7, 2024, gave it about an hour and a half.

The building covers 59,000 square feet. More than 200 people work there in production and support roles, according to Dave Sonsteng, vice president of human resources and manufacturing operations, who called it the company’s sixth factory in the United States. The boots made there go to construction work, the military, hiking, and everyday wear.

Five tests on a hide

The walk starts with the leather. Every hide used in the Portland factory is inspected by hand and must pass five checks before it goes into production:

• Tension. A lastometer shows whether the hide can bear the strain of construction.
• Thickness. A handheld gauge with a circular dial is moved across the hide to check that it is even.
• Softness. A tester presses a metal head into the leather. Leather too stiff makes a boot uncomfortable and noisy, and leather too soft gives it no structure.
• Color and finish. A worker scores the surface with a small serrated blade, presses clear tape over the mark, and lifts it to look at what came away.
• Strength. A T-shaped hook is set into a small cut at the hide’s edge and pulled to test for tearing.

“You have to start with the best materials, because you can’t build quality in later,” says Jay Bosshart, leather specialist. In 2018 a writer for Women’s Outdoor News met a man named Jay, whom the factory called its “leather jockey.” He had then been 26 years with the company, and he was testing whether leather would stretch over a boot’s toe.

Hides that pass go to a table under an overhead camera. There a worker traces each flaw with a laser pen while a screen builds a colored map of the hide. Leather for the Mountain Light Cascade, the boot Reese Witherspoon wore in the film “Wild,” is still cut by hand. A worker sets a green metal die on the hide, swings a pneumatic press over it, and stamps out the piece. Machine arms cut other styles from digital patterns. A flat press comes down on a piece of dark leather and lifts away to show the Danner logo. Stamping machines punch eyelets, hooks, and vents through, and the flat pieces are sewn into an upper.

Stitchdown and the water tank

Wire racks hold the lasts, cream-colored hinged forms of the foot. The plant uses 848 of them, one for every style, size, and width it builds. Toe-lasting machines stretch the upper over a last. A shank of metal or fiberglass goes in as the boot’s spine. A worker then pounds around the edge with a blunt tool to “spot,” or bond, the upper to the midsole.

The next step is stitchdown construction. The upper is sewn directly to the midsole with a lockstitch, which lets the boot be rebuilt when its parts wear out. Danner calls the Portland plant one of the leading makers of stitchdown boots in the world. The 2018 visitors were shown a triple-stitching machine said to date to the early 1900s.

Stitched uppers rest on a metal grate over heating elements that light them red from below. A press then bonds on the outsole. A cutting wheel called the Rough Rounder trims the excess sole, and the final sanding is done by hand. Each boot is then checked on its own, laced, and boxed.

The waterproof liners are tested separately. Danner seals each GORE-TEX liner with a single taped seam running all the way around, a method it calls “around the world” construction. A machine lowers air-filled liners into a tank of water and holds them under. If the tester sees bubbles, the liner is rejected. Laces are put through more than 100,000 cycles of abrasion, and the 2024 tour stopped at a shoelace stress test. “There is a pride in craftsmanship here, a pride in knowing our boots will live up to the Danner name,” says Carmel Clark, sample manager.

Each visitor presses a button on a machine that embosses a piece of leather. The piece goes home to be assembled into a small toy bull. The Danner Factory Store is a few miles off. In 2018 the outlet store also held the recrafting workshop, where the recrafting manager, Marci Uselman, photographed each pair before and after it was rebuilt and sent the pictures to the owner. The workshop handled roughly 3,000 pairs a year.

Chippewa Falls to the timber country

The tour covers a little of the company’s history, and the sources disagree about where it began. Flat Out Magazine, Women’s Outdoor News, and The Oregonian’s 2016 obituary of Bill Danner place it in 1932 at Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, a logging town. There Charles Danner founded the Danner Shoe Manufacturing Company in the middle of the Great Depression. Sonsteng, speaking for the company in 2024, named Lacrosse, Wisconsin. A 2012 Oregonian business story had Danner Boots founded in Portland.

According to Women’s Outdoor News, a pair of logging boots then cost about $4. Danner found he could sell boots to Pacific Northwest loggers for $10, and in 1936 he moved his family to Portland. During the Second World War the company supplied the local shipyards.

Bill Danner on Mount Hood

Charles’s son William was born in Chippewa Falls in 1919. He worked in the boot factory before the war and graduated from the University of Portland. In the war he was a sergeant in the Army Air Corps, operating the top turret gun of a B-17 on dozens of missions out of North Africa. In 1945, back from the war, he and his brother John took over the struggling company from their father. Bill later bought out John’s stake.

The company had made its name on heavy-duty work boots. In 1964 Bill Danner climbed Mount Hood in hiking boots designed for the purpose. By the 1960s Danner was the only domestic maker of hiking boots, and its partnership with Vibram dates from that decade. The Mountain Light followed in 1973, according to Flat Out Magazine. By the mid-1970s backpacking had caught on, and Backpacker magazine named the boot the No. 1 value in the country. His adopted son, Bill Crary Jr., recalled that production and orders tripled and the plant turned out 180 pairs a day.

The Oregon Historical Society holds a pair of hiking boots from 1975. They have brown leather uppers, white stitching, thick black soles, and twelve metal hooks and four loops on each boot, and no laces. The company gave them to the donor, and they were worn on an Outward Bound program for people with disabilities.

In 1978 Bill Danner said, “We are going to give you boots that you can be proud to wear, boots that can claim the best quality available anywhere.” The next year, by the company’s account, the Danner Light became the first footwear to use GORE-TEX liners. Women’s Outdoor News says that in 1979 Danner was the first brand to patent a waterproof boot.

He sold the company in 1983. The Oregonian names the buyer as Eric Merk, and Women’s Outdoor News names him as Eric Mark, adding that the sale was made on condition that the new owner keep the company’s standards. Crary Jr. always thought his father regretted selling when he did. “My dad never understood the value of his name,” he said. Bill Danner died at his home in Milwaukie on Christmas Eve 2016, aged 97.

A mile from headquarters

LaCrosse Footwear, founded in Wisconsin in 1897, bought Danner in 1994. At the time Danner had more than 160 employees and $15 million in sales. LaCrosse moved its own headquarters to Portland in 2001.

In February 2010 LaCrosse announced the present factory, twice the size of its old Portland plant and about a mile from its headquarters. Its president, Joseph P. Schneider, said the plant would incorporate “the latest lean manufacturing techniques.” The Portland Development Commission and Business Oregon helped fund the project. Area Development reported it open in September 2010, while Women’s Outdoor News dates the opening to 2012.

In January 2012 the United Food and Commercial Workers ratified a three-year contract at Danner. That July the Tokyo retailer ABC-MART agreed to buy LaCrosse for about $138 million, planning to sell Danner boots across Asia and Europe. Schneider said the Portland factory would continue operations. The military was then one of its biggest customers, buying combat hikers in droves.

In August 2024 The Oregonian reported that the factory was offering free public tours for the first time. Among the boots shown that week was one made for the Japanese market.