Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Lowa Boot Warranty and crappy customer service

Bought a pair of Lowa's back in March from Midway. Wore them twice turkey hunting (3 or 4 hours total of wear time). Then laced them up on dove season opener and a rivet that holds the bottom eyelet in popped out. The third time they were worn, less than 4 hours of weartime, failure.

Lowa has a 1 year warranty with proof of purchase, 4 pictures from all kinds of angles, and promising of your first born child. But evidently, only if you pay the shipping back to them.

So, my choice was pay $26 to ship back to them to fix an eyelet, or just have a local cobbler do the repair and let the world know that I won't buy Lowa boots in the future. Maybe (likely) other manufacturers have the exact same return policy, but I've never dealt with it because all my other boots haven't failed after 4 hours.

Petty? Absolutely.




Pretty standard initial response.  Love how they 'may ask for proof of purchase', which was already submitted on their webform along with pictures of all the requested angles of the boots.




My (what I feel as) reasonable response asking how they're going to reimburse me for the $26 on a brand new pair of boots for them to inspect




Them passing the buck that I did not initially purchase from them but somebody else and saying I am responsible for paying to ship.  And if it happens again, they'll send parts and I can pay a local cobbler to fix their inferior sub par quality boot.





Me telling them if I get to pay the $26, I'm going to get my moneys worth and post on every outdoors forum I'm a member of to let people know how their quality and warranty work on brand new boots.  Even asked them to proof read what I was going to post, in case they wanted me to change any wording or clear anything up.  They did not provide any edits for me and I figured 10 days was enough time for them to submit any revisions to my comments.





Them telling me that I contacted the distributor (LOWA USA) and not the retailer and that is somehow Midways fault the boots failed?



A final jab to whoever Amy is that their warranty coordinator copied in on my response.

You should get Hotrot Lincoln to call em….

He’s great with customer service. 😂🤣😂🤣😂.




Someone on their end isn’t putting 2 and 2 together…

Word spreads quick on the interwebs.

And doesn’t get deleted over time.

I just posted a Lowa Boot re-Sole thread.

LOWA BOOTS SUCK,, LOWA CUSTOMER SERVICE SUCKS ! ! ! ! ! !

The soles crumbled and came loose immediately.
I had cheap boots from the walmarks that were 100X better boot, 1/4 of the price.

Wore them twice turkey hunting (3 or 4 hours total of wear time).

^^^^ Turkey hunting, probably not even on rough terrain.

Mine fell apart walking in flat bushogged sandy florida ground.

Walking 1/2 mile from truck across a grazed pasture to calling location. Then back the 1/2 mile to truck. Two days.

Foreign boots! Why not buy a good handmade pair of American built boots.

grazed pasture? OMG no boot can withstand that.

I'm going to give Kenetrek a whirl, haven't home'd-in on which boot.

No eyelets popping out on my Russell's

Which Kenetrek boots are American built?

Not sure I saw the Corrie Line was imported.

Show me a pair of made in U.S.A., insulated, Gore-Tex boots other than Danner and I'll buy them.... I've searched and come up empty, unfortunately.

I've got a better one. Probably 15 years ago I bought a cheap burner for my gas grill. Had a 5 year warranty, so I kept the warranty papers and receipt, without reading them. Sure enough about 1 1/2 years later it rusted out. So I dug out the warranty papers. Mind you this was for a $25 burner from a local hardware store.

Burner was made in Canada and I live in Iowa. Stated I pay shipping both ways and they would send me a new burner! Shipping both ways would have amounted to about $60 for a $25 burner...LOL!

Scrapped the cheap grill and bought a Weber. It's still grilling steaks and burgers today.

In my experience Danner’s customer service sucks as well.

If you do find a made in the USA product the company will be owned by a large corporation that buys up small companies.
Made in America can and does mean South America.

Chink boots are cheaper.

Regarding the post about LOWA boot soles disintegrating--I was told by a local boot repair shop that Lowa had begun using a cement that is INTENSIONALLY formulated to fall apart after some years, five I think it was....some kind of Euro-enviromental BS sounds like. I have had 3 or four of my Lowa soles do just that, one pair had the sole come off in the first week of wear. [I had these on hand for at least 10 years before wearing, purchased in a closeout]

I greatly prefer the leather lining in the Lowa boots so I spent a hundred dollars a pair to have 3 pairs re-soled by Dave Page Cobbler in Washington state. Great work and great customer service from them.

All the Danner's I have ever owned were made in China.

My Chinese Danner Pronghorns were comfortable. They weren’t near the boot of my USA made Danner boot though. The difference is about double the price. $200 versus $400. Give or take.

Bad deal to see Lowa slipping in their business practices.

They have been absolutely stellar boots for me, at least their Hunter GTX have been. I have never had an issue but both pairs of mine are 3 years old. Maybe they switched to cheaper materials and/or manufacturing practices lately?