Even though most (hopefully) take out and put in shoe trees every day, many people use the wrong technique when this is done, which can make it unnecessarily complicated. Here I show how this is done best to save both yourself and the shoes trouble.
Especially now that it is almost season for boots this could be interesting, as they often are harder to get the trees in and out off. Often you do not think of how you do things, one do it just plain and simple as it seems the easiest, and that’s why many pull out the shoe trees in a straight position, so to speak. Below a couple of pictures that tries to illustrate how it looks:
What many do wrong is that they hold the tree so it remains horizontal to the ground when one pull them out.
The problem is that the shoe tree is formed after the shape of the foot which is widest at the ball area, which must get through the slimmer instep of the shoe, which can be a bit tricky and often the shoe is stressed quite a bit here. When one insert the trees you often do it in the same way, creating the same problem again.
What to do instead is to simply turn the shoe tree against the outside of the shoe while pulling it out. If you haven’t done so before, you will notice how tree more or less slip out of the shoe this way. The instep is, as mentioned, slimmer, but in return it’s higher which makes the wider portion of the tree now easily brought out.
This was a little hard to capture on camera, but here I have started to turn the tree outwards.
Here the widest part of the shoe tree on the its way through the instep, which now with the rotation is easier.
When the shoe trees comes out angled it fits much better into the instep shape and the whole thing runs more smoothly and more gentle on the shoe. When you insert the trees you should do do exactluy the same, but in reverse. The shoes are the model Treviso Nero from Italigente, the shoe trees are Skoaktiebolaget’s own travel trees made of very lightweight obeche wood (which, however, is excellent as a full-time shoe tree as well.
