Is it just me or has the quality of Nike SB's diminished over the past couple of years. This past week the entire toe cap came off of my P-Rod 3's after only 2 months of my normal skating. My 4 pairs of P-Rod 2's all lasted me roughly 6 months each. The Problem with the 3'sis they look like they have a 2 layer toecap but only 1 layer consisting of 2 peices stitched together to look like a dual layer toecap....So once the stitching on the toe cap stitching tears, and you start getting a hole from kickflips...there's no second layer of suede underneath...it's pretty much just mesh. When I went to a shop to get a new pair of shoes, I tried on the the P-Rod 4's only to find out that they aren't true cupsoles. They're a cup/vulc hybrid. I tried on every style of SB's that the shops had in my size only to find out that most of the "cup soles" were actually this cup/vulc hybrid. Problem with the hybrid is they feel way more like a vulc than a cup. The thing that attracted me to SB in the first place was the comfort and skateability of their cupsoles (the prod 2). Mostly it's due to the airzoom pad they put in the heel of the Sole. All the hybrids only have the airzoom pad in the insole. They can't put them in the actual sole b/c they are produced more like a vulc sole than a cup sole. It's super frustrating because all of their shoes feel like vulc shoes. And I can't really skate well in vulc shoes. It just seems to me that NikeSB is trimming cost by eliminating "excess" material and using cheaper production methods (ie more vulc style sole production) in order to further maximize their profits. It seems like they don't really care about the day to day skate functionality, and they care more about what the shoe looks like, since (most likely) they make more money off sneakerheads than skaters. I'm just wondering if anyone else feels their shoe quality (as far as skating is concerned) has been going down.
Topic: Diminishing quality of Nike SB's (Read 12846 times)