Surefoot's proprietary ski boot liners are injected with foam that forms around your feet for a true custom fit.

There is no piece of ski equipment more important than boots. Not clothes, not goggles, not even the skis themselves. Boots can make or break your ski experience, yet the vast majority of recreational skiers make the wrong choice.

I’ve covered sports related gear for more than15 years, and have written extensively on the pros and cons of custom fitted equipment for golf, cycling,and other sports, but I have never seen any single item for which it makes as big a difference as ski boots. How big? If you tried custom-fitted boots for the first time you would likely find the skiing experience so radically different that you would kick yourself for not having done it years earlier.

The good news for latecomers is that recent advances in technology have made the custom ski boot process better than ever before, which is why I just got a new pair from Surefoot, my third going back over a decade. While custom boots have always been better, traditionally you had to make choices among the three key areas of advantage: performance, comfort, and warmth. Now even the highest level recreational skiers can get the best of all three without any sacrifices at all.

First, let me review the three huge advantages of custom-fitted ski boots:

1. Better Skiing: You will actually ski better, turn better, have more control, and be a better skier than you were before you put the boots on. Who doesn’t want that? I will explain the reasons in more detail below.

2. Better Comfort: This is not just a matter of luxury. Better comfort has concrete advantages besides how your feet feel. It directly translates to less fatigue, which means more runs, better skiing, and less soreness at the end of the day. It is especially important to anyone with oddly shaped feet or toes.

3. Warmth: So many skiers complain about cold toes that it has become almost accepted as part of the sport – but it does not have to be. Today’s custom boots are actually warmer thanks to better foam, but more importantly, your feet stay warmer because the blood supply to them is not impinged, as it often is in off-the-rack boots.

Virtually every ski resort town has an artisan boot guru who locals swear by, and I don’t want to knock any of them, but what was once largely an art has become much more a science, and I don’t think any amount of personal talent or experience makes up for a lack of equipment or materials. In many cases, these custom boot fitters are really boot tweakers, making adjustments to ill-fitting boots in the hopes of retrofitting them to your feet. I think it is better to build a custom boot from the ground up, not customize an off the rack boot. That is why after going the local artist route many years ago, I have gotten my last three pairs of boots from Surefoot store the biggest, and in my mind best, national retailer of custom ski boots. I know that there are a lot of people who reflexively distrust “big” or “successful” companies, especially in the proud world of ski towns, but I choose Surefoot for my boots for the same reasons I choose to fly in commercial jets made by Boeing and not the guy who lives near the airport – they have the best equipment, R&D, and materials. I would – and often have – emphatically recommend Surefoot to family and friends. And while becoming the nation’s largest retailer of ski boots has given Surefoot even more competitive advantages, it is worth remembering that it was once just one guy with really bad feet who really loved skiing and believed boots could be made better – and proved it. And he still owns it.

That being said, while the actual fitting process I am about to describe is mostly unique to Surefoot, the benefits would apply equally to any properly made (that’s the key) custom-fitted boot from anyone.

One foot at a time is scanned and 3-D modelled using this computer controlled footbed scanner.

When you walk into a Surefoot store (there are 24, with branches in New York City, Santa Monica and London, as well as at almost every major Western US ski resorts and Vermont’s Killington, plus Switzerland, France, Norway, and Canada) the first step is getting your feet analyzed. You step onto a special scanner that uses air pressure to raise lots of little plastic pegs until they impact the entire bottom of your foot at different points, which in turn creates a highly accurate and detailed 3-D model of the bottom of your feet, including arch, heel, toes, and ball, along with where and how much pressure you are exerting. This model is fed into a very precise computer controlled lathe that generates a pair of orthotics designed to take whatever natural flaws you have in your foot and remedy them into a neutral stance.