Thank you for picking us to be part of this test.
We visited the Peterborough Serpentine Green store, with my two boys who are 5 and 10.
We bought trainers for both boys, although we also looked at sandals for DS2.
Despite being identical designs (DS1 chose his, and then DS2 wanted the same!), they are allegedly different brands. DS1's are Blox and DS2's are Skittles. I assume these are both Brantano's own brands.
As many other posters have said, the shoe fitting service was not fantastic. Despite making a big thing of the fact that they measure, select shoes and check the fit, they didn't really seem to be geared up to offer this full service. And tbh, if they hadn't made a thing of it, I probably would have been happen with the basic measuring service.
The first person who served us (Lauren) was pretty dire (sorry Lauren). She measured both boys feet on a board, wrote the size and width fitting on a pamphlet, and then went back to serving on the till. I asked if she would check fit later, and she said yes, she could do that.
I found DS2 some open-toed sandals in the size she had measured and he put one on. His big toe went right up to the end of the sandal, and actually poked a couple of mm over the end. I would normally just try a size or two up, but since we were testing the measuring service, we went back to the measuring area, and asked Lauren to check the size. I said that the shoe was obviously too small, and could she please remeasure. Lauren then looked at his foot, said that sizes vary in different styles (fair enough) and that the sandal was actually okay (which it very much was not). I asked if she was a trained fitter, she said yes, and DS2 and I went off to try to find some better shoes.
Lauren then clearly spoke to one of her colleagues, Rachel. I don't know if they twigged that we were mystery shopping, but Rachel came and found us and could not have been more helpful. She remeasured DS2's feet (and in fairness to Lauren, came up with pretty much the same answer). DS2 had moved on to trying trainers by this point, and Rachel checked the length and the width for us, and recommended some styles that might fit slightly better across the width. She also noticed that DS2 had no socks on (parenting fail!) and lent us some (without my asking). She popped back several times while we were trying on different pairs, and generally gave us really good service. We ended up buying size 13 trainers when DS2 had been measured as an 11 - Rachel and I agreed that they had a sensible amount of growing room, so not really sure what happened with the measuring.
However, I didn't really feel that Rachel knew that much more about fitting shoes than I have picked up from buying children's shoes over the last 9 years. We always get school shoes from a local independent shoe shop, and you can tell that the fitters there know what they are talking about, and know children's feet and their own stock well. For that reason, I wouldn't go to Brantano for school shoes, although I would be happy to buy trainers / sandals / wellies there (we buy them wherever is convenient as the kids don't spend so much time in them, so I don't feel that it's so important to get them fitted). I would recommend the store for good customer service, but not for the fitting service. I would also recommend it for adult shoes - I often buy mine there because they have a good range and I like not having to ask for the other shoe in the pair. In fact, I used the remaining portion of the voucher towards some new work shoes.
The boys were okay with the experience - shoe shopping is never exactly fun - but are both very pleased with their new shoes. Thank you again for the voucher.