Light-up shoes?

[Canna]

DD, 6, has been asking for several months for light-up shoes. I think she means the Twinkle Toes variety of Sketchers. We don't watch TV with commercials, but a couple of little girls in her class have them and she has admired them. I told her maybe in the fall since she wasn't currently in need of new sneakers. I've been looking at the Twinkle Toes and while they do look cute, it seems like they get so-so reviews in terms of quality. Are there better light-up shoes out there or should I accept that these are a novelty shoe even though they're not that cheap?

[crl]

Geox and Striderite both have light up shoes for boys. Not sure about girls. Also they may not be as fancy as the Sketcher ones.

Catherine

[jent]

DD has light-up Stride-Rite shoes. When we tried on pairs at our local shoe store, they were actually the best for quality and fit IMO, plus DD was sold as soon as she saw them light up.

[zag95]

I too was wondering about this! We went to the Nordy's sale to peruse the shoe offerings for my 3.5 yr old DD- and they had those sketcher light up shoes...... but we went with the less crazy stride rite ones- they were silver and purple and flash down near the heal..... pretty good prices for Stride Rite. Plus I like Nordy's if the size doesn't work later or not the right season I can return easily. They were definitely under 30.

[TwinFoxes]

I bought some cute Carter's ones for DDs from Kohls for around $15 this summer. They're a cross between Mary Janes and sneakers. I've always thought light up shoes were super cute, since waaay before I had kids, so I snapped them up when I saw them. DDs love them, they'd never seen such a thing. :D

[Nooknookmom]

DD has both Geox and Stride Rite light ups. She loves them both.

[lalasmama]

DD has been BEGGING for Twinkle Toes since she was 5. Oy vey! We found some at Burlington Coat Factory/Baby Depot for under $15 a few months ago. They had several styles. I wouldn't pay full price for them, you are right questioning the quality! At any rate, she's thrilled. I'm pleased that I paid $15 for some occasionally exciting shoes, and she still mainly wears her fisherman sandles (and likely will continue to do this into the new school year).

[justlearning]

Not an answer to your question but just a note--does your school have any restrictions against these? My sons' school has a uniform policy that includes not wearing any light-up shoes.

[KrisM]

DD got a pair of Twinkle Toes last year that light up. they've lasted a year, no problems. They taught her to tie shoes, since that was my requirement to non-Velcro :).

[Canna]

Not an answer to your question but just a note--does your school have any restrictions against these? My sons' school has a uniform policy that includes not wearing any light-up shoes.

They did not have that requirement last year...the way she found out about Twinkle Toes is from other girls (and apparently a boy or two with light-up shoes) wearing them to school.

I looked at other brands online today and decided that if she really wants the Sketchers ones, that they probably should be the real deal. They have...um...a very unique look. We have a Sketchers outlet near us so we went over this afternoon and took a look. They did not seem to be outlet priced at all (priced exactly as shown on the Sketchers website, some styles $5-$10 off) but they did have buy one get one half off. Which saved us $20 because we could of course not buy crazy sparkly light up shoes for my 3 year-old also... ;)

The girls were both REALLY excited to be in a store full of sparkly light-up shoes. They are usually reluctant to be sized, but this time they were both jamming their foot on the sizer eagerly. The staff there was surprisingly helpful and attentive.

I'm not crazy at ALL with Sketchers as a brand, though. The girl's shoe boxes (covered in cartoon characters) actually had stickers inside advertising some kind of nicktoons TV program produced by Sketchers with super-hero-like characters. (Talk about blurring boundaries between programming and marketing to kids!) They also came with full sized comic books in the box about characters representing the different varieties of Sketchers shoes (Twinkle Toes, Pretty Tall (wedge heeled sneakers for girls, I kid you not), and Sporty Shorty) and sending messages like "You can never have too many shoes!", a magical bag that can produce any object is improved when it is modified from plain and ugly to sparkly and fancy, and the protagonists save Sporty shoe-girl from the fate of missing the dance by intervening to help her stop competing with Sporty Guy. I feel like I've fallen down some kind of parenting rabbit hole of evil!