I bought these unisex water shoes for my sister for an upcoming whitewater trip we are planing. The shoes, manufactured in China, are sold under different brand names by different sellers, sometimes as shoes for men, other times for women, and still other times for both, mostly in terms of their color(s). They are light, inexpensive, and badly made.

The endings of the black-and-white stripped loops for the lock laces end on the inside of the shoe at the junction between the top section with laces and the rest of the vamp, where they are supposed to be fully covered by a U-shaped 'lip' of synthetic fabric. The lip is needed because these endings are trimmed to a similar length using a heat tool that produces a melted hard edge that can irritate or even damage the skin if it were to protrude inside the shoe.  And this is exactly what happens for some endings of the shoes I got since the width of the lip, instead of being uniform in size, is smaller in some places than the length of the endings, and the resulting protruding endings --obvious at simple visual inspection (see first figure)-- affect the skin of the top of the foot.

This problem, due to a lack of quality control, can be seen more clearly in the second figure showing the endings of two lace loops in close detail: the sharp edge of one loop (red circle) protrudes from under the lip (highlighted by a light yellow line), which is narrower there than over the other loop (blue circle) that is fully covered by the lip.

Had I not had detected this problem before giving the shoes to my 6' 2" baby sister, I might have never heard the end of it. The sibling bond is wonderful and unique but these triathlonist Iron girls can be tough on their only brothers. I returned the shoes, of course.