Each category will have its own distinct prizes and judging lineup!

You should enter the Work Dome instead of the Open Dome if you:

• – Work professionally in a field or trade that will consistently subject your boots to significant exertion and wear throughout your day!
• – Plan to do serious projects around your home or elsewhere throughout the course of the Patina Thunderdome that would subject your boots to significant exertion and wear!

You should enter the Open Dome instead of the Work Dome if you:

• – Wear “work boots” (or any other type of footwear) in an office, from home, or just throughout your life in situations that doesn’t put an “uncommon” amount of daily stress on your footwear that comes from high wear jobs

You should enter the Pre-Worn Dome instead if you:

• – Have a pair of boots that you have previously worn before the Stitchdown Patina Thunderdome has started! The Open and Work dome are for new boots.

You should enter the Leather-Goods Dome if you: 

• – Want to enter a leather wallet, belt, watch strap, jacket, bag, or any other kind of quality leather good!

Yes, each Stitchdown Premium membership allows any one contestant to enter up to two pairs of footwear and one leathergood item in any combination of categories in the 2025-26 Stitchdown Patina Thunderdome.

The 2025-26 Stitchdown Patina Thunderdome presented by Nicks Boots, Grant Stone, and Standard & Strange will start with rolling entry on our partner Patina Project app on Oct 1, 2025 and remain open through Oct 5, 2025. 

We will also have a late entry period open between Nov 1 and Nov 5, 2025.

NO ENTRIES will be allowed outside the designated entry windows. 

After six months of monthly photo submissions in the Patina Project app, remaining active contestants must submit final photos bewteen April 1 and 5, 2026, to complete the Thunderdome and be eligible for prizes.  

As has been the case for five years, all Thunderdome contestants must have an active Stitchdown Premium membership for the entirety of the contest. SDP membership fees are minimal—$5/month or $50/year—but are essential to keeping the contest and all Stitchdown operations going. 

An SDP membership also nets you access to our private Discord server, the hub of the Stitchdown community online. We say this as modestly as possible, but it’s the absolute best place to discuss quality footwear online—and also offers a bustling no-fee buy/sell marketplace for footwear, high-quality clothing, and other goods. 

SDP members also have access to bonus episodes of our Stitchdown Shoecast podcast (which often end up being extra-juicy for some reason). 

More information on Stitchdown Premium can be found here. 

Each Stitchdown Premium membership allows any one contestant to enter up to two pairs of footwear and one leathergood item in any combination of categories in the 2025-26 Stitchdown Patina Thunderdome.

Just like with our traditional footwear categories, the idea of the Leathergoods Dome is to spend six months with a fantastic non-footwear leather product, and watch it age and become more beautiful with time, wear, and care. Each contestant with an active Stitchdown Premium membership can enter ONE leather good and up to TWO pairs of footwear. 

Each Thunderdome category has a distinct prize pool (listed above) and will be judged on different criteria. Perhaps the most critical distinction is the Work Dome (in which much harder wear is expected) vs the Open Dome. 

The Pre-Worn Dome will be judged more along the lines of the Open Dome, but as a first-year category—and one in which boots and shoes are beginning from different starting lines—our judges will consider everything to be on the table. 

The Leathergoods Dome will focus of course on the natural beauty of aged leather and judging will attempt to not tilt TOO hard towards simply transformation (aka lighter leathers darkening). But again, this is a first-year category so we don’t have a lot of judging history to lean on yet. 

At the completion of the Patina Thunderdome on April 5, 2026, all contestants who have submitted the required contest photos in the Patina Project App each month will enter a pool for our esteemed judges to, well, judge. 

For the Work Dome category, judges will select 15 ranked winners, and each winner will receive a pre-allotted prize from the Work Dome prize pool. 

For the Open, Leather Goods, and Pre-Worn categories, judges will select winners, who will be given the opportunity to rank their preferred prizes from each category’s prize pool. Winner placement will be directly correlated to prize allotment via the ranked choices submitted. 

Judging and prize assignment should be completed by the end of April 2026.