There are two very common mistakes to make when buying Tricker's online. This is a quick post to help you navigate them and (hopefully) buy the pair you are actually after.
Tricker's vs. Trickers International
A very understandable mistake to make, but an Italian company called Trickers International tends to crop up on eBay searches for Tricker's. The two companies aren't related, and by all accounts, Trickers International makes a far inferior shoe overall.
The easiest way to tell them apart is the logo - see below. Look for the familiar Tricker's logo font and the apostrophe in the name. Trickers International most obvious giveaway is, of course, the "Made in Italy" tag. You'd probably rather have the ones that are made in Northampton in England, all things considered.
As a brand with some history, Tricker's itself has a variety of logos and fonts that you might expect to find inside their shoes, from which you can derive a rough idea of how old they are. They may feature the font below instead - still a genuine pair, just a bit older.
The other additional "watch out" is for shoes marked "Corniche by Tricker's" - these are generally a lower grade of shoe overall, which though made by Tricker's, tend to use poorer materials and build compared to their modern Country and Town models.
Tricker's "half sizing"
A slightly knottier issue than the one above, and one that Tricker's itself really has nobody to blame for but itself. They sort of address this on their sizing advice page:
Tricker's lasts have been in existence for decades, and their sizes can therefore be non-standard - this is part of our history and character as England's oldest shoe maker
Tricker's record their widths by number (4, 5, 6) rather than by letter (D, E, F) as nearly every other maker does. Not that this is always uniform between makers of course - in England a standard fitting tends to be E, whereas in the US it tends to be a D. But the general rule of thumb is numbers for size, letters for width.
The problem arises with Tricker's handwritten sizing labels on their shoes, which can easily be misread as "9.5" when it's actually "9 - 5" or size nine, standard width.
Actual half sizes will be written as "9 1/2 - 5" or size nine and a half, standard width.
So a 9 will look like this:
And a 9.5 will look like this:
It was actually hard to find an example of a UK 9.5 on eBay - of the 30 listed, many were actually size 9 where the seller has misread the label. So do ensure you check the photos for the size label before buying!