Exactly, no.
Here's roughly what happened. As I mentioned before I have the monks in full grain, I think Hiro. It's generally an alright fit, although the leather is tough, except my toe box is slighthly squashed if I wear them for hours. I have walked upwards of 4km at a time with them though (in our lovely humid Singaporean heat), it's not ideal but it was doable.
When I got these supposedly sleeker and pointier loafers, they were tight... but not at the toebox, rather around the arch. I was temporarily worried they'd cut off the blood supply as some oxfords like to do. However, first, there's a hell of a lot more padding in the sole. I don't know what they sandwiched between the leather layers, but it feels almost like walking on a cushion. Definitely a very different experience from my monks. So, since you sink into the cushion, you get arch space. Second, it took only a few hours wear for the shoe to mould to my foot.
And now it is very comfortable, so much so that I was about to buy the whole range until my wife pointed out that I have a rather large shoe collection already and Meermin would probably stock these again given how fast they sold out. I stuck to one new pair.
At this point my relationship with Meermin is to just risk the money. It's only a couple hundred bucks, and I've never encountered the QA issues so decried here (I think there's selection bias where the 1-2% unlucky customers are 30 times more likely to come and post about it). The outside-EU tax saving on a mainstream brand like Septieme Largeur is more than a new pair of Meermins...
