🇻🇳 Bringing Shame to “Made in Vietnam” – A CNES Shoes Review
📍Address - 75 Đ.Trần Đình Xu, Cầu Kho, Quận 1, Hồ Chí Minh 700000
🏖Ambiance/Facilities - Simple, probably the only thing respectable about the brand or the shop.
💡Highlights - none
💵Avg. Price per Person - 150 USD
⭐️Rating - 0/4
As a longtime shoe enthusiast, I approached CNES with tempered expectations. The brand has earned attention across Southeast Asia and received nods from reputable sources like The Shoe Snob and Misiu Academy. Their proposition—handcrafted, Goodyear-welted shoes at accessible prices—seemed promising on paper. But my experience with the Giày Loafer Nam T013 revealed a far less flattering reality: a shoe built to impress on camera, not to perform in the real world.
⚠️ Pricing – A Shady Start
This review wouldn’t be complete without addressing the dubious pricing experience. The shoe was clearly advertised online for 1,625,000₫, yet when I visited the CNES boutique in Saigon, I was told that price was an “error” and was charged 3,000,000₫, plus credit card fees. For context, their own POS system listed the shoe at 2,400,000₫. This wasn’t a misunderstanding—it was either a bait-and-switch or evidence of internal dysfunction. Neither scenario reflects well on a brand that claims to stand for integrity and craftsmanship.
👞 First Impressions – Pretty... Until You Touch It
Out of the box, the T013 appears handsome enough. The silhouette is elegant, the finishing looks clean, and it clearly borrows design cues from classic European dress shoes. But the illusion collapses under even light scrutiny.
Patina: This is perhaps the shoe’s greatest offense. What CNES calls a “hand patina” is nothing more than a spray-painted surface—flat, synthetic, and fragile. Within moments of handling, I was able to scrape the color off with my fingernail. There is no layering, no tonal variation, no depth. It's not artistry—it's artifice.
Leather Quality: The leather is thin, plasticky, and clearly corrected grain. It creased deeply within hours of light wear. These are not the elegant ripples of high-quality calf, but brittle, irregular folds that speak to a very low-grade hide with poor fiber integrity.
Heel & Outsole: The heel is painted rubber made to imitate stacked leather—a detail that feels dishonest rather than clever. It's stiff, noisy, and offers no real shock absorption. Despite being Goodyear-welted, the footbed feels hollow and unstructured. It’s a construction detail used more for marketing than performance.
🤔 Who Is This Shoe Really For?
This isn’t a shoe for someone who values real quality. It’s for the casual buyer who wants the look of a dress shoe without asking questions about materials, construction, or durability. CNES has designed a product to look good in photos and showrooms—but it quickly unravels in actual use.
And that’s the core issue: misrepresentation. CNES leans heavily on buzzwords—“Goodyear welt,” “hand patina,” “craftsmanship”—while cutting every meaningful corner behind the scenes. It’s the footwear equivalent of a fake diploma on a flashy office wall: it may fool the untrained eye, but it won’t hold up under pressure.
💬 Final Verdict
As a customer and a footwear aficionado, I didn’t walk away angry—I walked away embarrassed. Embarrassed to have believed the marketing. Embarrassed to have paid a premium for a product so hollow. And above all, disappointed to see a brand that could elevate “Made in Vietnam” instead choosing to drag it through the mud.
Vietnam has real shoemaking talent—craftspeople capable of world-class work. But CNES doesn’t represent that. This brand is a façade, built on buzzwords and cheap theatrics, that actively undermines the reputation of Vietnamese craftsmanship on the global stage. Instead of being a source of pride, CNES turns “Made in Vietnam” into a warning label.
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