BEST DRESS SHOE BRANDS - $200 - $500 (Part 1 of 2) - (ft. Hugo Jacomet from Sartorial Talks)

[Music] hey ladies and gents and welcome back today heath and i are beyond excited to welcome a very special guest to our channel mr hugo jacomay who has made the trek over from paris and we are ecstatic to be visiting with him and uh talking about a subject that you guys have been asking us for for a very long time yeah y'all have uh numerous comments have said hey can you make a list of shoes that two to four two to five hundred dollar range this is the perfect time to do it because we have the wealth of knowledge of every brand out there and hugo um that's exactly what we're gonna talk about today fantastic yeah it's an absolute pleasure to have you here thank you so much i'm very happy to be here with my beautiful wife she's behind the camera and i always say that because i have a tendency to say i do this i do that no we do this as you you work together we work it's a family business same here right it's with your father and the whole family is pretty much involved everybody's involved with it okay same here because uh we are doing everything together and our son is editing everything so it's really a family business it's fun that way yeah it is super fun so thank you for having me i'm super happy to be with you well it's great because as we discussed uh earlier you know we have such a a wide spectrum of an audience yes um you know we get a lot of folks that are college age kids folks in their 20s 30s maybe just starting out you have we get a lot of folks that uh have been buying certain brands for years you know out of the mall or at the discount stores and then they've started watching our channel they've started watching us redo shoes and they said hey i have a newfound respect for quality shoes and then you have a lot of folks that watch our channel as well but the folks that you know are hitting other levels of the finest bespoke shoes in the world um so it's what a great time to have you know just the knowledge that we have as cobblers the knowledge you have of all the different uh you know shoes and clothing and whatnot throughout the world just be able to share that knowledge and you know this is the perfect time to be watching uh because like i said we're gonna bounce some great brands off to these folks that you know are within an affordable price with pleasure so what what's your brief you want uh any kind of shoes or under a certain amount what do you want from me let's stick with uh what you guys been telling us uh generally around two hundred dollars to five hundred dollars uh those are generally the shoes you know that are being sent back in to heath and i to repair um and i think that you know most folks can fall within that price range okay okay okay so um first of all i'm very happy to do this with you i i don't know which kind i know your channel this is why we came to you well we can tell to the people it's it's so funny youtube is a funny uh it's like becoming a community between youtubers right we don't know each other personally this is the first time we meet but we've been speaking a lot through instagram through stuff like that and then it's funny because the people who are gaining some kind of audience like we do like you do like a few other friends have it's interesting because um i i used to tell people so many times hey listen guys we have no competitor on the internet we have colleagues you know because who are how many of us are speaking of real shoes or real suits or real artisanal stuff on the internet not many we are a little team of people trying to say hey people stop giving your money to hugo b to ralph l or to giorgio a you know and try to think a little bit about what you buy so it means beyond the passion for shoes and stuff like that what we do with my wife and with my son and with my team in general is start to it's like a wake-up call to the people wake up yes stop being fooled by big browns who are taking your money and selling you plastic for the price of gold and you know that in france we know this very well because the three biggest luxury group in the world are french you know lvmh lms carrying all this is french i have nothing against these people this is wonderful success but still they participate to this massive marketing that creates some odd reaction and in the world of shoes we know that many people when they discover the things that you are doing or we are doing they say oh my god this is beautiful and i thought i couldn't afford that and and they are very surprised that sometime quality costs less than the brand and we hear that all of the time um you know when and the thing about it is is so many people just like you said are fooled by the brands that have the most advertising budget yes um so it you know if they it's especially with a lot of men it's all about um ease of shopping so if i go to the mall or if i'm with my wife i let her choose my shoes they don't know a lot so you know they may walk into a department store uh they may go to somewhere like you know johnson murphy cole haan a lot of the brands that you're seeing out there in department stores and the amount of money that folks are paying for those shoes doesn't always equate the quality and get the same shoe in every color yeah just a cover one-stop shop yeah and then when they bring it to us after years of wear and they say hey i want you guys to resold this pair of johnson murphy's or whatever brand it may be what they don't understand is one these shoes the quality is very hard for us to resole that shoe yeah and and they they were unaware that maybe it's you know the heel block is hard plastic with wrapped in a leather veneer you know and and it's it's things like that they just don't know so you know we've enjoyed being able to uh break open shoes and show people the quality of the shoe that you're sending into us and educate them yeah and did you notice because it's the same for us when people they they fall into the shoe passion first first of all young guys when they look at our shows or read our books or read our blog or whatever we do the first time they put on a real pair of leather shoes most of them they send it's like an orgasm for them they send an email saying oh my gosh i feel like i'm a real man i feel like i'm a real person all of a sudden you know they because most of them they grow they grew up without even trying on a real pair of leather shoes and they changed everything specifically you know of course the style the look and everything but even the comforts yeah and a lot of those young guys they they exude that and it takes it to other within the clothing or they're going to that job interview they're going to feel a little bit more confident oh yeah for sure for sure we have an example um years ago we had a good friend of us from chile you know south south america he was in paris he's a he's a dentist a professor a very high level guy is he's teaching implantology in france and he was in paris when i had an event i don't remember was a book signing of maybe the italian gentleman i don't remember darling italian gentleman i think it was massive even that we had but he said i'm so sorry i didn't know you haven't even hugo it's a good friend of us he was in paris so i said yeah but i don't have a shoe said listen just buy yourself a good pair of shoes it's going to be just enough and you can come casual by yourself and so we took him to alton boutique it's a friend a brand that we love he bought a pair and just with one pair of shoes even him he said he was looking at himself from the mirror saying oh my gosh i can't i can't i can't believe a single pair of shoes was simple pair of shoes just a real pair of shoes change the whole picture well it just gives you you exude confidence you look at it and you just feel better you walk a little more in your step i know that's the way with i am even when i get a new pair of really nice quality shoes i just put them on my feet and it's like wow you know the craftsmanship and the quality that went behind this just it makes me feel better so ladies and gentlemen you know that we all love shoes at this table and uh this is something that we we we could speak hours and we're gonna maybe speak hours because we have no agenda right we have no no planning it's just a real stuff okay so let's start let's jump into the big swimming pool and say okay so you won the list so uh i'm pretty sure you covered pretty much all the bronze i'm gonna i'm gonna talk about but it's gonna be maybe reshuffle a little bit all this and give you an um a clearer view so i selected you asked me under 500 i selected i don't know 14 15 brands but before going into the bronze i like to reclarify if if i may a few ideas because many people and specifically since the covet crisis are becoming extremely um i would say at last more interested in where the shoes are made how are they made with which technique back in the years when we started writing parisian gentlemen with sonia in 2000 i started in 2009 it's the prehistorical time almost uh nobody have heard about goodyear blake rapid blake and all that you know these are construction techniques i i suppose you'll probably pretty much know this right or whatever it's funny we still get a lot of questions sent to us uh yesterday i posted i was like hey what questions you want us to ask and that is still a big topic what can you talk about blake versus goodyear wealth and yada yada well i mean we're not going to go too much into this right now but but what is interesting now is that more and more people and i noticed this after covet became more sensitive some kind of industrial patriotism you know say we want shoes made in for example in france i won't shoot made in europe now like like all of a sudden china becomes the big bad guy you know we don't want to buy anything from china or we don't want to buy anything from further country like eastern europe for example because for example you know or you may not know that there's a few countries who are coming up right now like romania for example very interesting country in terms of shoemaking um uh hungary also they have always been incredible eastern europe also over and so what i wanted to say first is that when i knew we were going to do something together i said oh i have to find some american brand made in america because maybe some people here are sensitive to that you know they want to buy something which is made in their country and then um well of course i thought about the two big elephant in the porcelain shop you know alden and ellen elements because these are the two which we in europe and in paris we know about and i've been making a lot of different selections and i never selected allen edmonds and i received i could say hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of well i would say bad comments or very how do you say that very insistent questions what about allen edmonds are you some kind of racist with the u.s maid now i remember reading some of the comments on one of your videos because i watched it myself and i went and i started reading the comments and you were getting you were getting hit by people saying what about allen edmonds and i was just saying and i can declare it officially now i have nothing again alan edmonds you probably know the bronze much better than i do the only thing is that for my taste everything is subjective right so for my taste the last we're very puffy very round very when i look at allen edmonds shoe i'm sorry to say i see a big tall guy but me i'm not that big and i'm not tall and when i put my i don't see myself into this though it's such a matter of style but we had to talk about that and so recently i heard that allen edmonds was extraordinary quality back in the years and that as far as we know the quality is dropped a little bit so i don't know if you have information if you want to go into that subject but uh for me i i don't know allen elements sufficiently from a quality standpoint to judge their work but do you have something to say about that sure so you know as a lot of you guys know allen edmonds is probably one of the biggest brands that we receive in our shop um we resold a lot of allen edmonds i own quite a few allen edmonds shoes myself um but one of the things that we've noticed with allen edmonds and that we hear in comment sections on blogs is just the quality level has has decreased over the years because allen edmonds has been bought and sold and sold and um yeah and you know that once that starts happening quality generally starts going down and even you know we'll get old allen edmonds from the 90s from the 80s that come into our shop and we'll get a lot of the new ones and you can tell the difference yep um it's the little the little touches that uh the sanding along the edges may not be as smooth as most of the other shoes in that same price category uh the stench disc density along the uh the sole and welt is you know nowhere near what it used to be you know 20 30 years ago the quality of the the leather on the sole is changed uh we there used to be um i'm and i'm drawing a blank on the name of the the company but they went out of business in the i want to say the 90s and um we'll crack open a shoe and you can they're stamped up underneath the hill the us used to make some pretty good soul leather back in the day and um my guess is allen edmonds had bought their stock when they were closing down they grabbed it they used it for as long as they could until they ran out and you can tell wow this is the original sole and i can tell this is an old shoe and it's just now coming in to be resolved the price is so you say the quality dropped a little bit but the price it didn't drop then the price did not yeah that's absolutely this is what i've also noticed with allen edmonds is they um they're still priced around the 400 price point but they run sales continuously throughout the year and if you're going to buy an allen edmonds now i will say this i do think the quality of allen edmonds has dropped uh drastically from what they used to have but for the gentleman who and we receive questions a lot from guys that have bigger feet yes i'm a size 15 i'm a size triple e i can't i can't exactly and i can't fit a lot of those brands that you're recommending um allen edmonds has my size and that is one of the great things i will say about allen edmonds is they have been around so long their last uh sizes are just so vast that they can fit most men's feet specifically in the u.s correct so that does help a lot um the other thing is when it comes to repairability um like i said we received so many allen edmonds and it is extra it is a very easy easy shoe to resole so i will give them bonus points yes in those two aspects and so one of the great things uh another great thing about allen edmonds is they're very easy to resold yes and you know we've received hundreds of them a year and it only takes you know an hour to resole these shoes and one of the great things is if you send them in to us or your other cobbler a lot of times we can upgrade it so while the stitch density may not be as great from the allen edmonds factory you know we can make all those little fine adjustments that used to be on an old allen edmonds it's no problem for us to read my question is uh it said it's so obvious that they have fantastic history they have a collection of lots which is outstanding i suppose they have a big power of possibility to buy some nice skins and nice leather so it means that if they really want to be back at the same level of quality it's not big changes they have to to make they just took some short cuts a little bit that this is what you were explaining a little bit it's not it's not that difficult to fix some cheaper materials um and like in the blocks um that you know cut some corners there but if you're gonna do that i haven't seen a drop in the price to match that that's that's the key they do do a lot of sales yes and that is the thing if you are wanting to go in that direction you have you have the ability to buy numerous um seconds sales so you can get that you know four hundred dollar shoe for for two hundred so yeah because they constantly constantly have so if you're going to buy allen edmonds i always tell people wait until the sales come out okay and it's still a very good deal it's still yeah for around yeah for around 250 a little to three it's still a good shoe that again will it's you can resole it over and over so it's a shoe that you'll keep for years to come okay so i'm happy we had this discussion about allen admins because for the first time i'm going to show this on my channel also and for the first time all our viewers from the us there are there will be now you have the answer i don't like the style of alan edmonds i didn't know much about the quality i know that was very decent we can say it's still very decent quality but that the the people who were allen edmonds you know aficionados they noticed that the quality dropped sure it's so awesome well alan runs if you listen to us we love what you do and maybe there's a little bit that you can do to bring back some quality because the thing they may not know is that the public you have 350 000 followers on this channel we have if we mix the french and the english 000 and probably i would say a million people all together um well it means that this million people they are more educated than they used to be and this is why brands now are pushed by the market sometimes this new upcoming crowd everybody say it's all about sneakers now and comfort no no no it's not true how can you explain that so many brands are you know every morning i discover a new brand almost you know so if it were a dying market you will not discover a newborn every morning on the contrary that something is happening a new generation is discovering the pleasure of a nice shoe of beautiful leather of this impression of being you know almost a new man when you when you wear this kind of stuff and there's a message also for allen edmonds and this company were very established you're going to be challenged by young men who know now what a blake stitching in what a goodyear teaching is what what a hand welded shoe is they they start to know and so it it should push we have the same problem in the thai industry you know nobody wear ties anymore i mean a little bit but now the people who are wearing thai they wear tie not because they have to wear thai this because they love to wear so this is not the same public and all of a sudden all the crappy tie maker disappeared of course no more business sure but the high quality seven-fold eleven-fold twelve-fold with a lot of silk a lot of technicity into the tie they all of a sudden there's a new market of people who are passionate with this and i think in the shoe industry is the same what is happening i don't know if you you you see this with your clientele yeah i do think there's a a renaissance movement going right now and i think uh just as you mentioned not only because of like channels like ours and yours and others out there that are educating the public unlike as they've ever been educated before you know before channels like all of ours came together you know i i didn't know and i was the same way you know i was like i'll just go to the mall and get myself a nice pair of shoes you didn't you didn't know quality and you're now because of all of our channels we're educating the public a lot of the younger people i hear this all the time from the generation z now yeah these folks are growing up they're saying you know what i'm tired of throwing all my stuff in landfills i'm tired of the just the cheap disposable give me quality and that's why i hear from so many the younger folks that are going to vintage stores buying nice old shoes that buy nice old clothes and they want to keep them and i i like it they are you know it's just there's a rejuvenation amongst everything style-wise shoes-wise and so manufacturers and not to mention the big manufacturers are in now competition with a lot of the folks we're going to talk about today so you're either going to have to step up your game or you're going to lose out on this exactly exactly so let's step up into the i wanted to make sure that everybody understood that about allen edmonds there's another brand that we like in europe from your country's alden but it's a little bit above the 500 price tag that we spoke about and they're famous mainly for their cordovan leather which is horse leather right and uh it's beautiful shoes they have nothing to say but they're not in our target photo and they also are known as for uh we're talking about allen edmonds fitting multiple size feet they do a two measurement uh they do a heel width and they do a um up at the the ball of the foot they'll take so that is for people who have kind of an odd size foot width wise that is one that they can they can go to like that okay so let's start uh i i made a list it may not be in the right order but it doesn't really matter okay i'm going to try i'm sorry everybody if sometime i i little bit struggle first of all you have to remember i'm french so english is not my mother tongue even if i speak fluently but i'm always very concerned about what about if do you detect my accent i suppose you do you're perfectly fine you just you just talk we will now it doesn't matter it doesn't matter but it's funny for me so you have to remember and you have to remember also that i speak normally in euros and not in dollars and it's going to be a little bit more complicated because some of the brands that i'm going to speak about there are maybe some discoveries for you uh i'm thinking about one which is located in singapore and they speak in singapore dollars so it's becoming a little bit you know tricky to have the right price but the thing to remember is like we said guys every shoe brand that we mentioned most of these shoes are between two and 500 exactly exactly so go look them up and you'll you'll be able to see what price so i will start with uh one which is for me probably the best value on the market right now so it's a big uh statement that i'm doing but it's among the best value for i would say the entry line for us uh well it's like in wine i'm a wine amateur i'm collecting wines we live in burgundy close to chablis so of course it's the right place to live and um i was always told by my grandfather and my father he said they said to me you know you go there's a technical point having a great bottle of wine under 10 bucks it's just impossible you can have some you know wine who's been trafficked a little bit put a little bit add some stuff you know in america they go as far as adding some microscopic wood chips inside the wine so that it can sound like it's been aging in a barrel for 10 years but it's just directly they put the wood directly in the wine okay so i remember my father and my grandfather telling me you go technically it's impossible to have what we call a great wine in front you know it's like it's a culture for us under 10 15 bucks honestly you can have some kind of a decent wine but not a great one it's the same for shoes sure i think for me the the cut is under 180 i would say 160 180 forget about it yeah forget about it because it's ridiculous to save 40 bucks and then not being able to resolve your shoe in in three years or not to being able to maintain your shoe to wear them you know it's better to spend a little bit more up front and then you can have them for well i would say a long time it's not a lifetime it's it's decent good year that you can be resolved by people like you so it can last a long time so for me one of the if not the best value in the market is from singapore so the brand they call it cnes i have no idea why it's probably an acronym of a company of a new establishment should i don't know cnes so we're going to put pictures as b-roll because i don't i did i didn't i couldn't bring all the shoes because of my um luggage would have been oversized otherwise as you can imagine it's okay photo pictures of all of this they are in singapore uh they are doing a very decent job beautiful i think they are for their loafers uh at 150 something like that and for the oxfords and derbies and boots they're around i would say 250 something like that 250 290 which is an incredible value when you're gonna see the shoes they are incredible so they use some ancient techniques like wood pegging sometimes you know the blind stitching can be a little bit complicated to do so they do woodpecking so it's a little bit of shortcut but it's stylish shortcuts i'm actually a big fan because i'm a boot guy yes and there's just something about seeing through the waist some some pegs and they're nice beautiful it is and they're nice and polished um it's it's very old school and it's got an elegance to it it's got a rich history yeah exactly military shoes and boots and yes see this was a brand that you we did not know about and you introduced us to us and we were looking over their website looking at the shoes and i agree with you absolutely beautiful for that price point yeah absolutely and with there are couplers initially so they repair also so they have this culture you know there are initially so it's i think it's three guys who joined to create this company so it's men in vietnam we may you may or may not know that vietnam is a very interesting place for shoes yes not only for labor costs because they have some know-how and they have some technicity there and honestly everything i've seen from them are absolutely fantastic okay you have to understand everybody ladies and gentlemen if you order from cnes we live in 2022 you can have to you may have to add some customs right you know this is a little bit tricky these days specifically uh when we receive something from the usa there well i think it's a little bit better now but you have to add maybe like 20 30 bucks of customs and a little bit of shipment but it's still a fantastic value cnes in singapore [Music] you

Channel: Trenton & Heath

Views: 154,469

Keywords: #bestbrands, #dressshoes, #highquality, #sartorial, #hugojacomet, #parisiangentleman, #shoecobbler, #cobbler, #beforeafter, #top10, #informative, #top12, #bestof, #shoebrands, #handcrafted, #welldressed, #bespoke, #cheapshoes, #cheapbrands

Id: A8xyukYvcXA

Length: 26min 13sec (1573 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 09 2022