Unpacking a WADE shoe

So Engadget does the whole Unpacking routine for gadgets.

Here’s mine.

I’ve taken a brief hiatus on gadgets for a while and concentrated my efforts to getting myself new clothes for 2006. You see, I rarely shop for clothes but the past month (mid December to now) had me buying shirts and jeans – and now, as icing on the cake, two pairs of shoes from WADE.

WADE shoes are made of Italian leather while the soles come from Singapore and exported to the Philippines. My encounter with WADE was pretty recent. I became the hapless victim of a fashion makeover for the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

This can only happen once, so …

I’d like to thank Ms. Abby Arenas and Edgar of Emphasis in Rockwell for my hair and highlights as well as the golden brown air tanning. I would like to thank Kym de Guzman for my clothes and Alex Vergara of the PDI Lifestyle for making this all possible.

Done? Great!

One of the shoe brands Kym carried in were from this store called WADE, and I gladly bought the pair she made me wear a few days after the shoot. Small world – Kym was my batchmate from school. I was in Dev Ed and she was in Comm.

Now to Unpack a WADE shoe.

WADE shoes come in a black rice sack bags that are big enough to fit one shoe box. You cannot fit two shoe boxes inside a WADE bag because if you could, it would give the impression to other people that you only bought one pair. So the more WADE bags you carry, the more shoes you bought. This statement is not as obvious as it seems, and if you think about it carefully, there is a lot of wisdom to be learned from here.

Upon removing the shoe box, I noticed that the WADE text was in red, instead of the usual silver that lined the bag. After much contemplation, I became enlightened to the fact that WADE as a company, wants to use the color red to generate your appetite to eat food after shopping for shoes (hence the color red to whet your appetite). But what is the reason for this? This is because they want to take care of their customers. So why is the WADE logo printed in the box colored silver? Well, the answer is simple – the ones looking at it are not WADE customers.

*The camera I’m using colored the red into pink.

Unlike other shoe boxes in the shoe industry (although I am sure a number of shoe companies do have this design I’m about to talk about. But who knows, I’m a gadget guru, not a shoe swami.), the WADE shoe box does not have a lid. In its stead, the box has a hole for your index finger and can be pulled out from the side. This makes a WADE shoe box very useful for keeping things in (like shoes) and not to be used for your little brother’s grade school Christmas Belen project.

The first shoe I bought were black leathers which I could wear to the office as well as to some semi-casual events (semi-casual and semi-formal are the same. It’s like the half-full, half-empty thing, depending on your outlook in life). In this case, I say semi-casual because I’m usually a formal person, like the British. But casual at times, like Mr. Bean, who is also British.

I can wear these with socks and without socks. I think. The price is P1,980.00 if I remember right.

The second pair of shoes is something for the more casual me which I can use to go to laid back Friday night gimiks, drinking with friends, watching movies, and even playing football – which will destroy the shoes (But wasn’t that fun??). I also won’t mind stepping on animal crap since the natural color of this pair is .. “natural turd.”

And the price is the same, P1980.00 I think.

I spent less than P4,000.00 for two pairs of great shoes. Yipee!

WADE can be found in the 3rd level of Glorietta 1, Ayala Center, Makati. They also have branches in Greenhills, SM City North, Robinson’s Place Malate and Robinson’s Galleria.