Honest Tieks Review - Testing Tieks for Travel - Part 2 Urban Weekend Getaway

5/3/2018

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This post is long overdue. The first post in this series was about unboxing my first pair of Tieks. In that post I promised to do a walking test in these shoes and let you know where they stood.

And walk I did..

I took them to a weekend getaway to Washington DC. And I am not going to lie, I regretted it. Severely.
So let’s go back....

After my Tieks arrived I wore them around the house with thick socks on per recommendations in order to stretch them a bit and help break them in. (I even tried that hair dryer trick I read about) When not wearing them I shoved bulky socks up in the toes to try to get that area to stretch as it seemed to be the problem area, with my big toe on both feet really hitting the top of the shoe.
When we got to our airbnb near DC (highly recommended) I did a photo shoot of delight! See below. These are beautiful shoes, no doubt!

The sad reality, though, was my big toe hurt so bad from the pressure of the tip of the shoe being too tight despite the measures I had taken in advance. The seam of the shoe around my toes left intense red marks, the back of the shoe is designed to not cause blisters, but unfortunately on my anatomy .... I had to resort to shoving tissue between my foot and the shoe to reduce friction of a growing sore blister. My heels hurt. My feet genuinely HURT. And to be honest I don’t remember my feet ever hurting so much. Yes, we did a TON of walking, so please bear that in mind. But for whatever type of foot I have, this is not a good shoe for me for travel.

See my awkward pics below

Stay tuned for a review of a Customer Service interaction I had with tieks and one more follow up post on how I feel one year after buying my tieks

Tieks Pros:

Gorgeous Colors
Quality Leather and crafstmanship
Foldable
Chic looking flats

Tieks Cons:

Very high price
No arch support due to foldable nature
Leather is very soft which is nice, but makes it prone to damage easily
My feet cried many tears after pounding pavement in these
Too much work to break in even applying moleskin to prevent the “big toe bump” For the price, I don’t want to have to do any work!

What Saved The Day?

Never pack one pair of shoes for this exact reason. Once again, just likein Thailand... Sanuks saved the day! Fortunately i had also brought my black yoga slings and my Donna Tribals which both provided much more comfortable walking even after the Tieks damage!