Naang Boots Finishes 13th at the 2026 World Championships of Shoemaking

Well, the results are in.

Our Zissou Chelsea boot finished 13th out of 20 entries in the 2026 World Championships of Shoemaking.

Shoegazing recently published the second half of its rundown of all the competition boots, which means we finally got to see Zissou sitting there at number 13 alongside some seriously good shoemakers from around the world.

Would we have liked to finish higher? Of course.

Are we disappointed with 13th?

Not really.

This was the first time we entered the competition officially under the Naang Boots name. We showed up with a pretty strange boot, tried a bunch of things that we had never done before, and put it in front of a jury of some of the best people in the business.

I’ll take that.

[Read Shoegazing’s World Championships of Shoemaking results here.]

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Our First Competition Boot as Naang Boots

The World Championships of Shoemaking isn’t completely new territory for us.

Allan and I have worked together on competition entries for several years, including a Top 5 finish last year. But Zissou was different because this was the first boot we entered as Naang Boots.

That mattered.

We didn’t want to make a conventional competition shoe and slap the Naang name on it. We wanted to make something that felt like it came from us, even though almost everything about a competition boot runs against the way we normally design footwear.

At Naang, we spend a ridiculous amount of time thinking about feet. Anatomical construction, how a boot moves when you walk, how it feels after ten hours. How it’s going to age.

None of that really matters here.

The competition boots aren’t judged on fit or wearability. In 2026 the competition called for a black Chelsea boot with hand-welted construction and a handmade sole stitch, and the judges looked at difficulty, execution, design, aesthetics, and originality.

So, for once, we got to forget about making a sensible boot.

That was fun.

Enter Zissou

If you’ve read our original article about the build, you already know where this got weird.

We called the boot Zissou, and the whole design grew out of the stingray.

Not stingray leather. The stingray itself.

We wanted the shape of the boot to feel like the animal moving through water. That led us toward this long, flowing silhouette with very few interruptions in the upper.

The upper itself is made from just two main pieces of leather. No toe cap. No broguing. No decorative panels added simply to create visual interest.

The shape had to do the work.

Before that leather even went onto the last, we spent seven days shaping and sculpting it to get the lines we wanted.

That is not something we’re about to start doing on every pair of Naang Boots.

But for a competition boot? Why the hell not?

[Read the full story behind the Zissou Chelsea boot here.]

Then We Made the Construction Unnecessarily Complicated

This was probably my favorite part of the project.

We had been playing around with the idea of using a French pump stitch, an old construction technique associated with very fine footwear. It creates this beautifully smooth, refined transition around the sole.

It is about as far removed from a rugged Naang adventure boot as you can get.

So naturally, we decided to combine it with a hand welt.

There was no practical reason for doing this.

None.

The French pump construction was delicate and elegant. Our hand welt was rugged and completely unnecessary on top of it. Putting the two together created this strange hybrid that probably made a few traditional shoemakers scratch their heads.

That was exactly what we wanted.

Competitions give you room to chase ideas that wouldn’t make sense in a production boot. Sometimes the answer to “Why would you do that?” can simply be, “because we can.”

Making the Whole Boot Feel Like a Stingray

Once we committed to the stingray idea, we didn’t want it to stop at the silhouette.

My wife Jib took over the Chelsea boot’s elastic panels and built three-dimensional embroidery into them. Instead of treating the elastic as something to hide, we made it one of the main visual features of the boot.

The beadwork references the raised texture of stingray skin and changes as the light moves across it.

Then Yo, a local craftsman here in Bangkok, made the brasswork.

The centerpiece is a hand-hammered stingray-shaped toe plate with this long tail running down the sole. We also tucked smaller bits of brass into the heel and other areas of the boot.

Aon handled the finish.

Most competition shoes go very hard on the mirror shine. We deliberately backed away from that. Real stingray skin has a strange mix of shine and matte texture, so we tried to recreate some of that variation in the leather rather than polishing the whole boot until you could shave in it. Cuz we sure as hell don’t shave.

Taken separately, some of those details are pretty odd.

Together, they start to make sense.

At least they did to us. Well at least they did for me.

And That Got Us 13th Place

Now we know where Zissou landed.

13th out of 20 entries in the 2026 World Championships of Shoemaking.

There is something useful about getting an actual number attached to a project like this.

When you spend months building something, you get way too close to it. You know every decision, every mistake, every detail nobody else will ever notice. Eventually it becomes hard to look at the finished boot objectively.

Competition fixes that.

The judges don’t care how difficult a particular problem was to solve at 2:00 in the morning. They see the finished boot.

Then they put a number next to it.

We finished 13th.

Good.

Now we know.

So What Do We Do With That?

Look at the boot. Look at the boots that finished ahead of it. Look at what worked. Look at what didn’t.

Then build another one.

That’s really the value of entering something like the World Championships of Shoemaking.

I don’t expect French pump stitches or brass stingray tails to suddenly appear on the next generation of Naang Boots. Zissou exists in a completely different world from the boots we actually sell.

But the process carries over.

We learned more about shaping leather. We pushed our hand-welting technique somewhere it normally wouldn’t go. We worked across shoemaking, embroidery, metalwork and finishing to make one object tell a single story.

Some of those ideas will disappear with Zissou.

Others will probably sneak into something we make three years from now without us even realizing where they came from.

That’s why we do this stuff.

For most of the year, we build boots around feet.

Every once in a while, it is good to build one simply to see how far we can push ourselves.

This time it got us 13th in the world.

Next time, we’ll see.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where did Naang Boots finish in the 2026 World Championships of Shoemaking?

Naang Boots finished 13th out of 20 entries in the 2026 World Championships of Shoemaking with the Zissou Chelsea boot.

What is the Naang Boots Zissou Chelsea boot?

Zissou is a one-off competition Chelsea boot created by Naang Boots for the 2026 World Championships of Shoemaking. Its design was inspired by the shape and texture of a stingray.

Was the Zissou Chelsea boot designed to be worn?

Zissou was designed primarily as a competition piece, not as functional everyday footwear. Unlike Naang Boots’ production boots, its shape was driven by aesthetics and competition requirements rather than anatomical fit.

What construction was used on the Zissou boot?

The Zissou combined a French pump-style construction technique with hand-welted construction. The unusual combination was created specifically for the competition as an experiment in technique and design.