Review: Sanwei FireFlash Table Tennis Shoes

[The_TT_Bat_Guy]

The moment I saw these shoes advertised by Sanwei I was hooked by the lace-free system. After regularly getting annoyed by shoelaces coming undone and then needing to double knot them, there was a certain level of appeal in not needing to fuss with laces anymore.

I also really liked the design of the shoe from the placement of the design accents to the way the various upper panels are laid out. I picked out a size 42 from Sanwei's website, added my payment and address details, and completed my order - then it was time to wait.... Time between ordering from the website to delivery was about a week or so. Not too long consider how far it is travelling.

You can choose whether you want simple packaging or gift box packaging - I chose simple packaging, which simply means the shoes come in a fairly nondescript cardbox box.

The white coral colourway is quite striking to behold in person. Photos don’t really do this product justice in terms of how the various design elements come together in a complete package – particularly because there’s a subtle shine throughout the upper of the shoe. That’s possibly how Sanwei decided on naming this variant the FireFlash! 😊

The build quality is pleasingly high. When you hold it, you feel like you’re holding a premium table tennis shoe. The non-marking sole is reassuringly firm with a good amount of flex and the sole pattern suggests a very grippy level of performance in match play. The insole is replaceable, which is handy since it's one part of the shoe that could wear out first.

Sanwei has included a carbon fibre plate at the base for added stability and overall, the shoes felt light – an important consideration in a sport which often requires lightning-quick reflexes. I've weighed them at 283g each shoe.

*A friend saw me trying the shoes and immediately wanted a pair for himself. He chose the SkyStrike blue colourway though there was a bit of a delivery problem which I’ll cover at the end since I faced no issues myself, but I felt it’s still worth mentioning.

So how does it perform?
Putting on and removing the shoes was a breeze thanks to the lace rotation system. Just pop the disc out to loosen for removal or press it in and rotate it to start tightening the nylon laces to the desired level. The nylon laces felt great to tighten and feel secure if though they looked pretty flimsy at first!

I enjoyed the ability to fine tune the level of tightness “to every millimetre” and get it ‘just right’ for me. Nice and snug is the goal and the new lace rotation system helps me achieve that in seconds.

A couple of quick steps and side-to-side shuffles later, I could indeed confirm that the “micro adjusted” fit was nice and snug. I was fully confident I couldn’t blame losing a point to an ill-fitted shoe 😆 (hmmm... I might be missing a trick here!)

I felt great moving around in the Sanwei FireFlash table tennis shoes and was confident of getting in position quickly to make and receive shots. Springing into action was easy (well, after a suitable warm up of course since I’m no longer 18! 🤣) and the grip was reassuringly firm both indoors AND outdoors.

After a long indoor session, the built-in ventilation helped ensure my feet didn’t experience a sauna-effect, so, that was good! The mesh in the upper is designed in such a way that air can easily travel through the shoe but you don't feel like the shoes are full of holes (even though you wouldn't walk through deep puddles in them!)

Final thoughts
I’ve used these shoes for a year now and they’ve held up very well. The structure remains solid and the shoes retain the same elasticity as when I first got them.

This is a premium table tennis shoe for under $100/£100 that doesn’t compromise on looks or performance.

*Note: My friend ordered it twice but the delivery company Sanwei used for the UK, Relay, delivered to the same wrong address, TWICE. That address wasn’t even listed on the package and was on the next street.

This happened even after I stepped in to help and contacted Relay to report it and resupply the correct address. Sanwei very helpfully tried to help by shipping out new pairs each time.

Eventually, Sanwei and I settled on a solution where the shoes would be shipped to me instead then I’d pass them on to my friend. The whole Relay fiasco took several months to sort out, including time for me to investigate the root cause, which kind of dampened the experience for my friend but at least he has them in hand now and is enjoying using them.

 

[Wakkibatty]

I also have a pair of the exact same shoes, and can basically back up everything you've said, with a couple of caveats:


TL.DR Version: -- definitely buy this shoe if you can, but don't buy it online. You absolutely MUST try this shoe on first and test it for both comfort, and a high level of fit.

If your foot just happens to be the perfect shape, it will fit your foot like a glove and provide you good service.

If your foot is NOT the right shape -- even just by a little -- then it feels instead like you've LITERALLY stuck your foot into a pair of gloves: some parts are too tight, other parts are too loose, and as the damn thing is wrapped around a foot not a hand, it'll stretch out of shape very quickly, assuming that is, it doesn't fall off your foot entirely first.

THE FULL REVIEW


THINGS I LIKE:

- Low weight ✓
- Lace up system is very convenient* ✓
- Grippy soles ✓
- Stiffer sole due to carbon fibre insert ✓

THINGS I DON'T LIKE:

- THE FIT: Maybe it's just my feet, but when playing in these things, I constantly feel like the shoe is going to come off, through my heel slipping up and out of the shoe. There's a lot of padding at the back, especially at the shoe mouth, near your Achilles tendon. This pushes my whole foot forwards compacting my toes against the front of the shoe. (I had to return my first pair to Sanwei for this very reason.)

Buying a bigger size fixed the toe compression problem, but not the heel-slip. The shoes still feel like they want to fall off while I'm playing. It may sound like a nitpick but the padding at the back behind the heel feels unnecessary, as you really don't get a lot of impact to the very back of your heel playing TT.

- THE FABRIC: The shoe's fabric is a white light-weight material, that looks and feels like nylon (rubber sole aside, the whole shoe has a very plastic-like feel, which explains the low weight).

If the shoe fitted my foot perfectly this would not be a problem. But as the shoe is a slightly poor fit for me, the plastic side material is stretching out of shape after just five or six playing sessions. There is now a pleat of excess stretched fabric on the inward side of both shoes, and it's starting to become annoying.

- THE LACING SYSTEM*: This is a positive and a negative, hence the asterisk. Lacing and unlacing the shoes is a breeze, and works brilliantly... I'm definitely a fan of it. But the lacing system only tightens the shoe over the top surface of your foot. There is no way to alter or adjust the lacing to prevent the afore mentioned forward sliding tendency due to the padding at the back.

With my previous lace up shoes I could lace them virtually all the way up to my ankle, which helped keep the shoe in place. With these shoes that's impossible. The tongue of the shoes is short and integrated into the lacing system through the use of fabric loops. As a result you can't adjust the tongue of the shoe very much to achieve more playing comfort, or stop the shoes from sliding forwards.

The plastic laces themselves are also a bit soft. These too are now starting to stretch, forcing me to tighten them further just to keep the shoe in place, meaning the more I wear this shoe, the worse it fits. I fully expect one of these plastic laces to break in the next month. If it does, I'm screwed, and can no longer wear the shoes. With this lacing system I can't just go buy one or more replacement laces at the supermarket -- if a lace breaks, that's it. You don't get any replacement laces, nor do you get any instructions on how to disassemble and reassemble that fancy lacing system to insert a replacement lace.

- LACK OF ADJUSTMENT / ADAPTABILITY: As the shoe is plastic, it's stretching everywhere: the sides, the lacing material itself, and those deliberately open weave breathing panels themselves are all stretching out of shape, due to being forced to conform to the shape of the foot inside it. This to me is its biggest design flaw.

The aim of a traditional lacing system is to allow the shape and fit of the shoe to better adjust to the shape of the foot inside it. This distributes tensile loads evenly across the shoes various fabric panels, and ensures the fabric's anisotropic threads don't deform or break through lateral stresses.

This shoe however does the opposite. It tightens and loosens in only one direction, which is over the top of your foot. It's wind-up lacing system is reminiscent of the nylon cord management system on most wipper-snipper lawn mowers. This is a great idea frankly -- its handy and innovative, but sadly in its current iteration it's also frankly far from adaptive. It just doest have any capacity to selectively tighten some laces more than others to ensure the right fit for every foot shape. Instead, it tightens and loosens all the laces equally and hope s that this is enough.

If the shoe itself were elastic and made of something like spandex this lack of adaptability would not be a problem, as the material is designed to compensate for poor adjustment. But as it's made of soft thermoplastic, stretch and deformation is actually a massive problem, not a benefit or feature. If the shoe was a perfect fit for your foot, this permanent plastic deformation wouldn't happen, whereas in the absence of a perfect fit, it's unavoidable.

MY OWN VERDICT:

This is a shoe with a LOT of promise and potential to it! But it's not quite there yet. Frankly it feels like a product that was released prematurely, part way through its development cycle, before its designers had solved all the requisite problems posed by its innovative design.

Like I said, if this shoe just happens to fit the exact shape of your foot absolutely perfectly, then it's an absolute beauty, and well worth buying.

Problem is, feet don't work like that. This shoe currently has VERY limited scope to be adjusted to perfectly fit your foot, (something regular lace-up shoes do much, much better). It's made from flimsy light weight plastic in certain places to save on weight, which only exacerbates the problems with adjustability, as these are the bits that deform first, causing the whole shoe to lose shape very quickly.

The complete inability of the shoe to tension itself from front to back (ie: along lines stretching from the back of the shoe diagonally up towards where the bow would be on laced shoes) is a glaring omission. If you have a long foot like I do, these uppermost laces near the ankle are what keeps the shoe in place, and stops your heel from sliding up and out of the its mouth, like it's a pair of over-large grandpa slippers

Maybe the designers had small feet, in which case lateral adjustment is all you need to stop a shoe from falling off. Once you get to a size 10/11 shoe or over however, this REALLY is not the case.

 

[longle]

I guess SpeedArt is the OEM for Sanwei. Yes they are really great shoes for its money

 

[Tyce]

I also have a pair of the exact same shoes, and can basically back up everything you've said, with a couple of caveats:


TL.DR Version: -- definitely buy this shoe if you can, but don't buy it online. You absolutely MUST try this shoe on first and test it for both comfort, and a high level of fit.

If your foot just happens to be the perfect shape, it will fit your foot like a glove and provide you good service.

If your foot is NOT the right shape -- even just by a little -- then it feels instead like you've LITERALLY stuck your foot into a pair of gloves: some parts are too tight, other parts are too loose, and as the damn thing is wrapped around a foot not a hand, it'll stretch out of shape very quickly, assuming that is, it doesn't fall off your foot entirely first.

THE FULL REVIEW


THINGS I LIKE:

- Low weight ✓
- Lace up system is very convenient* ✓
- Grippy soles ✓
- Stiffer sole due to carbon fibre insert ✓

THINGS I DON'T LIKE:

- THE FIT: Maybe it's just my feet, but when playing in these things, I constantly feel like the shoe is going to come off, through my heel slipping up and out of the shoe. There's a lot of padding at the back, especially at the shoe mouth, near your Achilles tendon. This pushes my whole foot forwards compacting my toes against the front of the shoe. (I had to return my first pair to Sanwei for this very reason.)

Buying a bigger size fixed the toe compression problem, but not the heel-slip. The shoes still feel like they want to fall off while I'm playing. It may sound like a nitpick but the padding at the back behind the heel feels unnecessary, as you really don't get a lot of impact to the very back of your heel playing TT.

- THE FABRIC: The shoe's fabric is a white light-weight material, that looks and feels like nylon (rubber sole aside, the whole shoe has a very plastic-like feel, which explains the low weight).

If the shoe fitted my foot perfectly this would not be a problem. But as the shoe is a slightly poor fit for me, the plastic side material is stretching out of shape after just five or six playing sessions. There is now a pleat of excess stretched fabric on the inward side of both shoes, and it's starting to become annoying.

- THE LACING SYSTEM*: This is a positive and a negative, hence the asterisk. Lacing and unlacing the shoes is a breeze, and works brilliantly... I'm definitely a fan of it. But the lacing system only tightens the shoe over the top surface of your foot. There is no way to alter or adjust the lacing to prevent the afore mentioned forward sliding tendency due to the padding at the back.

With my previous lace up shoes I could lace them virtually all the way up to my ankle, which helped keep the shoe in place. With these shoes that's impossible. The tongue of the shoes is short and integrated into the lacing system through the use of fabric loops. As a result you can't adjust the tongue of the shoe very much to achieve more playing comfort, or stop the shoes from sliding forwards.

The plastic laces themselves are also a bit soft. These too are now starting to stretch, forcing me to tighten them further just to keep the shoe in place, meaning the more I wear this shoe, the worse it fits. I fully expect one of these plastic laces to break in the next month. If it does, I'm screwed, and can no longer wear the shoes. With this lacing system I can't just go buy one or more replacement laces at the supermarket -- if a lace breaks, that's it. You don't get any replacement laces, nor do you get any instructions on how to disassemble and reassemble that fancy lacing system to insert a replacement lace.

- LACK OF ADJUSTMENT / ADAPTABILITY: As the shoe is plastic, it's stretching everywhere: the sides, the lacing material itself, and those deliberately open weave breathing panels themselves are all stretching out of shape, due to being forced to conform to the shape of the foot inside it. This to me is its biggest design flaw.

The aim of a traditional lacing system is to allow the shape and fit of the shoe to better adjust to the shape of the foot inside it. This distributes tensile loads evenly across the shoes various fabric panels, and ensures the fabric's anisotropic threads don't deform or break through lateral stresses.

This shoe however does the opposite. It tightens and loosens in only one direction, which is over the top of your foot. It's wind-up lacing system is reminiscent of the nylon cord management system on most wipper-snipper lawn mowers. This is a great idea frankly -- its handy and innovative, but sadly in its current iteration it's also frankly far from adaptive. It just doest have any capacity to selectively tighten some laces more than others to ensure the right fit for every foot shape. Instead, it tightens and loosens all the laces equally and hope s that this is enough.

If the shoe itself were elastic and made of something like spandex this lack of adaptability would not be a problem, as the material is designed to compensate for poor adjustment. But as it's made of soft thermoplastic, stretch and deformation is actually a massive problem, not a benefit or feature. If the shoe was a perfect fit for your foot, this permanent plastic deformation wouldn't happen, whereas in the absence of a perfect fit, it's unavoidable.

MY OWN VERDICT:

This is a shoe with a LOT of promise and potential to it! But it's not quite there yet. Frankly it feels like a product that was released prematurely, part way through its development cycle, before its designers had solved all the requisite problems posed by its innovative design.

Like I said, if this shoe just happens to fit the exact shape of your foot absolutely perfectly, then it's an absolute beauty, and well worth buying.

Problem is, feet don't work like that. This shoe currently has VERY limited scope to be adjusted to perfectly fit your foot, (something regular lace-up shoes do much, much better). It's made from flimsy light weight plastic in certain places to save on weight, which only exacerbates the problems with adjustability, as these are the bits that deform first, causing the whole shoe to lose shape very quickly.

The complete inability of the shoe to tension itself from front to back (ie: along lines stretching from the back of the shoe diagonally up towards where the bow would be on laced shoes) is a glaring omission. If you have a long foot like I do, these uppermost laces near the ankle are what keeps the shoe in place, and stops your heel from sliding up and out of the its mouth, like it's a pair of over-large grandpa slippers

Maybe the designers had small feet, in which case lateral adjustment is all you need to stop a shoe from falling off. Once you get to a size 10/11 shoe or over however, this REALLY is not the case.

I have this with almost all shoes, my ankle area is small for my foot size so more often than not I have to choose between too loose fit, or painful toes. Western shoes are made to accommodate wide feet and ankles, Eastern shoes are made for smaller foot sizes and don't scale up well.

My best fits are all in the "barefoot" or "zero drop" segments, built with plenty of toe room. Current TT shoes are Xero

 

[mamedium]

I remember watching documentary about Celine Dion. She said: "If the shoes are beautiful, I'll make my feet fit"

 

[TampaBayTableTennis]

they are good shoes. Each of the sanwei/speed art shoes are built slightly different. Dark blue is a different and more flexible material, light blue is my favorite looking.

 

[joshmak10]

I have the speed art version and i have no plans to ever switch to a different shoe. They do the job wonderfully and I love the BOA technology

 

[The_TT_Bat_Guy]

I guess SpeedArt is the OEM for Sanwei. Yes they are really great shoes for its money

View attachment 36246
View attachment 36247

Yeah! It also actually says SpeedArt on the upper as well

 

[The_TT_Bat_Guy]

I also have a pair of the exact same shoes, and can basically back up everything you've said, with a couple of caveats:


TL.DR Version: -- definitely buy this shoe if you can, but don't buy it online. You absolutely MUST try this shoe on first and test it for both comfort, and a high level of fit.

If your foot just happens to be the perfect shape, it will fit your foot like a glove and provide you good service.

If your foot is NOT the right shape -- even just by a little -- then it feels instead like you've LITERALLY stuck your foot into a pair of gloves: some parts are too tight, other parts are too loose, and as the damn thing is wrapped around a foot not a hand, it'll stretch out of shape very quickly, assuming that is, it doesn't fall off your foot entirely first.

THE FULL REVIEW


THINGS I LIKE:

- Low weight ✓
- Lace up system is very convenient* ✓
- Grippy soles ✓
- Stiffer sole due to carbon fibre insert ✓

THINGS I DON'T LIKE:

- THE FIT: Maybe it's just my feet, but when playing in these things, I constantly feel like the shoe is going to come off, through my heel slipping up and out of the shoe. There's a lot of padding at the back, especially at the shoe mouth, near your Achilles tendon. This pushes my whole foot forwards compacting my toes against the front of the shoe. (I had to return my first pair to Sanwei for this very reason.)

Buying a bigger size fixed the toe compression problem, but not the heel-slip. The shoes still feel like they want to fall off while I'm playing. It may sound like a nitpick but the padding at the back behind the heel feels unnecessary, as you really don't get a lot of impact to the very back of your heel playing TT.

- THE FABRIC: The shoe's fabric is a white light-weight material, that looks and feels like nylon (rubber sole aside, the whole shoe has a very plastic-like feel, which explains the low weight).

If the shoe fitted my foot perfectly this would not be a problem. But as the shoe is a slightly poor fit for me, the plastic side material is stretching out of shape after just five or six playing sessions. There is now a pleat of excess stretched fabric on the inward side of both shoes, and it's starting to become annoying.

- THE LACING SYSTEM*: This is a positive and a negative, hence the asterisk. Lacing and unlacing the shoes is a breeze, and works brilliantly... I'm definitely a fan of it. But the lacing system only tightens the shoe over the top surface of your foot. There is no way to alter or adjust the lacing to prevent the afore mentioned forward sliding tendency due to the padding at the back.

With my previous lace up shoes I could lace them virtually all the way up to my ankle, which helped keep the shoe in place. With these shoes that's impossible. The tongue of the shoes is short and integrated into the lacing system through the use of fabric loops. As a result you can't adjust the tongue of the shoe very much to achieve more playing comfort, or stop the shoes from sliding forwards.

The plastic laces themselves are also a bit soft. These too are now starting to stretch, forcing me to tighten them further just to keep the shoe in place, meaning the more I wear this shoe, the worse it fits. I fully expect one of these plastic laces to break in the next month. If it does, I'm screwed, and can no longer wear the shoes. With this lacing system I can't just go buy one or more replacement laces at the supermarket -- if a lace breaks, that's it. You don't get any replacement laces, nor do you get any instructions on how to disassemble and reassemble that fancy lacing system to insert a replacement lace.

- LACK OF ADJUSTMENT / ADAPTABILITY: As the shoe is plastic, it's stretching everywhere: the sides, the lacing material itself, and those deliberately open weave breathing panels themselves are all stretching out of shape, due to being forced to conform to the shape of the foot inside it. This to me is its biggest design flaw.

The aim of a traditional lacing system is to allow the shape and fit of the shoe to better adjust to the shape of the foot inside it. This distributes tensile loads evenly across the shoes various fabric panels, and ensures the fabric's anisotropic threads don't deform or break through lateral stresses.

This shoe however does the opposite. It tightens and loosens in only one direction, which is over the top of your foot. It's wind-up lacing system is reminiscent of the nylon cord management system on most wipper-snipper lawn mowers. This is a great idea frankly -- its handy and innovative, but sadly in its current iteration it's also frankly far from adaptive. It just doest have any capacity to selectively tighten some laces more than others to ensure the right fit for every foot shape. Instead, it tightens and loosens all the laces equally and hope s that this is enough.

If the shoe itself were elastic and made of something like spandex this lack of adaptability would not be a problem, as the material is designed to compensate for poor adjustment. But as it's made of soft thermoplastic, stretch and deformation is actually a massive problem, not a benefit or feature. If the shoe was a perfect fit for your foot, this permanent plastic deformation wouldn't happen, whereas in the absence of a perfect fit, it's unavoidable.

MY OWN VERDICT:

This is a shoe with a LOT of promise and potential to it! But it's not quite there yet. Frankly it feels like a product that was released prematurely, part way through its development cycle, before its designers had solved all the requisite problems posed by its innovative design.

Like I said, if this shoe just happens to fit the exact shape of your foot absolutely perfectly, then it's an absolute beauty, and well worth buying.

Problem is, feet don't work like that. This shoe currently has VERY limited scope to be adjusted to perfectly fit your foot, (something regular lace-up shoes do much, much better). It's made from flimsy light weight plastic in certain places to save on weight, which only exacerbates the problems with adjustability, as these are the bits that deform first, causing the whole shoe to lose shape very quickly.

The complete inability of the shoe to tension itself from front to back (ie: along lines stretching from the back of the shoe diagonally up towards where the bow would be on laced shoes) is a glaring omission. If you have a long foot like I do, these uppermost laces near the ankle are what keeps the shoe in place, and stops your heel from sliding up and out of the its mouth, like it's a pair of over-large grandpa slippers

Maybe the designers had small feet, in which case lateral adjustment is all you need to stop a shoe from falling off. Once you get to a size 10/11 shoe or over however, this REALLY is not the case.

I love how your response really rounded off this review very well. I had a fantastic fit around my feet so it felt like a perfectly snug pair of trainers/sneakers - and I fully appreciate your comprehensive viewpoint based on a different fit due to the shape of your feet. I'm effectively a size 8 so a Euro 42 was true to size for me

 

[JackJohnson]

I have the speed art version and i have no plans to ever switch to a different shoe. They do the job wonderfully and I love the BOA technology

Where did you get the SpeedArt version of the shoes? Do you have a link?

 

[joshmak10]

Where did you get the SpeedArt version of the shoes? Do you have a link?

I live in Canada so I get it from a local dealer called Secret Weapon sports

 

[Andrea Jiang]

The moment I saw these shoes advertised by Sanwei I was hooked by the lace-free system. After regularly getting annoyed by shoelaces coming undone and then needing to double knot them, there was a certain level of appeal in not needing to fuss with laces anymore.

I also really liked the design of the shoe from the placement of the design accents to the way the various upper panels are laid out. I picked out a size 42 from Sanwei's website, added my payment and address details, and completed my order - then it was time to wait.... Time between ordering from the website to delivery was about a week or so. Not too long consider how far it is travelling.

You can choose whether you want simple packaging or gift box packaging - I chose simple packaging, which simply means the shoes come in a fairly nondescript cardbox box.

The white coral colourway is quite striking to behold in person. Photos don’t really do this product justice in terms of how the various design elements come together in a complete package – particularly because there’s a subtle shine throughout the upper of the shoe. That’s possibly how Sanwei decided on naming this variant the FireFlash! 😊

The build quality is pleasingly high. When you hold it, you feel like you’re holding a premium table tennis shoe. The non-marking sole is reassuringly firm with a good amount of flex and the sole pattern suggests a very grippy level of performance in match play. The insole is replaceable, which is handy since it's one part of the shoe that could wear out first.

Sanwei has included a carbon fibre plate at the base for added stability and overall, the shoes felt light – an important consideration in a sport which often requires lightning-quick reflexes. I've weighed them at 283g each shoe.

*A friend saw me trying the shoes and immediately wanted a pair for himself. He chose the SkyStrike blue colourway though there was a bit of a delivery problem which I’ll cover at the end since I faced no issues myself, but I felt it’s still worth mentioning.
View attachment 36243
So how does it perform?
Putting on and removing the shoes was a breeze thanks to the lace rotation system. Just pop the disc out to loosen for removal or press it in and rotate it to start tightening the nylon laces to the desired level. The nylon laces felt great to tighten and feel secure if though they looked pretty flimsy at first!

I enjoyed the ability to fine tune the level of tightness “to every millimetre” and get it ‘just right’ for me. Nice and snug is the goal and the new lace rotation system helps me achieve that in seconds.

A couple of quick steps and side-to-side shuffles later, I could indeed confirm that the “micro adjusted” fit was nice and snug. I was fully confident I couldn’t blame losing a point to an ill-fitted shoe 😆 (hmmm... I might be missing a trick here!)

I felt great moving around in the Sanwei FireFlash table tennis shoes and was confident of getting in position quickly to make and receive shots. Springing into action was easy (well, after a suitable warm up of course since I’m no longer 18! 🤣) and the grip was reassuringly firm both indoors AND outdoors.

After a long indoor session, the built-in ventilation helped ensure my feet didn’t experience a sauna-effect, so, that was good! The mesh in the upper is designed in such a way that air can easily travel through the shoe but you don't feel like the shoes are full of holes (even though you wouldn't walk through deep puddles in them!)

Final thoughts
I’ve used these shoes for a year now and they’ve held up very well. The structure remains solid and the shoes retain the same elasticity as when I first got them.

This is a premium table tennis shoe for under $100/£100 that doesn’t compromise on looks or performance.

*Note: My friend ordered it twice but the delivery company Sanwei used for the UK, Relay, delivered to the same wrong address, TWICE. That address wasn’t even listed on the package and was on the next street.

This happened even after I stepped in to help and contacted Relay to report it and resupply the correct address. Sanwei very helpfully tried to help by shipping out new pairs each time.

Eventually, Sanwei and I settled on a solution where the shoes would be shipped to me instead then I’d pass them on to my friend. The whole Relay fiasco took several months to sort out, including time for me to investigate the root cause, which kind of dampened the experience for my friend but at least he has them in hand now and is enjoying using them.

Very great review, professional and objective.

Thank you for helping us to complete a big part of sanwei shoes' info for our fans in TTD.

It's so cool work!