What Chenjingkai Office is known for
A small Taipei atelier for made-to-order brogues, loafers, derbies and minimalist leather shoes. Customers select soles, leather and laces before fitting; the shoes are made by hand in the adjoining atelier.
Chenjingkai Office was founded in Taipei in 2006 by Chen Jingkai, who works as a curator, graphic designer, and artist as well as the atelier's principal shoemaker — a multidisciplinary background reflected in how the space is organized. Rather than functioning purely as a retail shoe shop, it has grown into a combined design studio, small exhibition space, and informal cultural platform, stocking art books and graphic-design publications alongside the shoe displays for visitors to browse. Customers commissioning a pair work through a six-step process the studio designed itself, choosing leather, sole construction, and lace details before the shoes are built in the adjoining workroom; the resulting product lines run from made-to-order dress shoes and brogues to rubber-soled leather sneakers and limited special-edition designs produced in collaboration with other designers. Chen Jingkai has described the underlying ambition as building a platform where designers, shoemakers, material suppliers, and customers can collaborate directly on experimental projects, treating shoemaking as the first application of that idea rather than its final purpose. Alongside the Da'an district atelier that remains its base, the operation maintains listed points of contact in Tokyo and Hong Kong, extending a project that began as a single Taipei workshop into a small regional presence built on the same made-to-order, design-first model.
How ORBIS reads this city
Best for — Made-to-order brogues, loafers, derbies and minimalist leather shoes
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Where next
- Max e Giò Calzoleria — Italy
- Michal Pavlas — Prague
- Friendly Shoe Shop — Vietnam
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