Done properly, yes. Cheap mesh bags from the supermarket, usually no.
A shoe wash bag does three structural jobs:
- Stops the shoes hitting each other through the cycle
- Protects the drum from the shoes (and the shoes from the drum)
- Protects the shoes from dye transfer, if the bag is the right colour
That last one is where most bags fail. A yellow, green or grey wash bag can transfer dye onto a light-coloured shoe under heat and agitation. The fix is colour fastness testing. The ShuCloud™ shoe wash bag is built in Chalk inside and out, tested to ISO 105-C06 grade 4 colour fastness, the standard used to qualify the lining of a high-end garment.
The other failure is the zip. Cheap mesh bags use single-thread zip tape, and it opens mid-cycle. Ours is an engineered zip with a metal locking clip that fastens into a D-ring, teeth facing inward, stress tested to 50 cycles at 60°C and 1400 rpm without failure.
Bag colour and zip construction are the two things to check before buying any shoe wash bag.