Resoling vs Replacement: How the Cobbler Can Be Your Lifelong Partner
You bought yourself a pair of Allen Edmonds Park Avenues for $400. Very stylish shoes indeed. The type of those that make your employer notice you before even sitting down at your desk. Now, after eighteen months, the sole looks like it has spent some time in a desert. You consider purchasing a new pair.
Forget about it.
This is something that a young man in his twenties and thirties tends to realize thanks to an older male friend who tells him this over a beer. You can get your Park Avenues resoled for anywhere from $60 to $120 depending on the sole material and your location. In this way, your pricey footwear will gain another two or three years of its life span. You saved $300 plus prolonged the life of some awesome footwear you broke in and which your feet already got used to. Why would you want to break them again with some new stiff leather?
Pretty embarrassing situation, if you calculate.
Imagine your annual expense on the shoes over ten years of your life. Let us say, you purchase two pairs of decent dress shoes every year for $350 each. This equals to $7,000 invested in ten years. At the same time, you can buy three durable pairs, wear them by turns, and resole them twice over this period. Then, you would spend only $4,500 in ten years, but your shoes will look much better because of that aged leather which a new pair will never have. Those very guys who understand this secret tend to buy a Rolex Submariner once instead of changing their fashion watch every Christmas.
Let me get back since I know that “find a cobbler” may sound like an advice of a grandpa.
Cobbler stores nowadays are not those dusty places with bells at the door and a man called Sal who accepts cash payments only. At least, this is true sometimes and those places happen to be the best. Nevertheless, there are companies such as Bedo’s Leatherworks in Virginia and Brian the Bootmaker in Los Angeles which have YouTube channel and Instagram page. You can send your shoes from any place of the USA to them. The Resole Company in Portland works with any kind of shoes – from Red Wing Iron Rangers to Alden shell cordovan loafers. They are artisans who really enjoy saving shoes people abandoned.
Last year, I visited the local cobbler shop in Chicago with my Cole Haan Zerogrands with split welt construction. The guy looked at them, estimated the price of $85 and gave me back my shoes looking like the day I bought them. It took me less time than looking for a replacement on Nordstrom’s website for twenty minutes. The argument about convenience of cobblers is basically a lie created by us due to online shopping which made us believe that everything should be delivered to our doorsteps within two days.
There is also a sustainability aspect in resoling. Yes, yes, I know the word makes you roll your eyes. Alright, alright, fair enough. But the truth is that 300 million pairs of shoes end up in the landfills of America annually. Tanning of leather is a resource-intensive process and many cheap dress shoes are manufactured from bonded leather to fall apart as soon as possible. If you resole your Goodyear-welted shoe, you actually prolong the life of a product which was meant to be resoled. Not activism. Just avoiding waste.
The shoe rotation is also much more important than you imagine. Even the best made shoe requires a rest day after being worn. You can buy cedar shoe trees that cost $20 each from Woodlore or Allen Edmonds and they will help to absorb moisture and preserve the shape of your shoes overnight. Wearing the same pair for five days without taking days off increases the wear in such a way that even the most skilled cobbler cannot reverse it completely. Proper rotation of three pairs of shoes with proper maintenance will help you to prolong their life longer than six pairs worn to the bone. It is not difficult. It is just paying attention.
Your task is to find your cobbler before you will need it desperately. Do not wait until the sole is waving in the air like a flap of a tongue on a windy day. Find a local cobbler, show him a pair of shoes that require some minor maintenance and ask about the services he provides. Ask about the types of soles he offers. Vibram, Dainite, JR Rendenbach, commando soles for winter. A good cobbler will not stop telling you about this since he really cares. You will see the benefit from it for many years to come. You will start perceiving your shoes as assets which should be maintained and not as consumables that should be thrown away.
Just one more thing worth mentioning. There is something special about feeling that your shoes are maintained by an experienced person. You enter a business meeting with freshly resoled Alden wingtips and nobody in that room understands that they are repaired. They just see a man who is properly dressed. Details are invisible which is precisely the purpose of maintenance. The best maintenance is invisible since everything looks perfect.
Your twenties are the time when you discover which brands are worth investing money into. Your thirties are the time when you discover how to maintain them. Cobbler is precisely at the point where all these things intersect. You are saving thousands of dollars while looking stylish. Most of men never understand it. They keep purchasing,
Thanks for reading this post! – MyPlugin
