Make Footwear Repairable Again (Part 2)

These heroes quit their jobs in corporate fashion to fix sneakers for a living

The sneaker industry is low-key one of the most wasteful on planet earth. These are products that get exposed to a huge amount of daily wear and tear, but there is no way of repairing them. Your Sambas and Dunks get smashed and scraped against concrete for 12 hours a day, but once the sole gives up, it’s game over.

Sneakers aren’t made to be repaired — their soles are mass-produced in all sorts of crazy shapes and sizes, then glued on with industrial cement. You can’t easily take the sole off, and if you could, there’s no way of getting a replacement — you can’t just call up Nike and get them to send you a new sole to put on your worn-out Dunks (I’ve written about this before). If you’re really into your shoes, you could buy a brand new pair just to remove the sole and put that onto your original pair, making the new pair useless (this is called sole swapping and is very much a thing for sneakerheads who have a lot of old but valuable shoes). The sneaker industry makes money from selling new shoes, not repairing old ones.

In an old industrial space in LA’s Arts District, Goods And Services has built a thriving business on repairing worn-out sneakers, using traditional methods normally used for fixing “proper” shoes from brands like Red Wing and Allen Edmonds. Rory and Lauren Fortune started the business in 2019, after they quit their old jobs in corporate fashion. Now they have a small team and repair hundreds upon hundreds of shoes a year in LA.

Goods And Services can build a brand new sole from scratch, even copying elements like the air bubble from the Air Max line, but completely hand-made from leather and cork. The soles are then stitched back onto the sneaker by hand, which is how shoes were made back in the day.

These guys can even do a fake Air Max air bubble!

This is an expensive service, so most of the shoes these guys bring back to life are from the luxury end of the spectrum — Rory has personally resoled over a thousand pairs of Rick Owens sneakers.

This is a very niche, very nerdy topic, but it’s one that’s close to my heart — I love shoes made the old way, because they’re a rare moment of tradition and craftsmanship in an industry that’s built on ultra mass-produced, super technical supply chains and hysterical marketing that gets people hooked on buying almost identical products over and over again.

Traditional shoemaking is sadly a dying craft these days, which is why it’s so important what Rory, Lauren and their team are doing. Shoes are an investment, or at least they should be, and we need to be celebrating the people with the skills and dedication to repair them.

I caught up with Rory over a glitchy zoom call to find out more about what they do. If you have a pair of shoes that deserve to be repaired (and you almost certainly do) you can hit up Goods And Services here.

When I look at what you guys do, the main thing I'm thinking is that there must be a lot of high-end shoes in LA.

Yeah, but if you go to Beverly Hills, there's one repair shop. There used to be two, but they're old-time repair shops, and it's just repair, which we do, but that's all it is. It's repair, it's not customization as well.

I'm kinda amazed at what you guys are able to do. I had no idea it’d be even possible to resole a sneaker, let alone build a replica sole from the ground up and stitch it on like you would a traditional shoe.

Yeah, the biggest issue with the sneakers is to get access to the soles, they’re not available. Vibram gives us special treatment and we still struggle to get 'em. It's really just for manufacturing, they're not set up to do repair. And then also there's special lasts, you’ve really got to design soles to fit these things. You’ve got to know a lot about sneakers and how to manipulate them so they fit. We've definitely had to spend a lot more time figuring it out. 

I don't think a lot of cobblers are willing to put the effort in to figure out how to do it. It's still a new thing. There's a couple people in Asia, but it's still a new thing. And it's expensive too. It's a lot of work to do it. We present it more as a customization. It's one of one, it's a special experience. People have to really get it.

It is really shocking when you think about it — that basically all of this waste in the footwear industry is coming down to the fact that brands don't sell spare soles.

One hundred percent. So we opened in 2019, that was our first year in business. We did an interview with Vogue. They just couldn't wrap their head around it. They were like, why don't they just supply you guys with soles? And I'm like, I don't fucking know. We get these Nike guys who want to resole an original Nike and they'll go out and spend whatever you spend on a brand new pair just so we can take the sole from it to replace the one on their old pair.

What I find really infuriating is that it’s like that even on shoes with very standard soles. I had a pair of the Margiela replicas, the German army shoe. I had it for five or six years, and by the end of it the sole had completely fallen apart. It was completely, completely gone. But the upper was still pristine, even the laces looked kind of still new after like six years. And you think, I've spent however many hundreds of euros on this thing, and it’s got a completely standard sole but you can't replace it.

Oh yeah. And then you take it to a cobbler and they're going to say no because they don't have the part available. That's a huge part of it. But I also feel like there's this bigger thing going on, because repair is a dying craft. Every year there's more and more shops closing. It's a generational thing. Younger people don't want to learn how to do it, but it's also the ubiquity of cheap shoes that just don't make sense to repair economically.

I'm 46, and when I was a kid, repair shops were all over the place. But decade after decade, they died off. And now they're just in some rich towns. Like I said, even in Beverly Hills, there's one good repair shop.

That's not how stuff is sold anymore. It's sold as an experience. It's sold as all these kinds of ideas, it's not like, here's a new bag, here's a new pair of shoes. And repair isn’t presented in that way. It's not presented as a cool experience — that repairing your old shoes can be fun and cool and creative. It's not just some errands you got to run, you know what I mean?

Totally. How did you get into it?

Initially, I was living in New York. A friend of mine that I grew up with, his dad had a repair shop. His dad passed away, so he took over his dad's shop, but he didn't want to do it. We were catching up, he knew I worked in fashion, he wanted to update his shop, so he was just talking on the phone asking about how he could update the repair shop and make it a little cooler. And then that was the genesis of the idea. 

My wife and I were living in Brooklyn at the time and we're just kind of like, what if we did a repair shop but there was a modern, updated take on it? It was just an idea for a few years. And then we moved back to LA, and we were talking about it more and more. It just started through these phases of saying like, no, we should really do this. And then we started working on it. Slowly over the years I acquired machines. 

My friend taught me some basic stuff, and then you practice and learn more. I met some shoemakers. They taught me stuff. I still had my day job and I got a part-time job at a repair shop on Saturday. So I'd work Monday through Friday at my day job and then go work on Saturdays at a repair shop. But it was really just to get experience. And then I started picking up freelance repair work at home. And then after we had our son, it was just like, fuck it, let's do it. Life is short. And that takes us to 2019.

So you just decided, I'm going to give up my — wait, what were you doing before in fashion?

I was doing mostly product development. You go through this trajectory in your career where you start advancing and growing, you're working for different brands and you feel like you're doing something that's important and all this stuff, and then you start getting older and then you start realizing it's a lot of the same shit at these companies. We're just doing the same thing. And then you start realizing we're just making a lot of stuff. I mean, half of the stuff isn't even selling, but we're still working late all the time. We're chasing all these crazy deadlines and everything's urgent.

And then you just get to this point where you're like, not only is none of this important, but it's actually hurting the world. It's causing damage. It sucks. Most people get into it because they like product, they're passionate about it, but when you get to mid thirties, late forties or whatever, you hit this phase where you're just like, God, it's a terrible industry. It's abusive, polluting, it's all these things, but you're still passionate about product. 

So for us it was like, how can we do a business, do something that's our own thing, but not contribute to the problem? With this idea around repair, you're not doing the same old thing of just producing samples, chasing buyers down, producing a bunch of stuff and then having to put shit on sale that isn't selling and tying all this money up. 

You can tell that you guys have a background in fashion. It's not like you've approached this thinking you need to just fix people's Red Wings and resole some Gucci loafers. You've built a bespoke Rick Owens repair service. Everyone working in the industry knows that people are spending a lot of money on these shoes, but that they're not the kind of thing that you can take to a cobbler to get easily repaired.

Exactly. And when you do take 'em to a cobbler, they don't know what it is, they're just going to put some rubber bottom on it, it's not going to look good. 

Rick Owns sneakers brought back to life with a completely hand-made resole

With the Rick Owens shoes, do you guys build something from the ground up?

Yeah, we rebuild the whole bottoms. We were lucky early on with those, a lot of people were sending their Ricks, so I've taken a lot of 'em apart. They're constructed in a cool way — they're  a hybrid between a sneaker construction and a more traditional shoe construction, it's all separate pieces and they can be taken apart and rebuilt. 

Awesome. It looks like you've done a lot of Visvim as well.

Tonnes of Visvim. We don't use the exact same sole, but we have some options that are pretty similar. Rick Owens and Visvim, that's kind of our bread and butter. You know what it is — in all these shoes the midsoles are polyurethane, so it's like a 10 to 12 year lifespan and they start to crumble. And with the Visvim FBTs, it was about 10, 12 years ago when they were the hottest shoe. And so everybody's got a pair and they're hitting that mark now where they're all crumbling.

A pair of Visvim FBT’s with a Vibram resole

We have a thing going with Feit. Their stuff is excellent. We love working on 'em. It's veg tan leather, it's cork, it's a kind of modified hand-stitched construction. We rebuild them really well, so we're super pumped that we’re doing a repair program with them.

So many of the shoes out there are made with these really crazy, completely custom soles that you're never ever going to be able to replace.

That's why we have to inject that creative side into what we do. We can't remake a lot of soles, we have to come up with something that's cool and different, but not the original.

Especially with those Balenciaga sneakers, you look at them and it's like, what can you do with that once the sole goes?

Yeah. That's all it is. 

What's like standing in the way of you guys being able to do more?

Training people. We have four employees, two cobblers that have been with us for a few years now, and they're amazing, they're very talented artisans. But it's one of those things where we do all the work here right now, I think we're at 14 weeks, 15 weeks lead time. We have a lot of antsy customers right now. To train somebody to do this is an investment for sure. That's the biggest challenge.

The kind of people that you're getting in to work with you, who are they? Who's deciding that they want to spend their career repairing shoes?

We have tried to find people through the kind of traditional cobbler route, but it really hasn't gone well for us. Like I said, I think it's a generational thing. It's mostly older people that know how to do it. The people we have, we really try to bend over backwards for 'em.

Not so many people want to spend their lives standing behind machines anymore.

Yeah, I know, right? It's definitely a novel thing. We have it like an open kitchen, so when you come in here, you can kind of see people working on shoes and it's kind of a fascinating thing for visitors to see.

Nobody’s on a laptop.

Exactly. 

How does it compare for you guys, after you've quit your jobs and decided to run this business? 

I do not miss working in corporate fashion at all. I'd rather work with my hands all day. It's stressful, just like any business, but it's a different kind of stress because it’s physical work, so we're tired at the end of the day. But it's very rewarding work. We get to work on all these machines, there's a learning curve to 'em, and when you can master 'em, it’s very rewarding. I don't miss sitting around getting urgent emails. Going into meetings and all that nonsense.

People must have thought you were a little bit crazy when you started spending your Saturdays fixing shoes. So you just spent a few years kind of in your spare time just taking apart and chopping up sneakers?

Yeah, that's pretty much it. I started with really simple shoe repair, rubber heels, half soles and then leather soles. Just some really basic stuff that my friend taught me. I would practice taking shoes apart and once I got a little bit of experience I started taking sneakers apart. It was just a hobby with no intent of it being a business.

An Air Jordan 5 with a hand-made leather replica of the original sole unit

If you were to do an explainer, for dummies, what's the difference when you take apart a sneaker versus when you take apart a proper shoe?

So a proper shoe, the sole is basically flat, so you can cut the bottom, you can sand it, you can pull it off with pliers or pincers, and you can do all this stuff without damaging the upper. With a sneaker, it's got a sole that goes up around the upper and it's cemented on the side. So taking the sole off is a much more delicate process. 

Yeah, it's funny, isn't it? You have this whole community of people who are so obsessed with sneakers and then the repair options for them are to buy another one and slice the top off just so you can get the sole to replace.

It's crazy. 

And I guess all that needs to happen at some point is for brands to start doing it themselves.

The big companies have no problem reaching out to us about working together, but they also make it very clear they have no interest in providing parts for repair when we talk to them. We get approached by big companies often and they always have lots of marketing and content ideas for us that we mostly turn down, but when we propose that they provide parts for us to repair, the conversation usually goes nowhere. So I don't think it's a matter of them not being aware of this, it's just that they don't have much interest in it. 

Most of these guys are thinking, okay, how can we sell another 10 million pairs next quarter?

Exactly. 

Are you noticing that more and more people are looking to get things repaired?

We are growing a lot. We grow every year. We're definitely noticing a lot of new people coming to us, but it’s still this new thing. People are still trying to wrap their heads around it. They have no idea that what we do is possible.

What I think is so cool about repair is that you're also really connecting with the product. You've got to have a really good product to be able to repair it, and you've got to really love the thing to want to get it repaired.

One hundred percent. We all connect with product. You're excited, you go get the shoe, but then once you start wearing it and breaking it in, it becomes your shoe. It's this more authentic connection to the product because the marketing is no longer part of that process anymore. The brand just wants to sell you new shit. So once you purchased it, it's like they're no longer around anymore, and then you're wearing the shoe and you're traveling in it, you're enjoying the product. There's something more authentic when people come in here and spend money versus going to a store and buying a new pair of shoes.

Yeah, for sure. I would never have thought, for example, that a Rick Owens shoe would be resolable. So when you see what you are able to do with that, you suddenly realize, okay, this actually could be a real investment.

Yes. We've noticed with Rick Owens specifically, because they’re so hot on the resale market, people are much more inclined to go out and buy used pairs with destroyed soles. People are like, okay, I'm going to go buy an old pair and then take it to Goods And Services as opposed to buying a new pair.

I mean, I personally have probably done at least a thousand of 'em or more. And then our workers have done several hundred. Visvim is probably similar. Birkenstocks, probably the same thing. So you can get a sense from that. 

A thousand pairs of Rick Owens shoes is a lot of Rick Owens shoes.

Yeah, I mean, we're talking since 2019.

I can imagine that spending your whole day working with your hands to fix really nice shoes is probably kind of awesome, honestly.

Yes. It's cool and it's exciting and you appreciate product differently. You look at it differently. I can spot a skipped stitch from across the room. You notice the craftsmanship. You definitely look at shoes differently. Yeah, it's scratched, it's beat up. But there's still plenty of things you can do to give them life again. 

There's definitely something bigger going on here. I don't think I've totally put my finger on it, but when people come in here we always ask 'em where they find us and what motivates 'em and stuff, and there's definitely this sense that fashion is pretty bad in a lot of areas. People really understand that. And I also think that a lot of the marketing around sustainability, people see through it too.

It's hard to be excited about the industry these days, honestly.

Yeah, yeah. And it seems like they're trying to do things, but then you can't break away from the old way of doing business. 

And they have to be growing at all costs. So you just end up in this really absurd position where it's like, well, everything's already really overwhelming and ridiculous, but they have to keep pushing harder and harder.

Yeah, it definitely seems like we’re in this weird phase where people still want to enjoy shopping and buying things and getting cool products, but they also know that there's got to be a better way to do it. You see people getting excited about vintage, getting excited about what we do. It's just a different experience than when you go to a bougie store and there's some new release out. There's definitely something deeper happening there with people.