Cobbling together a new career Waldoboro shop opens to give new life to old shoes

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With more Americans planting their feet in throwaway shoes and athletic footwear, the neighborhood shoe repair shop might seem like a relic from the past and a candidate for extinction.

But don’t tell that to Bill Wheeler. He entered the business four months ago at age 56, pumping new life into a collection of machines and hand tools that he purchased through eBay from a defunct repair shop.

The opening of Coastal Cobbler, sandwiched between an appliance business and a cellular phone office, means Waldoboro’s 5,000 residents no longer have to travel 35 miles to Brunswick or 50 miles to Lewiston for shoe repairs.

It also bucks a decades-long decline in the number of repair shops. While cities still support multiple repair shops, many towns have none.

The number of cobblers has dropped from roughly 100,000 during the Great Depression to about 7,000 today, according to the Shoe Service Institute of America.

And the trend continues.

For every repair shop that opens, two or three are closing their doors, but the rate of attrition appears to be slowing, said Jim McFarland, who serves on the board of SSIA, an industry trade group staffed by volunteers.

“By 2020, unless we see a radical change, there will be around 5,000 or 6,000 shops,” said McFarland, who operates a shop in Lakeland, Fla.

The cause of the decline is plain to see.

Last year’s average retail price of a dress shoe – men’s, women’s and children’s – was $32.59, according to the NPD Group Inc., a market research company in Port Washington, N.Y. Dress casual shoes were even cheaper, averaging $30.46 a pair.

That’s considerably less than the $40 to $45 that most shops charge to put on a set of half-soles and heels.

Also, dressier shoes make up a dwindling percentage of footwear sales. Last year, dress and dress casual shoe sales were $10.7 billion, roughly half of what Americans paid for sneakers and other athletic footwear.

Many of today’s consumers have no familiarity with repair shops and some are unaware that old shoes can be made as good as new, McFarland said. He cited estimates that only 10 percent of Americans have their shoes repaired.

Despite those worrisome figures, Wheeler decided to take the plunge. Skilled in the use of tools and machinery, the former shoe factory worker liked the idea of a trade that enables him to extend the life of a product that would otherwise be discarded.

“In a throwaway society, this is a really valuable thing,” he said. “It does something for the environment, maybe make a bit of an impact.”

With new shoe repair machinery prohibitively expensive, Wheeler decided to shop on the Internet but found the array of offerings costly and confusing. He hit pay dirt when he spotted a complete shop outside Pittsburgh for sale on eBay after its owner died and none of his four sons followed him into the business.

Wheeler flew to Pittsburgh, loaded the machines into a rented van and hauled them home to learn how to operate them. He spent weeks tuning, adjusting and refining the equipment until it was working the way he wanted it to.

“I knew I needed to learn a lot, and learn it fast,” he said, recalling how he collected two trash bags filled with old shoes – both men’s and women’s – on which to experiment. “I just ripped and ripped, and rebuilt and rebuilt.”

When he had a question about a repair technique, he would call cobblers as far away as Massachusetts and New Hampshire, many of whom had been in the business for decades and were happy to share their knowledge.

“In November, I got to the point where I felt very confident about rebuilding shoes and that’s when I opened for business,” he said.

Shoe repair has traditionally been a father-and-son business, in many cases begun by immigrants. McFarland, for example, stitched his first full sole when he was 16 and now runs the business his grandfather started.

But these days, fewer sons are following their fathers into the business.

Many of those who remain on the job are adapting.

Robert DiRinaldo, who turns 75 on April 28 and is hailed as a legend in the industry, helped pioneer techniques for repairing shoes with plastic molded bottoms that gained popularity two decades ago.

These days, DiRinaldo keeps busy repairing shoes at DiRinaldo’s Shoe Service in Trafford, Pa., and traveling the country to share with other cobblers his techniques at seminars on “how to repair the unrepairable.”

Even though many of today’s shoes are bonded rather than stitched, almost all can be repaired. “If the shoe repair man is up to date on his bonding techniques, he can fix it,” McFarland said.

“If the shoe fits, repair it,” is the motto of his trade group, which trumpets the environmental benefit of reuse of resources.

Simple economics, however, dictate that only a limited segment of the shoe market is a candidate for repair. “Chances are, any shoe you buy for under a hundred bucks isn’t going to be worth repairing unless you’re in love with the shoe,” McFarland said.

In Wheeler’s shop, the rates for full soles and heels are $70, half soles and heels $45, heels $21 and women’s high heel lifts $12.

So far, he said, the customer response has been enough to keep him busy. Gunilla Broman of Friendship was delighted to learn that she could get her shoes repaired without having to travel to Brunswick.

“A lot of people don’t repair their shoes but I do,” she said.

Wheeler loves the traditional craftsmanship that comes into play when he works on a pair of fine English dress shoes.

“I’m learning every day. The attention to detail when you’re rebuilding a boot or shoe is absolutely essential. Every nail has to be properly placed,” he said.

But he also is eager to embrace the new technology that will allow him to work on bonded shoes. He plans to add infrared heaters and work with shoe manufacturers that use a variety of bonding techniques and adhesives.

“The cobbler hasn’t died, he’s evolved,” Wheeler said. “Everything is changing, and I’m going to change with it.”