THE COBBLER
A good cobbler has the ability to majorly upgrade your dang life. We should know—we live in NYC where walking miles on end on rough pavement every week is the norm. Yes, most of the time we wear sneakers… But even one night out in a pair of beloved non-sneaks holds the potential for ruin and despair. Despair not! There are ways to avoid total shoe annihilation. Enter: your lovely neighborhood (or maybe further than the neighborhood if you’re not as fortunate as us) cobbler. The humble store front is deceiving—inside lies the den of a shoe wizard, a person (people) so skilled and crafty as to be almost beyond belief. Your favorite pair of ballets flats has finally sprung a hole? The leather is faded? the heel has run aground? No prob. For a small fee your cobbler can fix all that lickety-split. So get ya booty onto yelp, search though a few reviews of places nearby, and get goin’.
So… where to begin? How to know what to ask for? How to make sure one gets what one wants? We will tell you all of our secrets.
Present the shoe(s) in question and explain what the ish is. “They’re all faded;” “the toes are all scraped up;” “the heels are starting to fall apart;” they need new soles;” or perhaps, simply, “I want them to look like new again” (always ask what this will entail before you trot back out the door!!)
N.B. The friendly neighborhood cobbler who will not charge you an arm and a leg for their handiwork will not always have your same taste, or tastes that are up to date with currents trends/modes of fashion. Before anything gets replaced (like a sole or a heel or a new coat of paint), we suggest asking to see examples of the new pieces in question. We have made this mistake before! And we did not have the heart to to tell the satisfied/proud looking cobbler that we did not like their work! We have also had the satisfaction of spending a few minutes bickering with the cobbler before the start of a new project about how, in particular, we wanted them to fix a dented heel… and then rejoiced with the cobbler a few days later when the project came out looking more fantastic than anyone expected. It’s ok to know what you want. It’s ok to push for a new way of doing things. Just be polite about it. What you are really doing is starting a relationship with this person, a repertoire, a dynamic… Yes, the cobbler will implement the repair, but you are the one that must have/understand the plan!
Consider preventative care. Enter toe and heel caps, sole guards (great for protecting fancy shoes), and weather protector (this can of course be applied by oneself at home, but sometimes it’s worth it to pay a tiny extra for the convenience of someone else performing the service. $15 can save your sweet shoes from a scraped and scuffed tip, or toe box, and worn down, raggedy a** heel. A toe cap is a true shoe saver—it lifts the front of your shoe ever so slightly off of the rough sidewalk as you walk so that it is spared from potential ruin. A sole protector can help preserve the resale value of a beautiful pair of designer duds. Your friends and acquaintances will all wonder how you manage to stay so put together—only you and your lovely cobbler will know the secret.
Ask what the price will be before you leave. Cobblers often have you pay upon pickup and it’s not fun to be stuck with a bill that you weren’t expecting. If it seems way higher than you expected, you can take your business elsewhere. Unless you are expecting detailed/custom/particularly difficult work on an expensive pair of shoes, there’s no need to break the bank (that’s called getting ripped off).
That’s it. It’s so simple. Your life’s never gonna be the same. Your shoes are gonna thank you.