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New Yorkers work hard, but their shoes work harder. Living in the city my whole life, I’ve taken dozens of beat-up boots, flats, brogues, and sandals to my local cobblers, but never had I considered taking a pair of sneakers in for a tune-up until I learned about the Veja repair program.
Founded in June 2020, the "Clean, Repair, and Collect" initiative was started by the Paris-based sneaker brand to keep people from throwing out their sneakers when they eventually lost their luster. First, Veja opened a cobbler station in Bordeaux, where customers could have any sneaker brand refurbished. Then, in July 2021, they set up a shoe and sneaker repair space at Galeries Lafayette in Paris. In July 2022, the Veja store in Berlin became the first to offer in-store shoe repairs, followed by Madrid. And now, There are five in-store repair shops worldwide, including one in Williamsburg, which opened last year, plus dedicated Veja General Stores in Paris and Marseille, where you can purchase items related to shoe care but also books on repair, toolboxes, and items to take better care of your clothes and plants, among other things. Since the program’s launch, a total of 40,000 pairs of shoes have been repaired, with 700 given a new life in Brooklyn alone.
“We ve done as much as we can to make the barrier to entry as low as possible because we want every possible sneaker to stay on the road and out of a landfill,” says Lyle Kokiko, the cobbler at Veja’s Brooklyn store since November 2024. He’ll work on anywhere from thirteen to twenty-one pairs a week, with resoling being the most common request, followed by repairing a shoe’s heel lining, as people tend to slip their shoes on and off without untying them. The former costs $50 and the latter around $10. A full makeover, which includes cleaning, could be up to $90. The current wait time averages around 4-5 weeks. However, this varies heavily with demand and type of service needed.
It’s not exactly a lucrative business, and most shoe brands wouldn’t want to discourage their customers from buying more pairs. But Veja is dedicated to both using organic and recycled materials for its sneakers and allowing them to stay in use for as long as possible—a key step that is arguably a better alternative to recycling. As founders Sébastien Kopp and François-Ghislain Morillion like to say: “The most sustainable thing you can do is wear the sneakers you already own.”
Over 22 billion pairs of shoes are produced worldwide each year in part because people are buying more of them, but also because they’re running out of places to get them fixed. In the 1950s, France had 50,000 shoe repair shops. By 2023, only 3,500 survived. So, Veja had to invest in keeping the cobbler profession alive as well if they really wanted to make a difference.
“It s very labor intensive,” says Keiko Hirosue, founder of Brooklyn Shoe Space, a coworking space for shoemakers and workshop space for shoemaking courses, about the practice of cobbling, specifically. “There s no training program; it s just apprenticeship, and there s not that many people who do that anymore,” she added. “So the numbers are going down.” Still, social media and spaces like Brooklyn Shoe Space help keep the next generation interested. Kokiko, for example, is a young creative who took shoemaking classes at the Brooklyn Shoe Space and fell in love with the trade. Hirosue recommended him for the Veja job. (Other members of Brooklyn Shoe Space also work at Golden Goose in Soho, which has its own repair program as well.)
In addition to the ecological benefits, Veja also sees the program as a way to learn more about its own products and how people wear them. “We know exactly where we have to improve and where we don’t,” says says project manager Daniel Schmitt, who is based at the General Store in Paris. “There s constant communication between my team and the product development team. It’s another way to close the information loop—and it’s crucial information that most brands don’t have.”
Kokiko, meanwhile, is learning a lot about how his fellow New Yorkers move. “Everyone s really, really different,” he says. “You can have the exact same shoe, the exact same composition, the exact same durability standards, and one person has maybe lost half a centimeter of their heel rubber in seven years, and someone else might have a window looking all the way through after a year and a half. That s interesting to me—the mundane. What is one person doing that s so different from the other person? Do you have an elevator? Do you live in a walk-up? Do you work on your feet? Do you wear these every day, or do you have 20 more pairs? All these factors affect the lifespan of what is essentially the exact same shoe.” His conclusion? “New Yorkers are consistently inconsistent.”