The shoes I resoled instead of replaced

I have a pair of dark brown leather brogues that I bought nine years ago and that have, until last winter, been my primary work shoe through every season. The shoes had been beautifully made — a Goodyear-welted construction from a small English maker — and had cost, at the time, about three hundred and twenty euros.

Last November the soles had finally worn through. The leather uppers were still in good shape, the lining was still mostly intact, the laces were the originals, but the soles had cracks and the heels were down to almost nothing.

I had assumed I would need to replace the shoes. The replacement, at current prices, would have cost somewhere around four hundred euros. I went to a small cobbler in the eleventh arrondissement first, just to ask about the resole, and the answer surprised me.

What the resole cost

Eighty-five euros. The cobbler — a man in his sixties who has been working in the same small shop for thirty-five years — replaced the soles, the heels, the welts, and one of the inner liners that had worn through. The whole job took him eight days. When I picked the shoes up they looked, essentially, new from the bottom and beautifully aged from the top. The mismatch was the most pleasing thing about them.

What the cobbler said

He said that the shoes I had brought him would, with the resole, last me another nine years of regular wear, and that they could be resoled again at the end of that period for a similar price. The shoes were, in his estimation, good for a thirty-year life if I was willing to resole every nine or ten years.

He also said that almost no one resoles shoes any more. He said that he used to do twenty resoles a week in the 1990s and now does maybe three. The skill was disappearing. The shops that did this work were closing. The shoes that could be resoled — Goodyear-welted construction shoes, mostly — were being replaced by cheaper shoes that could not be resoled and that had to be thrown away.

What this changed for me

Mostly, what kind of shoes I now buy. I now only buy shoes that can be resoled. This means Goodyear-welted construction, real leather soles, traditional construction. The shoes cost more upfront — usually somewhere between two hundred and four hundred euros — but they are, I now know from direct experience, the most cost-effective shoes available over a long horizon.

A pair of well-made shoes, with two or three resoles over a thirty-year life, will cost somewhere around six hundred euros total. A pair of cheap shoes, replaced every two years over the same thirty years, will cost somewhere around fifteen hundred euros. The well-made shoes will also be more comfortable, will fit better, and will look better.

On the smaller principle

The throwaway economy is, often, the more expensive economy. The repair economy — the one in which shoes get resoled, sweaters get reknitted at the elbow, coats get rebuttoned and relined — is cheaper over a long horizon and produces objects that you have a real relationship with.

The cobbler in the eleventh has my custom for the rest of his working life. The shoes I gave him will outlive me, probably. The whole transaction is the kind of small commerce that has, mostly, been lost, and the loss is one of the small everyday losses of how we now buy clothes.