Your Sneakers Deserve a Second Life (2024)

One pandemic night two years ago, I was scrolling through my phone, brain matter liquifying into a goopy slurry, when I came across a photo of an old pair of Nike sneakers that stopped me in my tracks. They were beautiful, strange, lightly biophilic, and while I knew they came from the brand’s outdoor-focused ACG line, I knew nothing else. After some light sleuthing, and with some DM help from a friend fluent in rare shoes, I learned they were the Nike Air Terra Albis IIs, which were released in 1998. A few googles later, I located a deadstock pair in my size at Rooks BK (technically a slightly bigger woman’s size, but the colorway—described as a “tidal blue/aquamarine”—was too good to pass up). Added to cart. Checkout.

They quickly became the favorite child of my shoe rotation, and I wore them everywhere we were permitted to go at the time: to walk the dog. Out on hikes. To walk the dog again. At one point I even managed to sneak them into a GQ spread, which led to the fulfillment of a personal lifelong dream when an Instagram stranger asked “ID on shoes?” in the comments.

Then, not even a year later, catastrophe struck when I was going up some stairs and one of the heels broke off. The Zoom foam—two decades old at this point—had started to crumble, and the outsole had begun to peel off like a large scab. I cabbed home and haphazardly attempted to glue everything back together to no avail. The shoes, I thought, were gone—but for whatever reason, I had a hard time tossing them. For the next few months they just sort of sat there on our shoe rack, unworn.

Then one day I saw an Instagram Story that featured the work of Goods & Services, a new kind of cobbler shop based in Los Angeles. Except Goods & Services doesn’t exactly work like your average shoe repair shop. Instead, it has attracted a devoted following by doing some truly out-there reconstructive surgery: Birkenstock Bostons retrofitted with shark-like ripple soles. Rick Owens Dunks, rescued from the piss-yellow abyss with clomping new outsoles. Merrell Hydromocs, which are somehow attached on top of chunky Vibram treads. It’s a veritable Frankenshoe laboratory, where dead sneakers are somehow reanimated and reimagined.

Maybe the shop could even work some magic on my ACGs.

The mad scientist behind Goods & Services is Rory Fortune, a fashion industry veteran who picked up cobbling in 2016 when he relocated from New York to Los Angeles. “It's like learning to play the guitar or something,” Fortune tells me. “You just keep going, you get a little better, you watch YouTube videos, you pick up tricks.” Eventually, he bought his own treadle machine—an old mechanical sewing machine—on Craigslist for $500 and practiced his stitch.

Then he bought a few other large and unwieldy machines that he didn’t have space for, and decided to open up Goods & Services as a physical studio in 2019, and is currently based in LA’s Arts District.

Originally, he had intended to mostly just repair boots. But his stylish customer base saw other possibilities. “Oh, you can do what Recouture does in Japan,” says Fortune, referring to the legendary Shibuya shop that kickstarted the sneaker-cobbling renaissance by designing one-of-one shoes. “People very early just started really coming in and requesting getting their sneakers redone and getting excited about it.” The first pair of shoes that got some major attention was a pair of Vans Authentics with a Christy sole and a storm welt—e.g. the kind of bottom you’d find on a pair of work boots to keep out moisture—which made it into UOMO, a Japanese fashion magazine.

Purchasing the Goods & Services package—basic resoles start at $130, and a full custom re-design will run you $375 minimum—kicks off an open-ended conversation: Do you want Vibram soles? If so, what kind? Mini Ripples, or something with meatier teeth? Maybe you even want to try something more experimental, like attaching a Tom Sachs overshoe sole onto the actual Mars Yards. (Yes, it's been done.) There exists countless possibilities, everything everywhere all at once. With the ACGs I was open to any permutation, really. Maybe a white Vibram sole. Some natural leather side paneling could look cool. But I'd leave most of the design choices to Fortune's discretion.

Admittedly, it isn't cheap, but there’s a compelling argument that clothes and shoes should cost more and shouldn’t be so disposable. Like the resurgence of vintage shopping, I can’t help but wonder if the impulse to repair stuff is somehow connected to the anxiety a lot of us feel about the planet. Specifically, how our shopping habits have blanketed, say, the Chilean desert in mountains of fast fashion. Wanting things that last a little longer—and then actually wearing them—is the least we can do.

I ask Fortune why he thinks his business is taking off. “I don't think it's one particular thing—it’s a confluence of things,” he says. “Seven years ago the idea of a $1,000 sneaker was kind of unheard of, and that's normal now. A customer said this, and she’s been a sneakerhead her whole life, and she hates what sneaker culture has turned into. It’s not exciting anymore.” Customers used to have to stand in line with other like-minded shoppers to get a pair of sneakers they wanted, whereas now anyone with a bot can snatch up new releases and immediately post them for resale. Everyone wants the same thing. Everyone can get the same thing if their checking account is deep enough or they have decent credit and are willing to finance in monthly installments.

“You can just go online, and everybody knows what the stuff is, and you can get whatever you want if you're willing to spend the money for it,” adds Fortune. His business, on the other hand, “feels like it's something that's not for everybody. You have to get it. And then you make an appointment, come in. It's a fun, creative thing that you go through.”

Fortune says he tries not to do more than two pairs of shoes a day. (There are two other employees at the shop who can get through a pair-and-a-half a day.) It’s a slow business, by design. “The problem is that if you start rushing the stuff, the work suffers, the quality suffers,” he says. “We don't compromise on that.”

I asked Fortune if he could breathe new life into my ACGs, and after mailing them to the shop, he agreed to take me through the process with him.

Trusting the Process

“Sneakers use such larger spectrum of materials (thermoplastic rubber, polyurethane, vinyl, hard plastics, etc.) that you don’t know what they’re bonded with,” says Fortune. “Sometimes it’s a combination of bonding materials. You have to have a better understanding of the chemistry and know about solvents. This is one of the reasons why traditional cobblers don’t like working on sneakers.”

“I finish prepping the leather panels by skiving the edges where the seams will overlap. I do all my skiving by hand, and use a variety of knives to skive, but I prefer a round knife the most. There's a versatility and degree of comfort. I'm using 4/5oz natural vegetable tanned leather. It's a heavier weight leather in the context of shoes, so it is strong but still flexible to some degree. One of the advantages to natural veg tanned leather is you can wet mold it and it burnishes nicely.”

“I like this look on thicker leather because it's a detail you see on old school ‘leather worker’ items like belts, wallets, tote bags, etc. It has a vintage Americana vibe, and it's nice to apply that in a modern context like a sneaker."

“Burnishing the edges is a time consuming process. It's one of those details that distinguishes handcrafted work from factory work. I start by using an edge beveler to round out the edges, then apply a burnishing agent. "

“The next step is to glue the leather panels to the shoe and stitch them on. Since they will overlap, I have to stitch them one at a time. There are only a few machines that are designed to stitch on completed shoes. I have a couple of them. On your shoes, I'm using my Claes patch machine. It's a really high end machine, which is needed to do complex detailed stitching."

“I stitch the welt to the leather midsole on an outsole stitcher. This is the construction used on most work boots, where the upper has a welt stitched to the midsole and the outsole is then cemented on afterwards. The reason for this is that future resoles can be done fast and many times over without changing anything on the upper, unlike a Goodyear welted dress shoe, which can be resoled one or two times max before the welt has to be replaced too. In my opinion, this is the most difficult part of the process and requires the most skill and experience. You need to be well-versed in shoe recrafting and leather working, and if you are off slightly when doing it, you can mess up the fit or shape of the shoe."

“The next step is to glue a piece of EVA to the leather midsole and create a second midsole. After I bond the EVA, I sand it on a finishing machine into a sneaker midsole with a wedge, toe roll, rocker on the heel. “When this is done, I glue the outsole. We are using the Vibram Prism outsole. This is their HAE Compound, a mix of rubber and EVA."

“I bond the outsole, hammer it on a jack, trim the excess with a knife, and sand it on my finishing machine. This is the final step. I start with heavy grit sandpaper to shape it and trim the welt down, then move up to a finer grit to smooth everything out. I used the Naumkeag for the final polishing of the sole. I then bevel the edges of the welt and burnish it.”

“Home repairs like yours don’t really work. In order to get anything to bond to those materials, you have to get all the old residue off and get to a clean surface. I get old pairs all the time with Shoe Goo on them and it’s always coming apart.”

“Your shoes took a little under two and a half days from start to finish. This is pretty typical of our ‘Custom Re-design’ option where the work is more detailed and customized to the shoe. There is a lot of prep and dry time in between."

“Obviously, I always have a few projects going at one time, and as we've been growing, I've been doing the more detailed complex projects that take longer, while my staff work on the more straightforward ones. One of our more straightforward resoles can be done in 3-4 hours. Sometimes with that much leather, the shoes can be little stiff at first, but they break in after a couple weeks.”