The Sneaker Brand Committed to Cobbling—From Paris to New York

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.”