Inside the light-filled space at Janssen Shoe & Leather Repair, LLC, owner Laura Janssen, 35, and her friend and shop manager, Chad Woodbury, 41, attend to customer orders. Woodbury works on replacing the worn sole of a man’s shoe while Janssen pins a new zipper into a man’s jacket. The 700-sq.-ft. space smells of leather and glue, and a wooden shelving unit behind the counter holds countless pairs of repaired shoes, boots, and leather bags awaiting pickup.
After graduating from the UW in 2003 with a major in costume design, Janssen knew all about sewing for costumes and theater, but soon after becoming a new mother, she quickly realized that pursuing a theater-related career required too many evening and weekend hours away from home. Instead, she joined Cecil’s Shoe Service as a seamstress and honed her skills in leather sewing and repair.
Woodbury, meanwhile, learned the shoe repair trade at a friend’s shoe repair and tack shop in his hometown of Shawano before moving to Madison. He and Janssen became friends while employed at Cecil’s, and a couple of years ago began brainstorming about opening a shop of their own. Luckily, Janssen’s parents were able to bankroll their dream.
Start-up costs, including about $40,000 in “top-of-the-line, state-of-the-art equipment,” totaled nearly $55,000. One machine, a large, outer-sole stitcher, cost $10,000 and weighed so much it required reinforced floorboards. Most of the other tools of the trade were either used or refurbished. An $8,000 German-made sewing machine was their only new purchase.
In the back of the shop, a collection of hides of various colors, textures, thicknesses, and sizes wait to be repurposed. Leather is purchased in half-hides, right off the animal. “The best leather comes off the spine,” Woodbury explains. “As you move down toward the stomach, there may be creases or scars.” The business typically spends between $60 and $200 each on a hide, and unused, smaller scraps are saved for smaller projects.
“The scraps we cut for new handles are probably worth more than all the materials in [some popular] bags,” Woodbury says, and Janssen nods.
Saving a sole
On this day, Woodbury is repairing a high-quality man’s shoe, well worn under the ball of the foot. He’s already removed each individual stitch by hand from around the shoe’s outer rim. With a utility knife, he peels off the heel, then carefully slides the blade around the entire bottom of the shoe, separating the worn half-sole and exposing a tired piece of cork.
He glues a replacement piece of cork to the shoe’s bottom, then sands it down until it meshes perfectly. Next, he attaches an oversized piece of leather – the shoe’s new half-sole – with a high-end contact cement.
The shop’s back door is cracked open to disperse the pungent but temporary odor of glue. “Eventually, we’ll invest in a Fume Buster that will pull the fumes out and vent them outside, but a new one is expensive,” Woodbury says. “I figure I can make one, hopefully before next winter.” He’s already made several of the store’s wooden tables and storage shelves.
Using a five-in-one machine, he clamps a tight seal around the shoe’s edges. From there, the shoe is placed upside down onto an air press that applies up to 800 pounds of pressure to guarantee a complete seal. The overextending edges are trimmed off, again with the five-in-one machine, before being sanded and smoothed to fit the shoe exactly.
Tomorrow, he’ll stitch around the entire shoe, reusing the existing holes rather than creating new ones. “The more holes, the less strength a sole will have,” he explains.
Finally, he’ll attach a new rubber heel, paint the edge of the new sole to match the shoe, and buff it to a glass-like shine.
Meanwhile, Janssen is busy on two projects. First, she’s adding decorative leather panels to a long leather coat, as directed by an artist-customer. On another project, she’s replacing the old zipper on a jacket. Standing, she sets the needle in motion with a foot pedal as she feeds the jacket underneath. “This will go through anything,” she warns. It went through her hand once, which proved no match.
Woodbury earns an hourly wage, but Janssen has yet to earn a paycheck. When she’s not repairing zippers or doing other repairs to coats and jackets, she handles many of the business’s other tasks, such as repairing purse handles and purse zippers or shortening or lengthening purse straps. Her forte, though, is in repairing taller leather boots, specifically tapering or expanding the width of a boot to fit around calves. “I’m just good at it,” she admits shyly.
In today’s throw-out-buy-new society, repairing can be an economical solution. “All sorts of beautiful purses and shoes get thrown out when a $10 repair could bring them back,” Woodbury states.
Whether to repair or replace is determined by one rule of thumb: If the cost of a repair is less than half the item’s purchase price, repair it, they advise.
Each time a customer comes in to claim a repaired item, the duo quietly celebrates. After all, that’s how they make their money. “Looking at these shelves,” Woodbury says, pointing to the completed projects on the wall, “it may not look like much, but there’s probably about $600 to $700 worth of income just waiting for pickup. All our money is sitting there.
“After three months, we put them in a box in the back.” The store has about 15 to 20 unwanted, tagged pairs in the backroom, and to this point, efforts to contact the owners have proven fruitless. “At some point, we’ll probably donate them to [a charity].”
Lifting legs and spirits
Just then, a customer comes in to claim three left-footed shoes. Total cost: $151. “Her left leg is three-eighths of an inch longer than the right leg,” Woodbury explains as the customer leaves –
a fairly common condition, evidently. Now, she has three pairs that will help her compensate for the variance. “One customer brought 15 pairs of shoes in to adjust,” he says.
His expertise, besides basic shoe repair, is in orthopedic shoe lifts. The business receives specifications for repairs from chiropractors and orthopedists, and with the precise measurements, Woodbury can craft a higher and virtually unnoticeable fix. On this day, he completed eight orthopedic lifts in four hours. He also makes sit lifts to specification – small pieces of leather designed to correct a person’s sitting posture.
Custom orders for leatherwork, such as belts, bags, knife sheaths, and even bike pouches, are also available, and with high-quality leather and meticulous care, they’ll last forever, Woodbury promises. He is currently working on a saddlebag for one customer’s Harley-Davidson. He’s also worked on shoes for Civil War reenactment costumes, using traditional wooden pegs in their construction.
Custom design is an area the couple hopes to expand on in the future. While shoe repair encompasses about 60% of the business, orthopedic and custom leatherwork are the most lucrative areas.
With 20 years in the shoe repair trade, Woodbury says every day is “like an arts and crafts class, but you get to use cool machines! I also love working with my hands – the arts-and-crafts part – and working with my good friend.”
He’ll repair any kind and style of shoe, but his personal favorites are Allen Edmonds shoes. “They take more time, but they’re worth it. Many companies no longer have the quality they once did. They’ve lost their quality control, but Allen Edmonds shoes haven’t changed in the 20 years I’ve been doing this.”
Janssen Shoe & Leather Repair first opened its doors in 2011, during the Willy Street reconstruction project, when the sidewalks were torn out. Since then, business has picked up, and while Janssen admits she’d like to repay her parents more quickly than she has been able to, both she and Woodbury feel optimistic about the store’s future.
“Everything is going in the right direction,” Janssen says. “I’m glad I did this, I love the diversity, and I’m my own boss. I’m also hoping that by next year we’ll be making money.”
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