The first thing you should know about sneakers, according to Veja project manager Daniel Schmitt, is that they’re so-named because shoes used to be soled with leather, which made a racket every time someone walked in them. The invention of the rubber sole allowed people to move more noiselessly, or “sneak.”
The second thing? They’re practically impossible to recycle. You can blame the Dassler brothers—Adi and Rudolph, founders of Adidas and Puma, respectively, after a sibling schism—for successfully hawking their “sports shoes” to athletes at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, paving the way for increasingly complex fabrications designed to improve performance, ventilation and comfort.
Today, the average sneaker contains 40 different and disparate components, from cotton to leather to metal, that are challenging to separate for sorting.
But there’s another step before recycling, one that most fashion companies are appearing to skip over in their quest for circularity, Schmitt said from the newly inaugurated premises of Veja’s Williamsburg store—its second in New York City. Recycling has almost become synonymous with the idea of chucking something out. The French footwear label, he said, didn’t think this was right. The question shouldn’t be how can you get rid of something but how can you keep it in use for the longest time possible.
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The Brooklyn location shares many physical traits with its Nolita sibling: clean white shelves, exposed red brick that is original to the site, concrete floors. The difference, and it’s an important one, Schmitt said, is the wood-paneled cobbler counter that sits in a corner of the light-drenched 2,300-square-foot space, surrounded by cubbyholes.
Anyone can bring in a pair of busted-up shoes—they don’t have to be Vejas—and get them spiffed up. Simple fixes such as a quick patch job cost $10. More complex repairs, such as a new sole, are $50. A “complete renewal,” which can include multiple mends and cleaning, might rack up a $90 charge.
Veja’s foray into shoe repair came about almost by accident.
A life cycle assessment commissioned by the label in 2019 estimated that its products’ end-of-life phase generated nearly 1,010 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, making roughly 3 percent of its total emissions footprint.
In the grand scheme of things, this wasn’t too worrying, François-Ghislain Morillion, who co-founded Veja in 2004—or 2005 if you count the release of its first sneaker—with his childhood pal Sébastien Kopp, said from the sunny boardroom of the brand’s São Paulo office in Brazil, where it sources the vast majority of the raw materials that go into its celebrity-beloved sneakers, on a recent Sourcing Journal visit. (You might have heard of Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex’s “Markle Sparkle” moment?) But it still wanted to do what it could, even though there were no viable recycling solutions to speak of.
So Veja started collecting castoff kicks in its shops for running tests. Going through the piles, the company realized that most of the shoes were in fairly good nick. Some needed resoling or a new lining on the inner heel counter. Others just wanted a good scrub.
“Then we realized that we had something that was easier and [would result in a] much better result in terms of impact, [which was] extending their life,” Morillion said.
In 2020, Veja opened a “store of the future”—part showroom, part repair workshop—at Darwin Écosystème, a military-barracks-turned-cultural-center in the famed wine-growing region of Bordeaux. Before long, more “clean, repair, collect” hubs were popping up in Galeries Lafayette in Paris and at Veja stores in Berlin and Madrid. In February, the shoemaker broke ground on its first Veja “general store”—in Paris, bien sûr—that it’s calling its “sneaker repair temple.” The establishment boasts a footwear workshop, a clothing alteration counter and an array of curated goods, including books, socks and handcrafted wooden cleaning brushes from Sweden.
A common refrain from Veja today is that the “most sustainable sneakers are the ones you are wearing.” To date, it has refurbished 22,000 pairs of shoes, 10,000 of them in the past year alone.
The Williamsburg outpost almost didn’t happen. Cobbling work is somewhat of a dying trade and Veja doubted if the American market was ready to embrace repair. Googling “stuff about cobblers” in the United States, however, Schmitt stumbled across something called the Brooklyn Shoe Space, a maker space for, well, shoes and the people who love them. Veja could tap into an existing ecosystem, he realized. It was meant to be.
“With every workshop we’ve opened, the hardest part has been hiring,” he said. “Here, it was actually the easiest part.”
It was through the organization that Veja connected with Chrystal Ritter, a Fashion Institute of Technology alum who did art direction for props and window displays. Decked out in cobalt overalls and burgundy Vejas on an afternoon in April, she’s the Williamsburg store’s cobbler-in-residence.
“That this opportunity came along was fantastic,” she said. “Because it kind of blends everything: to be in a workshop, I get to work with great people and work on a product that I love. I love footwear. I need to build it, not design it. I really like to problem solve and I get to sculpt all day.”
It may take years before Veja cracks the recycling problem, Schmitt said, though R&D remains ongoing. Repair, however, is more than a stopgap. Mending something, he said, is almost like performing magic because “you’re strengthening the shoe compared to its original state,” meaning that the revived shoe is stronger and more durable than it was when brand new. And the job of Veja’s cobblers is to make sure that the fixes are as “discreet” as possible.
Schmitt said that the idea is the increase the sneaker’s so-called “emotional durability,” which refers to the attraction people feel to new products.
“If you get a new iPhone, you want to use it all the time, you kind of want to show it to your friends and you want to use it,” he said. “It’s the same thing with footwear; you want to show to the world that you have a brand new Condor 3.”
But emotional durability declines with time and use, he said, which results in a product being used less and less, to the point where you might consider it fodder for the landfill. Veja’s goal, Schmitt said, is to get shoes that have fallen out of favor as “close as possible to their original state so that the emotional durability can be increased and back again to its starting point.”
Veja doesn’t make money with its repair work, but it’s something that the brand thinks is important for the planet. It’s why it’s purposefully capped the cost of refurbishments at $90, which is around half the sticker price of its basic model. The brand is also incentivizing people to bring in more sneakers by laddering down its fees for second and third pairs.
Cost might be second only to awareness when it comes to why people don’t repair their shoes more, Schmitt said.
“You fall in love with shoes but you live in them and they wear done,” Ritter said. “But when you have repair that’s going to cost $90, we can talk about how [with the] next pair that you love, you don’t have to wear them down to bring them up. Once you realize that the service is there, you’re like, ‘I don’t have to wear them till they die.’ Just wait until they pass out a little.”