When cobblers describe people, they start with the feet. Cobbler Bill’s founding story is one about ill-fitting shoes told by Bill’s wife, Maria. Forty years later, the couple still run a small shoe shop on 82nd just south of Foster. According to Maria:
“His feet are very long and shallow and narrow. Back when he wanted to do a lot of running, he came back from the shoe store and said they’re not fitting me right, they’re doing something wrong. And so he just started teaching himself about shoe fit, and how important it was and how much he didn’t know. We had 800 dollars and so we bought 800 dollars worth of Birkenstocks. That’s how we started.”
Bill and Maria Smith have run a shoe shop in the Lents neighborhood for 40 years.
Maria and Bill Smith met at a Portland yoga class in the seventies. Cobbler Bill’s opened in 1976, moving to its current location on 82nd just south of Foster in 1981. Over forty years, Bill has watched the shoe business change:
“When I started, there weren’t that many cheap shoes imported from China. So the value of repair work was there. Nowadays you can buy a pair of Chinese shoes a lot cheaper than I can resole or re-heel them. So it’s harder for people to justify what I’m going to charge them to do that work. ‘But I only paid ten dollars for these!’ Well, it takes me the same amount of time whether you paid ten dollars or a thousand dollars.”
“Business has been a steady decline since the eighties. When I started, the sales rep we were buying supplies from at Oregon Leather was talking about how few shoe repairers there were compared with when he started right after World War Two.”
One big reason for the decline is online shoe stores like Zappos, but Bill thinks the expert fitting and personalized help that small shoe shops provide is irreplaceable.
“Most people don’t know how to fit themselves. Bicycles or shoes or whatever. They’re stuck in their ways. You know, you go into a store, and they ask you what size you wear, and you say, this size, and no one measures you for years and years. Or if they do they measure, they go by toe length only, and they don’t know that shoes don’t fit by the numbers they say do.”
Still, the internet put many brick-and-mortar retailers out of business. Adds Maria, “Finding good shoe repairmen isn’t easy. If you look in the yellow pages, there’s a small list, but Bill remembers when it used to be a couple pages. A lot have retired and moved on, and younger people haven’t been interested.
Each shoe repair is a custom job, done by hand with simple tools.
Over the years, Bill has taken on many apprentices. Maria explains, “Most of these guys stay about six years, which is really great, but then there’s nowhere for them to go here.” A couple have started their own shoe repair businesses in Portland, a couple more make custom shoes. “A couple of them say they wanted to buy the business, but they found out what Bill did, his hours, and decided it wasn’t for them. Owning the business and all the responsibility.
Maria recalls, “we used to know a lot of the cobblers in Portland. It was great. They’d stop by. There wasn’t a lot of competition then, and they’d come by and share, talk about what’s happening in the business, and sharing ups and downs, and about the craft. We were younger. We had a friend with a shop similar to ours called Ashley’s, it was in Oregon City. And he didn’t have repair equipment, but he and Bill were friends, and they would share, like ‘Do you have this shoe, I’m out.’ He’d take in repairs down there and bring them up to us. He decided, this year, that he’s finally going to retire at age 78. We said you’re way too young.
The Great Recession of 2008 almost put Cobbler Bill’s out of business, but also meant more repair work. According to Maria, Bill’s business fluctuates between repair work and retail sales.
“When sales are down, repairs can be up,” says Maria. “In the recession, younger people realized the benefit of repair, and they just streamed in here and they were all excited. We were like a new discovery even though shoe repair has been around forever. Or people come in here and, say, I want something that’s going to last, so they won’t have to buy shoes so often.
“Even after the recession, no one was buying shoes, and people said, why not, everyone needs shoes! I said, no, they’re making do. And repair was way up.”
The small shop is packed with raw materials and parts for repairing shoes.
(Cobbler Bill’s is located at 5839 SE 82nd Ave, Portland. (503) 774-9944. cobblerbills.com)