100 years ago, more than 120,000 cobbler shops served basically every community in the United States. Today that number is under 3,000, a devastating decline driven by the rise of disposable athletic footwear, an awareness erasure of awareness of what a cobbler even does, and a breaking of the traditional family lineage skill development chain—and exacerbated by just how difficult it is for an aspiring cobbler to find someone to teach them the trade.
That’s where Matt Paisley comes in.
Matt is a high school shop teacher and self-taught cobbler and sandal-maker in Colorado. Two years ago, he got the bright idea to introduce a shoe repair program in the school.
It wouldn’t be simple. Getting a school board rather confused by the idea on board was step one. Next up was obtaining funding and other support to acquire the tools, materials and machinery necessary to teach and learn. And finally: getting students interested in an idea they were totally unfamiliar with. In a hugely inspirational turn, that ended up being the easiest part.
This past fall, Matt’s shoe repair program launched at Thunder Ridge high school, with nearly two dozen students taking the plunge and immediately being drawn into the program, skill development, and practical hands-on cobbling work. But it’s spread beyond there—students who don’t even take the class begging to learn shoe repair on their lunch breaks, teachers whose lunch lounge has been taken over by sewing machines realizing wait, these kids can fix my loafers for me? Ok this is actually pretty cool.
I had Matt lay out a blueprint for how he navigated making the shoe repair program happen, and the curriculum he’s been teaching in the first, legitimately monumental go-round.
The fact that Matt’s program exists is a wonderful and inspiring story on its own—as is all the remarkable help that’s been offered by the repair and quality footwear community. But potential for Matt’s idea and approach to spread to other schools is what makes this, in my humble estimation, one of the most important episodes we’ve ever published.
Here’s Matt Paisley, the guy who lit the spark that just might fix a broken shoe repair pipeline, on the Shoecast.
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