A new, AI-driven retail technology service aims to elevate the experience of footwear repair.
Launched three months ago by tech industry veterans Leslie Bateman and Emily Watts, Coblrshop aims to prolong the life of shoes and handbags by removing the hurdles that keep shoppers from ditching their damaged goods in favor of new items.
While the U.S. once boasted 100,000 cobblers in 1920, there are now fewer than 4,000 making their living servicing shoes and leather goods today. And despite growing understanding about the importance of circularity, the founders told Sourcing Journal that the inconvenience of finding a professional to refresh worn-in, scuffed shoes often keeps consumers from seeking out solutions.
Bateman, a former Uber sales executive, said that she and Watts, who served as chief operating officer for software company Sling, both noted that service-driven businesses like cobbler shops seemed to be closing with greater frequency in recent years. Whether due to the stay-at-home behaviors sparked during the pandemic or the rise of fast, disposable fashion, many cobblers have struggled to keep operations afloat. “Parallel to that, we are also both people that have subscriptions or buy a lot of clothing online—all these other facets of our lives are very easy, tech-enabled and on-demand,” she said.
Coblrshop aims to blend the ease of e-commerce with an essential service: repairs. Headquartered in Boston, the operation allows users to send in their shoes or handbags to a repair facility in the city, where a master cobbler and associates buff, stitch and polish items back to better condition before sending them back to their owners. But Coblrshop aims to integrate AI as a diagnostic tool, giving cobblers advance intelligence about the repairs they’ll be undertaking and giving consumers an immediate quote on cost.
In speaking with numerous artisans throughout the startup’s development, Bateman said that nearly all of them said that they need to physically assess items for damage before conveying expectations for repair costs to a client. “Repair is tactile, you have to touch it, you have to feel it to know if it’s a $20 job for a new pair of heel caps or a $400 job for a complete redo of a very expensive men’s dress shoe,” she recalls them telling her. “But now there’s AI.”
Coblrshop is in the process of building out a “library of data points,” which will include consumer photos of damaged footwear, Watts added. “Eventually once we have enough volume there, the model can really start to train itself.” The end goal is for customers to upload their smartphone photos to Coblrshop and quickly receive response detailing their repair needs and timeline. “Right now, we’re taking before and after photos of all of our repairs, and categorizing them,” Watts added. “This is the basic step that needs to happen before we can get to the sexy side of things with AI.”
Watts and Bateman have hired a longtime Boston professional to head up operations at their repairs hub, and have been speaking with other local artisans with diverse skill sets to join their team on a part-time basis as the business scales. “There are a lot of cobblers who are closing their stores, so you have people who want to continue on, but they don’t want the headache of running a store,” Watts said. Eventually, the founders envision having a full-time, in-house team of cobblers to service online or app-generated service orders.
Unlike other repair and refurbishment services that have crowdsourced labor across regions, creating an expansive network, the founders said it was important to develop a centralized service hub to maintain quality control and accountability. The founders learned from the fall of companies like the UK’s The Restory, which was liquidated in March, as well as Miami-based The Cobblers, which connects consumers to artisans across the country through a digital platform. The company has been plagued by Better Business Bureau complaints alleging that luxury goods were lost, damaged or delayed. “The pitfall of that is operational, not being able to keep track of product and communicate openly with your with your customers,” Watts said. “It comes down to having the right operating model and we believe that this centralized model is the solution.”
When asked whether repairs are really likely to see a renaissance, Watts said she believes shoppers want to see used or pre-owned goods remain in rotation longer. “Resale has really seen this precipitous growth over the last several years, but there hasn’t been precipitous growth in industries that support repair,” she said.
“In our eyes, that’s a huge opportunity,” she added. As goods are traded in the secondary market, refurbishment and repair will become an essential part of maintaining their value, she said, “But in order to effectively address that the demand from that growth, we have to bring cobblering from a cottage industry into a more modern state.”
This story was reported by Sourcing Journal and originally appeared on SourcingJournal.com.
