The Goodyear welted shoes from our own Skolyx brand, Yanko and TLB Mallorca that we sell are all made to last for many, many years, and they are made to easily be repaired when needed. The beauty of welted footwear is that they can easily be resoled, but exchanging the sole is just one of many repairs that you can do. In this guide, we go through some of the most common types of wear and tear on the shoes and tell about all the cases where it works well to just repair them, and about the few cases when it’s not possible to fix.
Resole of shoes
The procedure that is most clearly associated with Goodyear welted shoes, as the nice thing about the construction is that you can easily resole them by just removing the outsole, without touching the inside of the shoe. When the sole is worn and needs to be replaced on a pair of leather soled, welted shoes, it’s common to make a so-called half-resole. This means that you remove the sole stitch, which together with glue holds the outsole to the welt, back to the waist and only changes the part of the sole that is in the ground. The waist that is not worn remains. This is done together with a re-heeling where the wear part on the heel is replaced. If a full-resole is made, the heel is removed (even if the base itself is often retained) and the entire sole is replaced. This is always done, for example, with rubber-soled shoes, as you cannot solve the joint between the waist and the new sole part in a good way.
Here it's clearly time for a resole.
There is no danger if the sole seam on the underside wears down, which often happens quite quickly in the toe, both on leather soled shoes with an open channel and with closed channel soles, or on rubber soles where the seam is only slightly sunken into the rubber. Because as I said, the sole is also glued and the sole seam is sewn with so-called lock stitch that locks each stitch separately, so there is no risk that it will continue to derail. It’s important that the sole does not wear down so far that you start to wear on the welt, as you prefer to avoid changing this as well. If only the toe is worn, you can apply a new piece here in leather or rubber, and go for a while longer. When the toe area and also the middle part of the sole starts to wear down, you can feel that it starts to get thin in the middle, and in the worst case there will be holes, then it’s really time for re-soling.
The price for a half-resole at cobblers vary greatly, but it’s usually between €80-130, a full-resole about €150-220. For shoes from TLB Mallorca, we also offer factory resole, it costs €150, then both sole and heel are replaced. Contact us at ktj@skolyx.se for more info about this, here you can read and see more about factory re-soling.
Re-heeling of shoes
Usually the first procedure that needs to be done on shoes, as we wear a lot on the heel when we walk. On leather-soled shoes, it’s usually a piece of rubber slightly angled on the back quarter of the heel, the rest is in leather. Depending on how you use the shoes and how you walk, it varies how quickly you need to change the heel. It can be anything from six months to a couple of years.
Re-heeling should be done before the rubber piece is completely worn down, so you are inside and wearing on the heel base itself. The leather lifts that build up the heel are not made to walk on and wear faster, and if these also need to be replaced, it will be more expensive. A re-heeling usually costs between €30-50 at the cobbler.
For women's high heels where the top rubber piece has come off, you can glue it into place again using a good cement, like Atomlim.
Shoes where you can see that the whole rubber piece is worn down, which isn't good, since then you also need to replace part of the heel base.
Heel lining repair on shoes
A common wear that occurs on shoes is that you wear down the lining leather in the heel area, so that there are holes in the inner heel stiffener. It’s quite logical, when you walk there will be great strain on the shoe here, as in every step you take you create friction against the back lining.
However, this is very easy to repair, the cobbler inserts a new layer of lining leather at the back. It is glued there and thinned out towards the edges that lie in front so that you don’t feel it, and the upper edge is sewn into existing upper, in the same row of stitches that are already here, which means that you can’t see from the outside that the shoe is repaired. New heel lining usually costs around €30-50. If you need a quick temporary solution, you can install a heel grip like this to cover the hole, and use this until you have the opportunity to hand in the shoes for repair.
Replace elastic or buckles on shoes
If shoelaces break, it is undeniably a simple procedure to replace them, but other ways of holding the foot in the shoe can also be fixed if they break. An example is the elastic on chelsea boots, which can become stretched or come loose from its seam. A cobbler can easily replace these.
Elastics on chelseas which would do good of an exchange.
On monk shoes or jodhpurs, for example, sometimes the buckles break. This can also be repaired in most cases, although it may sometimes be necessary to sew in a little unorthodox way throughout the whole upper leather.
Cracks on the insole of shoes
The insole is the backbone of the welted shoe, the relatively thick leather sole around which a welted shoe is built. It’s in this that the upper and the welt are attached with the welt stich itself. Of course, the inside of the shoe also wears, foot sweat and abrasion mean stress, and this can mean that the insole eventually starts to crackle and crack.
This is something that is much harder to fix. There are sometimes possibilities to send the shoes back to the factory and make a total make-over of the shoe (where then more or less only the upper remains of the original shoe), but it often costs a lot and when it has gone this far, the shoes are usually so worn that it is not worth it.
A cracked insole removed from an old shoe.
Cracks in the upper leather of shoes
This is the wear and tear that is the most common reason why a pair of quality shoes is discarded. That there are one or more cracks in the upper of the shoe. It’s usually in the shoe's creases at the vamp, the widest part of the shoe where it bends. If it’s well-cared for shoes made of fine full-grain leather, it can take many, many years before this occurs, but basically all shoes will eventually get cracks in the upper leather eventually. There are possibilities to repair it, but it needs to be done with patches of new leather and rarely looks particularly nice.
To browse through our wide range of high quality Goodyear welted shoes from our own Skolyx brand, Yanko and TLB Mallorca, click here.