The hidden secret of Louboutin lovers all over Ireland

The Japanese art of Kintsugi — repairing broken pottery with gold — is built around the idea that in the process of repairing something that’s broken, we create an item unique, beautiful and resilient. This is the philosophy that Dubliner Isaac Jackman, and his father before him, have built a 65-year-old business on. To label his workshop on Charlemont Bridge as simply a shoe repair service is an inadequate reflection of the type of restoration service Jackman provides. He is not a cobbler, but a craftsman. Like those pre-industrial shoemakers who had the patronage of wealthy women with expensive tastes in footwear, Jackman is the hidden secret of Louboutin lovers all over the country.

The father of two specialises in taking worn-out or damaged designer footwear and creating a better-performing shoe, but without compromising the aesthetic or design integrity of that shoe. Many people don’t realise, not only that their designer shoes can be sensitively repaired, but that they can actually be made to wear better in the future, Jackman explains. His decision to pivot the business into the luxury repair market was made in the early years of the fast fashion phenomenon. “The shoe repair business was hit hard with the emergence of cheap footwear. There used to be a shoe repair as well as a pub on every street corner, but that all changed. Despite this negativity, I saw an opportunity,” he says.

Jackman credits his father with teaching him almost everything he needed to know to propel the family business into the luxury market. “The knowledge you need for this kind of work actually dates back 50 years or more. My father had all the skills and he passed them on to me.” On average it costs just €40 to have a €500 shoe brought back to life by Jackman. “The value that €40 will bring to a designer shoe is unbelievable,” he reveals. While it might sound like a surprisingly low outlay for the labour and skills required to restore a Manolo or McQueen, Jackman’s business model is based on building relationships and trust with his customers.

“The most important thing to me is that each customer comes back with their next pair of shoes and their next.” Jackman’s business sense is as agile as his hands are dexterous. When the pandemic hit, his designer repair business “fell off a cliff”, so he swiftly pivoted again and plugged that hole by becoming the go-to repair service for hillwalking boots. Now, post-Covid, both aspects of the business are thriving. Jackman says he sees a mindset change as the conversation around sustainability becomes more urgent. “The feedback I’m getting from customers is that they’d prefer to repair than replace.”

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Roche has assiduous attention to detail which he credits to being an aeroplane model enthusiast as a child.

It was another pandemic pivot that led Carl Roche of Pembroke Cleaners in Dublin to open Just For Kicks, a trainer restoration service that has caught the imagination of the country’s most fanatical sneakerheads as well as the Veja-wearing women about town. Buying and selling trainers is big business, and one particular client of Roche’s has brought in trainers to be restored and then sold them on to a collector in the States. Roche is self-taught. Building on 15 years of stain-removal experience in his dry-cleaning business, he has spent the past couple of years developing techniques, creating product solutions and perfecting methods of drying and reshaping trainers.

Every pair of trainers is meticulously hand-finished by Roche. He has assiduous attention to detail which he credits to being an aeroplane model enthusiast as a child. It’s this level of perfectionism he feels singles out his business. According to Roche, many people have a strong emotional attachment to their footwear, so trust is paramount. “One customer came in with a pair of AirMax his wife had given him. He’d stopped wearing them for fear they’d get destroyed. When I returned them to him, he was so thrilled to be able to wear them again, and to know that he could bring them back to me in the future,” explains Roche. The entrepreneur wants to promote regular upkeep, and explains that if people drop in their trainers to him two or three times a year, they’ll be wearable for far longer.

Roche will also restore shoes, and given that prices start at just €30, it’s a small annual investment to make. It’s certainly significantly less than a new pair of trainers or decent quality pair of shoes, plus you’re minimising your own contribution to landfill. According to the Sustainable Fashion Forum — a global community for sustainability advocates — an estimated 22 billion pairs of shoes wind up in landfill each year.

Jackman and Roche agree that sentimentality is as strong a motivation for people to have their footwear repaired as sustainability. Andrew Farrell of Handbag Therapy says that emotional attachment is the main driver for the women who deliver their precious Hermès, Chanel and YSL bags to him via his drop-off point at Luxury Exchange on Dublin’s Exchequer Street or Cobblers Wardrobe in Sandymount (he works from a purpose-built studio). An enormous 70 per cent of his business is repairing and restoring handbags worth more than €2,000 from labels such as Chanel, Hermès, Prada, Celine and YSL. One of his regular customers owns no fewer than 30 Hermès handbags — “She keeps me busy”, he laughs. The rest is made up of mid-range items from Mulberry, Coach, Michael Kors, Marc Jacobs and similar labels.

Though all based in the capital, each of these restoration services offers a postal pickup and return service, so people from all four provinces can have their favourite handbags, shoes and trainers restored or reinvented

Although he has been breathing new life into well-worn and vintage handbags for six years, Farrell remains one of Dublin’s lesser-known national treasures. Still a one-man-operation — “I provide a unique service for very expensive items, and I’m a control freak, so right now I prefer to keep doing everything myself” — Handbag Therapy is satiating a growing appetite for designer handbag restoration. Farrell explains that the value of luxury handbags is rising at a rapid rate. “Chanel has gone up by 30 per cent, and a second-hand Hermès will sell for upwards of €12,000.” So alongside the customer who would never part with their beloved Hermès heirloom is the one who’s buying, repairing and reselling Chanel in the buoyant second-hand marketplace.

The services Farrell offers include basic repairs (zips, handles, rivets), full restoration, cleaning and protection, full-colour change and 24-carat gold-plating on hardware. While he will repair Louis Vuitton bags, he won’t clean them as he says the leather, which has not been treated with a protector, is too difficult to work on and the process wouldn’t yield results that he himself would be satisfied with (even if his customer would). Prices vary as much as individual requirements, but the average cost of a Chanel restoration is between €275 and €450. Given that a Medium Classic Flap bag can cost €7,500, and sell second-hand for €4,500, it’s a great deal.

Though all based in the capital, each of these restoration services offers a postal pickup and return service, so people from all four provinces can have their favourite handbags, shoes and trainers restored or reinvented. It’s said that all trends are cyclical. Well, it looks like the fashion for mending and minding our belongings is at last officially back in vogue.