An Afternoon Repairing Shoes with Cobbler Mike Heimall
About a year ago, on an unseasonably warm November day, I drove down to Providence Shoe Repair and spent the afternoon with it’s proprietor, former indie wrestler, musician, and cobbler, Mike Heimall. Unpacking my equipment, I pulled a zipper right off of one of my cases. Mike immediately responds, “I can fix that for you.”
Mike isn’t the kind of person who wants you to come in and buy a product or merely drop off your shoes to get fixed. While purely transactional relationships are guaranteed in a service business, Mike wants for a world where everyone who enters his shop leaves more knowledgeable than when they arrived — regardless of the fate of your shoes.
Hums, whirs, and drones fill the air as Mike gets to work. “Multitasking,” is the de facto standard. As I follow Mike from machine to bench to machine, he appears as a focused, coordinated performer. He weaves between thousand pound machines, sanding belts, and piles of rubber and leather. That multitasking is key to the cobbler’s success.
“Every job is different,” Mike says, “you have to time it right.” There’s always something that can be worked on — perhaps a quick stitch or glue up that can fit in between the sole replacements and complete restorations. Even two of the same tasks can take wildly different amounts of time based on the variables associated with hundreds of individuals wearing dozens of types of shoes.
A year later, Mike is busier than ever, and he’d like to see more people taking up the trade and joining the industry. Cobbling is a meditative and focused trade that requires the touch of human hands. “This is a job that can’t be automated.”
As is typical for “And Their Craft” shoot, I was only able to spend an afternoon with Mike. I had intentions on coming back to shoot additional b-roll footage and conduct an interview, but those plans never materialized. At some point along the way I also lost a whole bunch of b-roll. In this case I had to really work with what I had. The decision to turn the video into more of a follow-along than a profile works in my opinion. There’s enough on-the-fly type dialog to get a sense of Mike’s ethos and personality.
Mike is a wonderfully busy person, who I am thankful took the time to record with me.
Mike Heimall is the proprietor of Providence Shoe Repair in downtown Providence Rhode Island. He opened his shop in March 2022.
[UPDATE January 2024] Providence Shoe Repair closed on December 31, 2023. We wish Mike the best in his future endeavors.
