When Emily Watts co-founded the Philadelphia-based shoe repair service Coblrshop in 2023, vintage shopping was already on the rise nationwide. But within the last year, it’s exploded. Between March 2025 and March 2026, Fortune reports, secondhand fashion sales increased 22 percent, fueled by a fivefold increase in demand for pre-owned luxury items. Shoppers were (and are) moving away from inexpensive fast fashion, and holding onto investment pieces that lived previous lives.
The trend has been alive and well in Philly, where you can get your hands on vintage Hermès or orange-tab Levi’s, not just in curated brick-and-mortar boutiques, or through luxury resalers, like the 1916 company, but also in pop-ups, like Crane Arts’ popular monthly vintage design market. Gen Z and Millennials seem especially fond of creating new looks out of older clothing and accessories.
This change in consumer behavior isn’t just fashion for fashion’s sake. It’s also good for the environment. Apparel manufacturing generates more carbon emissions than both the airline and shipping industries, combined. Reusing instead of buying new both reduces demand for the polluting garment industry and keeps discardable clothing from entering landfills or recycling streams.
But secondhand investment fashion also poses a problem. What to do when your 1980s leather clutch loses its shine? Whom can you entrust when those splurge-y Rick Owens platform booties you splurged on at Moore Vintage Archive require a new zipper? What to do when your bunny-print Eagle’s Eye cotton cardi gets a pull?
Fairmount resident Watts saw this problem coming. She’d gone through it herself, with the Michael Kors fox hunting boots she’d won on eBay back in 2005, her favorite pair of worn-through Stubbs and Wootton loafers, along with countless items she and her sister had thrifted as teenagers. And she knew she wasn’t alone.
Working in tech for Xfinity Mobile at Comcast and the employee scheduling app Sling, she watched her peers endlessly browsing resale sites like Depop, Poshmark, The Real Real, and Mercari. But no one seemed to be willing to brave their neighborhood cobbler, with its odd hours, unusual smells, and unconventional inventory system. Watts belongs to the generation of contactless delivery, of GoPuff and DoorDash. People wanted convenience; a lot of people developed a Covid-worsened aversion to communicating with strangers, but also, they wanted to know they could trust the person who was going to reattach the gold chain on their beloved Chanel 11.12.
“The demand for repair has never been higher,” Watts says. “People are holding on to their things for longer; they want to repair versus replace.”
So, in 2023, Watts and Leslie Bateman founded their company Coblrshop. The fully online mail-in platform works the way the personal shopping behemoth StitchFix sounds like it should work: You place an order for a repair; they send you a box; you put your Jimmy Choo’s in and ship that box; wait, and your kicks magically return to you, good as new.
They started out connecting customers to reliable repairs for their leather goods (hence the intentionally misspelled “cobbler” in the name), and this year they’re launching a pilot to help find clothing repairers too.
This April, Coblrshop raised $400,000 in venture capital funding, is in the process of raising a $1.5 million pre-seed round to support its growth, and finally hopes to turn a profit for the first time this year.
Although they’re based in Philly, they’ve mapped and partnered with repair vendors around the country, and currently partner with 11 retailers to offer repairs to their customers.
An organic start
Watts’ idea for Coblrshop wasn’t just about meeting demand. It was about doing good in her work.
Watts got her professional start working at USAID, the government-run foreign aid and civilian assistance federal department the Trump administration shut down abruptly last year after Elon Musk’s DOGE gang razed the agency. She did that work because she wanted to help people. Later, she allowed her paycheck to dictate her trajectory, pivoting into tech with roles at Xfinity Mobile at Comcast and the employee scheduling app Sling. “I’d taken this path away from the mission-based work that I started with in my career,” she says. “I really wanted to get back to that.”
She knew of the environmental harm being done by the fashion industry — and simultaneously saw independent tradespeople struggling to find customers in an instant gratification economy. Plus, she’d become a parent in 2020 and wanted to make the world a better place for her son. Combine that with her lifelong love of and the surging demand for online secondhand shopping, and …
“[Resale platforms] are making it really, really frictionless for consumers, but when you look at repair, it hasn’t had that infrastructure moment and it’s full of friction,” she says. Her market research consisted of cold-calling dozens of repair shops. What she found shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s been to a similar operation lately: Many cobblers were using outdated systems to manage their businesses. Only a few had websites.
So, in 2020, as a new mom with loads of spare time (kidding), she poured her tech expertise into building a platform that connected repair vendors with consumers. She also joined an industry association, where she made contacts who were willing to test a beta version of her platform. They liked it. So did customers.
What’s not to like?
Using Coblrshop is just about as easy as ordering delivery. No need to Google, or ask your neighbor about the local shoe repair guy. No reading reviews. No hauling your busted Gucci shoes or ripped Chanel dress on the subway and then back home, wasting precious weekend hours. Just hop online, answer some questions, and wait for the pre-paid shipping labeled box to arrive.
Watts vets each repair partner, checking reviews, monitoring the number of refunds a shop has had. She even sends out test repairs for quality control. Her platform has a built-in repair tracker that she likens to the Domino’s Pizza tracker, so you can watch as your cherished Repetto ballet flats undergo a life-saving procedure. Turnaround times vary by repairs needed and the vendor doing the fix.
Coblrshop repairs start at $10 and can go into the hundreds or thousands, depending on the complexity of the job, which most often includes sole replacement and heel repair. They have a menu of standard repairs (including one especially for spiffing up your Louboutins), like adding a protective sole or reattaching a button. Customers can also request custom quotes, which most tend to do. The business makes money by charging a monthly fee to repair shops that list on the service and taking a small portion of the total cost of the repair. (Watts didn’t share exactly how much). Here in Philly, Benjamin’s on the Row at 7th and Sansom and Bryn Mawr Shoe Service are in Coblr’s member network. But they determine where to send your goods based on the individual repair.
Working with retailers and designers
There’s a major market for clothing repairs. Market research values the global clothing and footwear repair market between $3.6 and $5.8 billion, with steady growth projections over the next 10 years. “The global sustainability movement has elevated repair services from a niche, cost-driven activity to a mainstream lifestyle choice,” according to a recent Data Intelo report.
Watts sees synergy for Coblrshop not just for the repairers, but for quality-minded retailers and designers who want their customers to enjoy their products for a long time, reinforcing the perhaps old-fashioned expectation that goods are worth maintaining — while building goodwill for these typically smaller brands.
For retailers, she says, working with her company is “a really great way to authentically re-engage with the customer, instead of just throwing marketing emails at them and hoping they’ll come back. … It makes it really easy for the customer service team to resolve an issue without being like repair experts.”
“The demand for repair has never been higher,” Watts says. “People are holding on to their things for longer; they want to repair versus replace.”
So far, Coblrshop has gone to their wheelhouse for retail partnerships, working with 11 shoe and leather goods labels. One is Philly-based Italian leather sneaker business Mocalmo. Coblrshop designed a custom landing page for Mocalmo’s website that customers go to request common repairs like shoe stretching or resoleing, or to purchase a leather care kit.
Diana Kattan, who owns the company with her husband, says the construction of their handmade shoes typically lasts longer than 10 years, but soles can wear out faster. She also says their clientele frequently have specific questions about leather care and maintenance.
Just as with the direct-to-consumer model, a Mocalmo-Coblrshop customer receives a box in the mail, ships their sneaks, and gets them back good-as-new. Kattan views the partnership as a value add. “It’s nice to be able to offer the services to our customers and it helps give credibility as well to our product, especially as a newer brand,” she says.
Adding clothing to the mix
Coblrshop is in the process of onboarding a handful of apparel brands to pilot repair partnerships. Watts envisions the business becoming a go-to solution for consumers who need to get their sweaters darned in addition to their shoes resoled. On the brand end, she sees potential to grow the business through partnerships now that states like California have passed laws requiring retailers to have reuse and repair strategies.
Watts also plans to introduce new features to the platform, including AI that can analyze damages and make repair recommendations. Right now, most items go through a custom quote process with the repair vendor, which is time consuming. AI would “basically cut a five- to 10-step repair process into like two,” Watts says.
The work itself and its environmental impact are rewarding, she says, but expanding into retail partnerships while exposing craftspeople to new clients — is “triple the excitement.”
“We’re helping brands recoup lost revenue and are helping build lifetime value for their customers,” Watts says. “It’s so exciting to hear from a repair shop, because of you, I’m expanding my business. That’s what gets me the most excited.”
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