Are your shoes wearing so thin that you can feel pavement with every step? A very non-traditional Rhode Island Internet business hopes to provide the solution to your problems. Shoefix.com, started by Newport native Stephen Benevides with the help of Washington, D.C. shoe repair expert Terry Fortuna, is now available to busy business people who don’t have time to take their shoes to a shop.
Customers who log on to Shoefix.com can download a prepaid mailing label, package the shoes in a Priority Mail package, and send them off to have the soles or heels replaced, or other repairs that are needed. The process takes from seven to 10 days. While the company’s administrative offices are in Newport, the shoes are sent to the firm’s production center in Rockville, Md. to be repaired.
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The replacement of a full sole and heel of a men’s dress shoe by Shoefix.com typically costs about $60, including shipping and handling, said Benevides, president and co-founder of the company. That’s a bit priceier than your neighborhood shoe repair store where the cost is usually in the $35 range, which is what Abe’s Custom Shoe Service on North Main Street in Providence charges to the $38.95 that Lincoln Shoe Repair on Reservoir Avenue in Cranston gets. With Shoefix.com customers pay via credit card over the Web site’s secure server.
”We’re certainly not your typical Internet company; we absolutely have bricks and mortar,” he said. “We don’t derive our income from advertising.”
Benevides, who said he has financed the business with his own money so far, is now looking for investment capital, which is part of the reason he is planning an extensive advertising campaign in newspapers such as Investors Business Daily and USA Today. He hopes a venture capitalist or angel investor will step forward.
Benevides said he started the business because he was looking for an industry that was not already being dominated by a large company. Shoe repair was his choice. The number of repair shops has dropped by anywhere from 5,000 to 7,000 shops nationwide in the last 10 years, Benevides estimates. His partner, Fortuna, estimates that about 10,000 shoe repair shops operate nationwide today.
Shoe repair shops in this country were mostly run by Italian and Greek immigrants with great work ethics, Benevides said. So great, in fact, that their sons and daughters have gone on to become doctors and lawyers instead of continuing the tradition, he said.
Another factor in his favor, Benevides said, is that people in the 1990s have been buying more expensive shoes than they did in the 1980s, principally because of the booming economy. The 1980s saw a movement toward cheaper shoes, he said, but that has turned around.
“People are buying more expensive shoes,” he said, “and there seems to be in the industry more of a sense of quality.”
His partner has a family history in the shoe repair business. Terry Fortuna’s father in law, who was a first-generation Italian, started a shoe repair business in Washington, D.C. in 1943. Fortuna said she decided to step in and take over the business when her father in law decided to retire – his son, Fortuna’s husband, is a doctor, while his daughter owns an advertising firm.
Fortuna, who has a master’s degree in business and had run other small businesses before taking over the shoe repair business, said she revived the repair business by finding a niche – instant shoe repair shops in upscale malls. By 1990, however, the company had moved out of shopping malls and located its stores in office buildings to catch busy business people at lunch or on their way into the office.
Now, the company is taking its Washington, D.C. and suburban Maryland business national. It expects to handle upwards of 30,000 shoe repairs a day when the Internet end of the business gets rolling. The production center will feature teams of workers who will perform tasks such as running the sewing machines, gluing, and taking off the soles, Benevides said. “Eventually it will resemble an assembly line,” he said.
Fortuna – who has a national reputation in the shoe repair business – said she regularly trains students from local schools in Washington, and that the business appeals to people who are dexterous and don’t mind getting their hands dirty. The first thing students learn is how to shine a shoe, since a shoe’s shine is what customers notice first.
Many people who have their shoes repaired have an emotional attachment to them, Fortuna said, which is why some will ask her to fix shoes that should be replaced. But she also noted that many people who invest in expensive shoes want to maintain them with the same care they would apply to a nice car.
”People maintain their Mercedes, and the same goes for a $300 to $400 pair of shoes,” she said.
