Built Outdoors | Backcountry Cobblers
On this episode of Built Outdoors, we are featuring Backcountry Cobblers, created and led by Jay Halford, based in Lander, Wyoming.
Jay in front of the Lander storefront.
In this episode, Jay and Kris discuss how Jay got interested in cobbling, the difference between resoling and cobbling, the challenges of scaling a business, and the importance of craftsmanship. Jay also shares his perspective on how bartending for a decade prepared him for a life as a local business owner.
A pair of Jay’s custom cowboy boots with climbing soles being used on a local climb.
We hear about Jay’s favorite jobs, helping a local kid with a rare condition find shoes that actually fit, creating cowboy climbing boots for a friend, and the ever-rising demand for rubber-soled Crocs.
The custom Crocs with grippy soles, custom job by Jay.
Kris and Jay also discuss how Jay’s relationship with the outdoors and his love of outdoor sports has shifted and evolved over the years with his relationship to the business.
Built Outdoors is created by Emily Holland and Kris Hampton for Plug Tone Outdoors.
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
Jay Halford 0:07
It's a Landis 12 L outsole stitcher, it's a little over five feet tall, weighs a little over 800 pounds. Mechanical perfection. It's two stages. It stabs a hole in thick materials. And then the needle follows the all of its punched the hole through. They range in price from $1,000 to $10,000, depending on if they've been refurbished or anything. And I found one outside of Milwaukee on eBay. I could afford it but just barely. And I just like jumped on it soon as it came up. I contacted the guy saying, "Yeah, I'm sorry, my wife's having surgery, I'll be there in a couple weeks, we can schedule something," he's like, "it needs to be picked up in like four days, otherwise, I'm gonna sell to another person." And so I just had to do this mad dash to Milwaukee. And I had to be back to pick up my wife from the airport coming back from surgery in like 45 hours. And it's not close to drive to Milwaukee and back. But so I raced there picked it up, chatted with the guy, ended up being a sweet guy just had been burned on eBay. And then as I'm driving back, stopped off to nap just because I was delirious, I woke up and there was six inches of snow on the car. And so I just had to keep scrambling. I'm just on the border of South Dakota and Wyoming and hit an icy spot on the road. And the trailer just fishtails out behind me, pulls the car toward a ditch and I'm like, 'oh fuck, I'm gonna lose this sewing machine, my wife's car, I'm not going to be there to pick her up from the airport. This is just catastrophic.' And I just did this quick maneuver. I was like, so proud of myself. I was really hopeful that other people had seen this maneuver because it was top tier. And that being said, I was like shaking with adrenaline. So I pulled off the next exit to catch my breath and relieved myself and walked in there and was followed by this trucker. He's like, "was that you out there? That was some damn fine driving," and it was just like, the perfect situation. It was amazing. It's exactly the validation I needed to just keep going back to Wyoming
Kris Hampton 2:32
Welcome to Built Outdoors, where we talk with outdoor industry entrepreneurs about the ideas that became businesses and what they've learned along the way. I'm your host, Kris Hampton.
Jay Halford 3:06
So there's a lot of forums and threads you can dive down and certain people get into these like deep semantic discussions about cobbling and resoling. Cobbling from my understanding tends to be a broader title than purely recycling meaning that you are adept at sewing, leather work. Resoling is a component of cobbling in that perspective. And so I guess I like to latch on to that framing. My name is Jay Halford. I am the Head Cobbler and owner of Backcountry Cobblers here today with mutt Mabel. I hear that doorbell in my dreams.
Kris Hampton 4:08
Ask anyone in Lander, Wyoming. And Jay is the kind of person you want on your team. That includes sports and life. He's tall, strong, measures his words carefully. And while he's reticent to make himself the center of attention, he's absolutely focused on you when you're talking like someone eager to learn more, because, well, that's exactly who he is. And he has this air of confidence about him. You get the sense that if you handed him any tool, he'd know how to use it, and that he'd probably been taught to do so by some 100 year old master craftsman.
Jay Halford 4:53
I wanted to be my own boss. I think that's an impetus for a lot of entrepreneurs. Before moving to Lander, I was actually enrolled to go to this traditional wooden boat building school. And then my wife and I wound up loving it here and I just cancelled that and just figured something would come. But I wanted to work with my hands and be a craftsman. When I first came to Lander, I was kind of blown away by the fact that there wasn't a resoler here, with year round access to climbing like there is no offseason here. You just changed crags you never stopped climbing here, you need to be able to resole, you shouldn't have to send them down to Colorado and wait two to three months to get them back. I just assumed that everyone knew something that I didn't. And that's why there wasn't a resole here.
Kris Hampton 5:51
I mean, it's one thing to see that there's a need for a business. But if you have no experience in that field, how do you even get started?
Jay Halford 6:08
Went to Harbor Freight, grabbed whatever tools I thought I might need for it. Found all like three YouTube videos I could just to give myself some sort of foundation and just kind of winged it for mine and my wife's old climbing shoes just to see how it went. But then I got hooked up with some friends of friends in Salt Lake who resole and went and studied with them for like a week and a half and just saw their process. Like specific glues they use, their distributors, and like really dipped my toes in a little deeper. And started to broaden my understanding of what it takes and what an industrial outfit looks like. Even initially, starting the business, I was very careful. For what it's worth, I went to business school. And that was like one of the main things hammered home that starting a business is exceptionally risky. And so I was very hesitant, but I like asked around the community to gauge potential success from successful business owners in town. And once I got their blessing, I was willing to invest all of my savings, which still wasn't much money, but it was everything I had. And so I started my LLC, bought whatever equipment I could afford, started getting customers here and there. And then, I don't know, four months in, I get a call from one of the guys that I spoke with before starting the business. And he tells me that Butora, this climbing shoe company who I had heard of so they were big enough, was going to be moving to town and they were bringing with them a resole component.
From my perspective, they crushed this little garage business. And I was just shattered. I spiraled because how am I supposed to compete with corporate financing and like a big dog like that their name recognition is much larger than just some schlub in Central Wyoming. I'd put everything into it. I was so excited about this, and then it's just gone instantly.
Kris Hampton 8:50
This modern day David and Goliath situation is something many retailers bookstores and restaurants have had to contend with in recent years, with many of those small businesses not making it. Luckily, Jay got a heads up from a leader in the local business and climbing communities Mike Lilygren. And Mike tells Jay that maybe it would be a good idea to just reach out to Butora.
Jay Halford 9:18
He said they seemed like friendly enough people and he gave me their contact to just say like to plead my case and tell them my situation and hopes that I could play to their good graces and they wouldn't just want to drown a local small business.
Kris Hampton 9:36
Yeah. What was that conversation like initially?
Jay Halford 9:40
Um, it wasn't that confidence inspiring because I was new at this. And they seem to have a specific idea in mind of what they wanted. And it didn't involve a cobbler who was just learning the craft, they mentioned wanting to pay someone to relocate to like an experienced cobbler to relocate to Lander to get this off the ground. But I just kind of just pled to their sympathies and like, "Hey, I'm a small business owner, I need this. I want this. I'm going to work for this." And we joined forces.
Kris Hampton 10:28
Do you think it was just the pleading to their sympathy? Or do you think there's something about you or something you said or displayed that gave them confidence?
Jay Halford 10:43
If nothing else, I am tenacious. There was no fluff added on my end, I truly did want it more than anything else at the time and I was willing to do whatever was within my power to make it happen. So hopefully that shone through, I'm hesitant to give myself compliments in any regard, but that could be it. So when I first started the business out of my garage, my LLC was the sole revival and I was planning to take a more like, punk rock take on it and just like stained glass of climbing shoes, and they wanted to call their business the Climbing Cobblers, but that I didn't like the alliteration. It sounded kind of juvenile to me. And so we compromised and settled on Backcountry Cobblers. Honestly, that's like the best thing that ever happened in the business because that just like broaden the audience so widely from just like purely climbing shoes to footwear and now like soft goods and everything else in between.
Kris Hampton 12:03
And everything else in between requires more space, more equipment, which requires more money. And remember, Jay was a small garage business who had already dumped his entire savings into what he was doing.
Jay Halford 12:26
Butora moved up here from Longmont and they bought the building this space was not allocated yet so it was a chance to really scale up. I've had mixed feelings about it from the get go but the bottom line it lit a fire under me to grow and fill this space and really make use of this and the opportunity.
The equipment I had my 200 square foot garage didn't make a dent in this space. I had a desk in the middle of the floor. I had people coming in that said it was like a villains lair or something it was just like a desk and then a bench against a wall with a single grinder on it and a toaster oven. And it was just anytime someone would come in to drop off shoes I felt kind of self conscious like what's he doing in this big space with like three pieces of equipment but it has since grown and most of it is full now.
Kris Hampton 13:45
We'll be right back. And we're going inside of the back country cobbler shop to see just how things have evolved. And we'll talk about some of the challenges that come along with that growth.
Emily Holland 14:10
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Kris Hampton 14:56
Can you describe the shop for me? So, like instead of like looking around and describing it, if you were describing it to another cobbler like you're at a cobbler convention in Denver...
Jay Halford 15:15
My dream.
Kris Hampton 15:18
and you have to describe your shop.
Jay Halford 15:22
So the workspace is divided into two parts, we have one line wherein all the climbing shoes come in and go out. And then we have the non climbing shoe side. So hiking boots, cowboy boots, etc. Because we do both at a high enough scale, now we were able to divide those processes and have them each be their own separate processes. And just that helped optimize the efficiency instead of sharing the space like when we're trying to crank through climbing shoes, but I have to kick my assistant out so that I can start gluing non climbing shoes. We're at a point now where the two are separate from one another. And then the front space is the sewing and soft goods repair area. Just miscellaneous leathers, webbing, paracord, five sewing machines up front to perform different tasks. And that's also the space that the customer sees. So I wanted to make that look as good as I could and like really frame with the business is and show off some cool jobs I've done to show like the kind of caliber of work that we can do. So yeah, that's the business in the front and chaos in the back.
Kris Hampton 16:43
It's almost the mullet of cobbling.
Jay Halford 16:47
I like to think of ourselves as that.
Kris Hampton 16:50
I love that. You know, but knowing you, I know this thing is not all about growth and business and money for you. Can you tell me about your motto?
Jay Halford 17:09
Reduce, Reuse, Resole. I guess the backbone to resoling and cobbling is more economical and I'm kind of torn on it, because we use like there is still waste. We use some gnarly glues. So I can't just stand on my high horse and call it the most eco friendly thing. But it is certainly better than using shoes, wearing them out, throwing them away. Like it teaches people how to climb better kind of because they come in, like why is there a hole in the front of my shoe? Oh, because you're dragging your feet. And so it gives them a chance to learn better footwork without having to invest in a new pair of shoes every time. Having grown up without money, like I remember saving up so long for my first pair of Mad Rock climbing shoes. So I can definitely understand not being able to fork over money every time you wear through shoes.
Kris Hampton 18:12
When talking about business, we almost always frame growth as a positive thing. But growth comes with new challenges for every business. And those challenges can sometimes run counter to what so many of us value about small business.
Jay Halford 18:34
With the prior scale, each pair of shoes I attached directly with the customer. So I have to take the human element out of it now that with this bigger scale, which I really battled with. I've honed this process for five years, I need to trust it not be so precious with it and just know that okay, if the process at its foundation is solid, I should trust that I don't need to 'Oh man, this is these shoes are for so and so. So I have to do such and such,' like no like trust the process. All the shoes are going through this process. I hope that makes sense. It's like a internal dialog thing that I deal with.
Kris Hampton 19:15
Yeah, you know, it's something that we've dealt with as well. When I started Power Company, I answered every email, I had, you know, personal conversations with every person who was coming in. But you realize at a point, once there are 1000s of people coming in, you can't you can't email with every person, you can't have this personal conversation. Sometimes it's going to be four or five days before you know somebody gets back to that person.
Jay Halford 19:45
You feel like you're letting them down if you aren't just like always right on top of it. Breaking away from that is a big lesson. I don't know how to necessarily encapsulate that whole feeling and experience. But that's it's been a big lesson to learn as things have scaled up.
Kris Hampton 20:05
I think there's an element of it where you're still a, like, community based core sort of a business that, that people understand you, you care about this thing you're doing, you know, I think you've built that. And I think that goes a long way where in the beginning, it has to be a while I'm talking to Jay, I'm having this, you know, personal interaction with this business. But now, I think people are understanding, you take a personal interest in the business. So it doesn't have to be a personal interaction anymore. That's the way I feel about it anyway, because I've struggled with the same idea.
Jay Halford 21:00
Yeah, and these are good problems to have. That means we have successful businesses. It's just like growth is a weird thing. It's a good thing, but there's a lot of unnecessary reframing that comes with that. I mean, this career path is fraught with challenges. Learning the processes, acquiring equipment, like so many people refer to cobbling as a lost art or a dying trade. And so it's prohibitively expensive to buy industry specific equipment. So it's been a lot of buying a trailer full of resoling equipment from the 1950s that's been sitting in someone's garage for a decade, cleaning all that up and restoring it just because that's what I could afford to do. I'm not just cobbling and recycling shoes, I'm also dealing with all the back of house stuff, the customer interactions on emails, answering the phones, finances, product and materials ordering, material shortages. That's been a recent huge challenge. Fortunately, I think that strong suit of mine is doing well in chaos. Oddly, I think bartending for a decade translated well to this because you're just always on your toes running back and forth. And that just like being on your toes and moving fast, and like staying on top of it was a good skill set to bring over here.
Kris Hampton 22:46
I bet. You know, I think it's really easy to want to start a business because you love being outside and then get wrapped up in the business and forget that you love being outside.
Jay Halford 22:59
Exactly, yeah, I just went into this so blindly. I'm like, 'oh, man, I'm gonna resole climbing shoes. That means all I'm going to do is climb.' I climb so much less than I used to. You get so caught up in the numbers and like the status of what you've done, whereas now I appreciate the outings that I do get so much more.
Kris Hampton 23:31
We're going to take a break from the challenges, and we'll be back with an immersive look at a day at Backcountry Cobblers as well as some of Jay's favorite success stories.
So what is the plug tone audio collective? Well, first and foremost, we're a diverse group of the best, most impactful podcasts in the outdoor industry. We're a network of creative, passionate, forward-thinking people who believe in the transformative power of storytelling and service to our communities through podcasting, climbing, hiking, skiing, mountain biking and expanding outward. We're here to offer effective advice, ask great questions and tell the stories that aren't being told. You can listen follow along and learn more about us in our shows on Instagram at plugtoneaudio or on our website at plugtoneaudio.com And please subscribe to the show. Give us a rating, leave us a review, and share this episode with a friend. It really helps.
Jay Halford 25:07
I open up the shop at 8am. So I like to already have my feet under me and going by that time so that when customers start rolling in, it doesn't just derail the productivity. So the most efficient way I found to do it come in, turn on the computer, just browse emails. Get set and put together my to do list for the day like in order of what needs to get done the first or what's going to take the longest, and just try and work my way down that list. We've got a big box of shoes from Steep World climbing gym up in Billings. Get it on the rack, get last the shoe forms and all the shoes, mark off where they're going to be ground down. Shoes that need toe caps and then I just run through, get all my new outsole rubber, new round rubber, for that batch traced cut out.
Hop on the grinder we're through the batch of shoes, get those ground. Work through all the new rubber, rough that up so it can take glue. Pass it into the glue bay. Then we got to clean the climbing shoes to just remove any residual oils and greases and dirt. Once the solvent has dried on those, tape off the edge, glue them up. The open time on the glue is like a half hour but I typically like to let them rest for about an hour and a half and then activate the soles. Then just start hammering and it's a workout every time I'm assembling a batch of shoes. I worry that I'm gonna just be like a one sided Popeye from swinging a hammer so much.
Cool, are they next door? Sweet. Thanks, dude. But yeah, work through those. And our batch size is 20 pairs per side of the rack. And after 20 pairs doing much more I don't have the longevity to get me through the week. So I kind of stop there for the day with hammering and move on to tasks like sewing and breakdown of non climbing shoes just slicing up soles.
It benefits me most to go ahead and get my work for the following day lined up as best as I can. So my closing tasks would be okay, I've got a pile of sheet material over here. Go ahead and cut out all the parts that I'm going to need for the shoes that I'm going to assemble the next day. And then put everything back where it goes I'm really bad at but actively trying to be better at putting things back where they belong once I've used them because I spend that half hour sometimes just running around trying to figure out what I did with this knife or that tool. Run through, check my dropbox out front see if anyone's left anything in there, inventory that. One last breeze through emails, turn off lights. And I'd like to say sweep, but that doesn't happen as often as it should.
Kris Hampton 29:01
Awesome. What time are you usually wrapping up?
Jay Halford 29:05
The past several years, anywhere from like 530 to 6, I am actively trying to not put as much of myself into the business as I have in the past, not in a way of negligence or like, I just want to keep the fire burning for this career path. And I don't want to burn myself out. So I'm trying to make time for myself. So I'm trying to have a hard out at five o'clock.
Kris Hampton 29:33
That's a tough balance for a lot of folks. How do you find that gray area? What's this conversation with yourself look like since you've been thinking about this?
Jay Halford 29:45
I guess the first question would be like, 'Okay, where's my mental health right now? Am I just like rundown? Am I feeling bitter?' Then I need to go on a bike ride, I need to go climbing the moon board or something. I just need to go and not be in here, I need some physical exertion. I need something that like all this frustration and anger that I can just channel that into and find that relief so that I can come in fresh and excited to come to work the next day because typically I am really excited to come to work every Monday. Like, I look forward to this job, and I don't want to ruin that.
Kris Hampton 30:25
That's really important. I mean, like with my Sauconys, I've seen you get really excited about one off projects.
Jay Halford 30:37
So I love the funky one offs that I get to do. The most common obscure request I've gotten since starting this business is 'can you put sticky rubber on crocs?' Like, 'yeah, for sure. Yeah, just send them in. It's pretty straightforward, especially relative to a lot of the stuff we do.' But no one has ever followed through on it. Until one day this guy came in, like with crocs in hand. And I, I'm not super involved on Instagram, but I tried to just keep it up to date. That blew up like it was the biggest engagement post. I have another pair of crocs, like someone ordered from Zappos and sent here to have a custom sole put on. Yeah, I love the Franken shoes. Over Thanksgiving dinner a few years ago, some friends and I were talking and inevitably work came up and we were talking about what if you put climbing rubber on cowboy boots. And so I found a pair of cowboy boots that were my friend's size and converted them into a climbing shoe and he climbed Rodeo Free in them. It's not just like a casual ramp up. It's a nails hard climb. That people it's their like, lifetime project to climb it and he'd just be bopped up in these shoes that I had made for him. So it was pretty special.
Yeah, this kid Ezra in town, I don't recall what his condition is called. But his bones grow at disproportionate rates. At this point, he was about eight years old. His feet were the length of a kid his age, but the width of an adult's. And so it's impossible for them to find shoes like those shoes don't exist. His mom came in and told me the situation and was curious if we could just come up with something so that he would have shoes that he actually liked. Like there's some Walmart water shoes that could kind of stretch and fit the bill. But they weren't he wasn't psyched about him. He loved red. So I made him this, it was the first pair of shoes I made. This pair of red checker boots that fit his feet specifically like I made shoe forms directly off of the measurements I took from his feet and built the shoes around those. And that was such a cool process and just seeing him like that he's he's a quiet kid, but seeing him light up when he put them on and like head is his cool red shoes was awesome.
I find immense gratitude. I am of service to the outdoor community. And I like the services we provide are of value. So I'm really grateful for that. And we just help people stay outside doing what they want to do, whether it's trail running, hiking, horse packing, climbing, we help them continue to do those things because everybody's got their specific specialized footwear they need to keep doing what they want to do. It's bizarre how tailor made I feel for this industry, like my hobbies and interests my entire life, it seems led to this and culminated in this business, in this craft. And not to sound like too woowoo about it, but it's just odd to me, how passionate I've become for this industry and how perfect it is for me.
Kris Hampton 34:45
A huge thank you to Jay Halford for taking time out of his busy schedule to sit down and talk with me and for putting a sticky rubber soul on my old favorite pair of red Sauconys. Now I can look fresh and have reliable traction when I'm scrambling on boulders in the mountains. In your show notes, you'll find a link to our website where you can learn more about Jay and Backcountry Cobblers, as well as where to send or drop off your well worn favorite footwear. You'll also find photos of some of Jay's favorite projects and videos of him at work in his shop, including using the hulking piece of art deco machinery that is the Landis 12 L Outsole Stitcher picked up in Milwaukee. Thanks for listening. Built Outdoors is created by Emily Holland and me Kris Hampton for Plug Tone Audio and is a proud member of the Plug Tone Audio Collective, a diverse group of the best, most impactful podcasts in the outdoor industry. You can find full transcripts and more information about Plug Tone at plugtoneaudio.com.
