Longtime Lakeland cobbler gets next generation interested in shoe repair with viral social media videos

LAKELAND, Fla. - A Lakeland man who is carrying on his family’s 100-year-old cobbler tradition is taking one of the oldest professions in the world into the 21st century through social media.

Jim McFarland comes from a long line of cobblers.

"My great uncle trained my grandfather," McFarland explained. "He had a shop in Anderson, Indiana around 1900. My grandfather, by the time he was about 20, had his own shop in Hamilton, Ohio around 1918. In 1981, my dad opened this shop, and I took over in '86. I remember being in a playpen in the back of my dad’s shop. I can remember it as a kid. In fact, we have a piece of leather that I teethed on."

Yet, it was not his first choice to be the owner and operator of McFarland Shoe Repair in Lakeland. He made that decision when his father passed away.

McFarland took over his father's shoe repair business in 1986. 

"That's why I didn't want to get in it. I saw what my grandfather and my dad had at my age and I said, I don't want to be those guys. I'm going to make the best of it. I had just gotten married and I said if I have to be a shoe cobbler like my grandfather and my dad, I'm going to be the best shoe cobbler I can be," McFarland shared.

He spent decades in Lakeland working in one of the oldest professions and, during the pandemic, he decided to try something new.

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"You know I spent, I kid you not, more than 20 years promoting other people's products and brands and names. I finally got the point during COVID. I said, you know, I would love to promote ourselves for a change," McFarland said.

McFarland took to social media during the pandemic. 

With the help of his daughter, McFarland took to social media as ‘America's Cobbler’ and quickly went viral. 

His videos about what we wear on our feet had legs.

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"TikTok we're at 1.2 million (followers) and Instagram were at 600,000. Youtube, we hit the first 100k subscribers in the first 90 days. I don't know, it's been a crazy couple of years. I laugh at it sometimes because I just would have never imagined that if you told me that you were going to put out videos and millions of people would be watching. I would have been laughing." Mcfarland told Fox 13 News. "[They] check out the shop because they have been following us and it's very humbling! I mean for me to think that someone would come in and want to meet a shoe cobbler. It baffles me. I soak it all in because I'm like, wow, I'm a shoe cobbler! This person cares this much about a shoe cobbler, I'm going to give them all the time they want."

McFarland has more than one million followers on TikTok. 

The shoe is on the other foot. They care about a shoe cobbler because of the care that he puts into each and every pair.

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"Hey, buy another pair of shoes…I never say that because I never know where those shoes have been, where they've walked, who wore them. You’re not just rebuilding a shoe, you're rebuilding a lot of memories," he stated. "You should see all the letters I get. I save them all. I have them all over there on my desk. They're touching. You can feel the hurt when you're reading them, you can feel how hurt they are. How damaged the heart is. So many of these people will send me shoes of a lost loved one. So, when you get something like that in your hands, you can't put a price on that, and it means so much to that person. I think the pay for me is to clean those things up, make them special again and hopefully put a band-aid on that guy’s heart."

McFarland comes from a long line of cobblers. 

McFarland, with decades of experience, has a lot of knowledge to pass along, but this one pearl of wisdom goes farther than Walter Steiger's walking shoes and wingtips.

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"Don't care what you do in this world, give great service. You don't have to be great at something or everything but be good, be great at customer service. If you can put out a good product with great customer service, you're going to do phenomenal. I don't care what you're doing," McFarland said.

He went on to say that about a third, if not half, of the comments on his videos are from people wanting to learn the craft.

McFarland hopes to get the next generation interested in shoe repair. 

He says there is a real opportunity for people to become a cobbler, befriend an older cobbler, and see if they're looking for an apprentice.

It gives that cobbler a way out into retirement and a way in for you.

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A typical apprenticeship takes about 3-5 years.

McFarland can be found on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube under the name 'America's Cobbler'.