When a repair is worth more than a replacement

A zip fails on a winter coat in the third year. The repair quote is €35. A new coat is €140. Almost everyone does this calculation, and almost everyone does it wrong, because they compare the repair to the purchase price rather than to what the repair actually buys.

There is a better test, and it takes about thirty seconds.

The comparison that matters

A repair does not compete with the price of a new garment. It competes with the cost per wear of a new garment over the same period.

Take the coat. The €35 zip replacement, on a coat you would otherwise wear for another four winters at roughly 70 wears a winter, buys 280 wears. That is €0.13 per wear.

The €140 replacement coat, worn for those same four winters, is €0.50 per wear — and that assumes the new one lasts as long as the old one has already proven it can, which is an assumption and not a fact.

The repair is roughly four times cheaper per wear. And it is the option with less uncertainty attached, because you already know how this coat fits and how it holds up.

The formula, stated plainly

Repair is worth it when the cost of the repair, divided by the wears it buys back, is less than the price of a replacement divided by the wears that would buy.

Written out that sounds fussy. In practice it collapses into one question: how much life is left in the rest of the garment?

That is really the whole decision. A broken zip on structurally sound fabric is a cheap problem. The same zip on a coat whose shell is already thin at the cuffs and shoulders is money spent on a garment that will fail somewhere else in six months.

The fabric integrity test

Before paying for any repair, check the fabric away from the damage. Pinch it between thumb and forefinger and rub. On a garment with life left, the cloth feels dense and springy. On one that is finished, it feels papery, and you can sometimes see light through it when you hold it up.

Then look at the stress points: underarms, crotch seam, elbows, the seat, where a bag strap rides. If two or more of those are visibly thin, the garment is telling you the damage you noticed is the first of several rather than a one-off.

Repair the failure. Do not repair the fabric’s old age. Components fail early and independently — that is what makes them worth fixing. Fabric fails everywhere at once and that is what makes it terminal.

Which repairs pay, and which rarely do

Almost always worth it. Zips, on anything with sound fabric — this is the single most common repair and the one people most often decline. Replacing a zip is fiddly work and therefore not cheap, but it restores a garment completely. Hems, buttons, popped seams and small tears are cheap and quick. Resoling welted shoes is the outstanding example: a good welted shoe is built to be resoled several times and the upper will outlast the sole by years.

Usually worth it. Reweaving a moth hole or a snag in wool knitwear. Relining a coat where the shell is good but the lining has shredded — linings wear out much faster than outer fabric by design. Replacing worn cuffs on a shirt whose body is fine.

Rarely worth it. Cemented shoes, where the sole is glued rather than stitched — they can sometimes be re-glued but the construction was not designed to come apart and go back together. Heavily pilled acrylic knitwear, where the surface will simply return. Anything where elastane has gone, because the failure is chemical and everywhere. And any garment that never fitted properly, because a repair does not fix the reason it sat unworn.

The part people underweight

The strongest argument for repair is not the money. It is that you already know the garment works.

A replacement is a bet: on the fit, on the fabric, on whether it will still feel right in a year. A repaired coat has already proved all of that over three winters. Cost per wear assumes you will actually wear the thing, and the item hanging in your wardrobe with a broken zip has better evidence behind that assumption than anything you have not bought yet.

This is also why the calculation shifts as a garment gets older in a good way. A five-year-old coat you still reach for has demonstrated something a new one cannot. The repair is buying more of a known quantity.

A rough guide to costs

Prices vary by city and by how the garment is made, but as an order of magnitude in the Netherlands: a trouser hem runs around €10–15, a button or a small seam repair under €10, a jacket zip replacement roughly €25–40, reweaving a knitwear hole around €15–30, and resoling welted shoes somewhere between €45 and €80.

Set those against the per-wear maths above and the pattern is consistent: on a garment with sound fabric, repair wins comfortably almost every time. The reason people replace instead is rarely that they ran the numbers and the numbers said replace. It is that nobody ran them.