One of the founders of a sneaker dry cleaner ‚Sneaker Mate’, Dmytro Dibrivnyi, speaks about why he wants to come back home even after the premises of his business in Kharkiv were hit by a missile, how he manages to find new meanings while helping others.
Dmytro, tell us more about yourself and your project. How did you come up with the idea of launching this sneaker dry cleaner?
Actually, I am a native of Lviv. I graduated from the law department of the Lviv university. However, I found it more interesting dealing with the culture in which the youth took interest. I want to bring such things as street culture, clothing and art to a new level in Ukraine so that people could transmit our ideas to the world while making handsome profits off it.
For some time I lived and worked in some African countries. I then settled down in Poland. While being abroad I came to realize that I enjoy living and working only in Ukraine. It’s my native country, I know how things work here and I want to create stuff here. A friend of mine texted me about his acquaintance, Anton Nazarko, who is the owner of the portal www.rap.ua, having intention of launching a project that would focus on cleaning footwear. This is a sphere I have always taken keen interest in, and all of my friends knew that.
I used to collect sneakers. Usually they were in poor condition. However, it was the only chance to find exclusive models. Therefore, I would always come up with ideas of how to resuscitate them, so to speak.
My father and grandfather introduced several techniques to me. I improved on some of them and hit upon new ones. So, while living in different parts of our country (Anton lived at that time in Kharkiv), Anton and I came to understand that this hobby of mine could be turned into a business.
I came back to Ukraine and took myself to Kharkov to meet Anton and his wife, Ksiusha. I also met Nikita Diemienkov who is our important partner. We talked while taking walks through the city. It took me 5 days to pack my suitcases and move to Kharkiv. There we opened our first Sneaker Mate dry cleaner on Naukova street in a cramped space that had no windows.
We started cleaning people’s footwear. Our idea was to do it by hand. We decided to take and give back orders to our clients in person, so that we could maintain contact with them. Subsequently our business started to grow. We put 10 pairs of limited edition on display in our shop. These were sneakers that could be bought exclusively in our shop. Such a move attracted the youth who would come to the shop and talk to us. We needed a more spacious shop and it took us less than a year to find it.
It was a three-storied concept store comprising a coffee shop of the third wave and a dry cleaner located right in the basement. We worked in the dead center of the city. We started organizing film screenings, discussions of new books and other artistic exhibitions.
We are proud to call ourselves shoemakers. One of our main goals is to change people’s attitude towards this craft. We want to instill an idea into people that cleaning sneakers is not an activity to be ashamed of. It means taking care of your favorite footwear. Besides, it saves you money since the price on sneakers tends to constantly shoot up, whereas cleaning them regularly extends their life. We have always been supporting the idea of modest consumption.
Did you keep yourself busy with things other than cleaning shoes and selling coffee?
Thanks to Anton and Nikita having managed rap.ua for over 8 years (currently it’s one of Ukraine’s largest music portals), we have also been organizing regular festivals at the art plant ‘Platforma‘. We used to bring British musicians in and, of course, all top Ukrainian hip-hop artists.
Many interesting people would hold lectures there. These people have their own brands and implement their own projects. We offered opportunities for young brands to promote their production. That was how we scaled up, starting from a small craft production shop to a youth culture festival.
We are still working on scaling our business up. In total we spent less than a year working in that cramped space. We then went on to extend our business all the way to Kyiv. Simultaneously we were launching our main space on the Kvitka-Osnovyanenko street in Kharkov. After Kyiv we set sights on Odesa. Our most recent shop has been set up in Dnipro. The entire project is now 6 years of age.
What happened to the project after the Russian full-scale invasion?
In Kharkiv our shop is now being used as a storage of humanitarian aid. In the first days of the war our team of ‚Some people‘ began functioning as a volunteer center. Our boys visit the most remote districts of Kharkiv and the eponymous region to deliver food products and medications. Our building has been hit by shelling, which, however, has not dissuaded us from continuing to work.
Apart from the storage, we have organized a center that processes requests for help to be delivered to people. Alongside other volunteer organizations (lots of creative designers from Kharkiv have also stayed in the city and reorganized their work) we set up this humanitarian aid route from Lviv to Kharkiv. Organizations from Lviv have been helping us a lot. They still do. They are literally feeding the city of Kharkiv now.
Our team has grown to 28 people, the majority of whom were working from Kharkiv. We all came together and set out to volunteer. After our center had been destroyed, we moved to another building. We did not stop our volunteer activities. Quite the opposite, they became even more intense. A first storage was found where our team worked and volunteered for over 50 days. However, when missile strikes on Kharkiv became more frequent, we decided to split our team into two. Some team members stayed in Kharkiv while others were evacuated to Lviv.
We had to provide for our entire team as well as coordinate the humanitarian route from Lviv to Kharkiv. It’s only us whom we can count on to make things function well. We are aware of our limits and we found a new working space on Dzhokhar Dudayev street. Before opening it we had done some repair works.
Our main task now is to ensure a comfortable working and communication atmosphere for the locals and those citizens of Ukraine who have come to Lviv from Kharkiv, Kyiv and other cities.
We have always been supporting the concept of cooperation. This is the main driving force behind progress, especially that of the youth. That is why we have a dry cleaner and a phonograph record. Folks enjoy the opportunity to bring their records and have them played on this vinyl record.
Would you like to come back to Kharkiv after the victory?
As soon as a missile hit our dry cleaner, our dream was to return to Kharkiv as soon as the Armed Forces of Ukraine would restore safety. We know how we would do that and to what extent. We will definitely rebuild not only our space but we will also be helping Kharkiv recover.
As soon as there is an opportunity to do that, we will do it even better! Such an approach in these times helps us cope with stress and support those in need as much as we possibly can.
