How to Clean Tennis Shoes

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Mike Summers with Jim The Shoe Doctor in Eugene, Oregon, and today we're going to be talking about cleaning and protecting tennis shoes. This shoe is a brand new shoe, and before you wore this shoe, you would want to treat this with a water and stain protector. It keeps the shoe whiter for a much longer time, helps the cleanup much easier once it has gotten dirty. So if you do not do that, what you end up with is shoes that end up looking like this, really dingy, really dirty. A shoe like this is pretty hard to clean. There's a number of different polish materials that you can use. This is a patent leather cleaner, a Pattina cleaner, and it's a solvent based product, and this is a pretty harsh product, so this will, you have to be kind of careful with it because it can remove finish, but you can see the different that that makes. That takes that real dingy, dirty, down to pretty clean. You would want to treat the cloth portion of this shoe with a product that is also made for suede, and this works on satin shoes also, any of the nylons, silks, that sort of thing. And this, you would actually have to get the entire shoe completely wet. You would apply the cleaner and you actually scrub that in. There's a number of spray on cleaners that you can use, but pretty much you have to get the entire shoe wet when you do this and then you have to rinse all that back out because you don't want the soap-based material to stay in there. Once you've gotten that cleaned off you can use a white polish or a white refinish. We've got one that's open here. Just doing a small portion here, and you can work this into the stitching and stuff and make that white also. And with this, what you'd do is you'd let that dry for a little while and then you'd rebuff it just as it's drying so that it doesn't leave any streaking. It's very important with white polish to do that last little step on the process, otherwise you will end up with lines and it will streak. So white polish is one of the most difficult polishes to deal with. And that's how you would clean and protect a tennis shoe."