How Do You Clean Dirty Shoes?

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Mike Summers from Jim The Shoe Doctor, in Eugene, Oregon and today we're going to talk about cleaning and polishing a dirty shoe. This is just a normal leather shoe, no special finishes on it. The first step we would want to do with this shoe, would be to apply a leather balm. It has some waxes in it, so we first put that on and then with our brush we would actually work that into the entire shoe. We're going to be working that all the way down into the crevices. What is nice about using a conditioner like this, is that it does a great job of protecting the leather. It's cleaning the shoe and also adding a protectant to it to keep the leather soft, to keep it from drying out and cracking. We're going to work that into the shoe pretty good, all the way around so that we make sure we have good even coverage. Then we're going to take it and buff that. Now you can do this with a machine or you can do it by hand using a cloth or a regular shoe brush. A traditional shoe brush and then you can use a buff cloth. You could leave it at this point and the shoe looks pretty good, but if you want to go beyond that and actually polish the shoe, you need to apply a stain wax. This is what is referred to as a hard polish. This is a Lincoln brand, it's a high quality brand, has nice color to it. This is a meltonian polish. This polish is a soft polish. This has more conditioners in it and it's a little better for the leather. It's not going to give quite the shine that a paste wax will. You can use either of these polishes and be just fine. Once you apply a conditioner, then it really doesn't matter if you add a cream or a paste. We'll put a little bit of the paste wax on here and again going over the entire shoe. Making sure you get clear down into the welt area of the shoe, which is that low area between the sole and the upper of the shoe. With many shoes, you would also want to edge the shoe with a sole edging. We have waxes that we can use with the machine and put some wax on there. We'll rebuff the shoe after we've applied the polish to it and this just gets that gloss up. You can do this by hand but it does take a little bit longer to do. Now we have cleaned and we've polished the shoe. If you want to protect that, you can add to that by using a shine sponge, it has a little bit of lanolin and a little bit of mink oil in it. This you would just rub right on the shoe after you have polished it and that really brings that shine up nicely. These are great because once you have cleaned and polished the shoe, you can reuse this without polishing the shoe many times over, and keep that one shine going for a long time rather than having it dull out really quickly. These are a great thing to have for convenience. That's how you would clean and shine a dirty shoe."