How to Clean Birkenstock Shoes

Video Transcript

"Today we're going to be talking about Birkenstocks. This Birkenstock shoe has seen a little better day. This shoe can be completely refurbished. This shoe looked just like this shoe not too long ago. Now it's got the replacement foot bed in it, resoled, and that's what we'll be doing to this shoe also. When we finish that shoe, we apply a cork seal. To protect that cork to keep it from doing this deterioration like this. Put a couple coats on and this is a water based cork seal, it works pretty good. You do a couple of coats of that and it gives a nice protectant to that cork, it keeps it sealed up. Once we've redone this shoe, we're going to clean and polish this shoe to keep that leather going. Once we've got the excess glue off the sides of that shoe, we're going to take and apply a little bit of a conditioning cleaner and we're just going to work that right into the leather. We'll buff it off and we can also apply a polish on top of that. This is a meltonian cream polish, it does a nice job of also adding a little bit of conditioners to it. It has some good color in it. We'll also just apply that with a brush, rubbing that in nicely. You can use a cloth to apply the polish or you can use a brush like I did. You can also use a cloth to buff that or you can use a brush and buff it by hand. Now that would be with a smooth leather, but if you have a suede, like this shoe, what you would actually want to use is a stain eraser. It's a little block, it's not quite like a pumice stone, but it does a great job of cleaning that suede, getting that really shiny worn area to come back to the suede finish. These are a great little thing to have. If you cannot find that, at most hardware stores you can find these little sponges that have a grit embedded on them, little sanding sponges. These work great too. You would want to get a fine grit so you didn't damage the suede. And with that, you would just rub right on the suede, and they'll clean up pretty good. Once you've got that cleaned off, you can use a suede brush to brush it. Once you've got it completely clean, you would use a water and stain protector to protect that suede to keep it from getting as dirty so quickly. That's how you clean and protect a Birckenstock."