How to Shine Your Boots

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Mike Summers from Jim The Shoe Doctor in Eugene, Oregon. Today we're going to be talking about cleaning and shining a pair of boots. So the first step in cleaning and shining a boot like this, most of the time you're not even going to touch the upper area where you've got all this stitching, anything you put on there is going to transfer into the stitching, so most of the time you're going to just leave that alone. You don't want to polish that and change the color of that. So we'd start off by just applying a conditioner, this is leather balm, it's a great product, cleans and conditions leather. And that we would work into the boot making sure that we really get it down into that welt area, and that's the area between the upper and the sole, that is the area that cracks out the most often in shoes and that's the area that you really want to concentrate on. You want to make sure you work that in good, and you can use a cloth or a brush like I'm using. And once you've applied your conditioner you can take and just wipe that off with a rag and buff it off, or, and you can see how much dirt is coming off that boot just by doing that little bit right there, so there was quite a bit of dirt that was on this boot. Or you can take and use a polishing brush and just run the entire boot around that brush. So at this point we've cleaned any of the surface dirt off of the boot, and now we can apply a polish, and we could either apply a cream polish or a wax. A wax is going to give it a much higher shine. With this boot we'd want to keep the shine fairly low on it, so we're going to use a cream polish, it's a soft polish, this polish is a high quality polish made by Meltonian, you can buy at most any shoe shop and with that you would just apply it the same way that you did with the conditioner with either a cloth or a brush, covering the entire shoe. And with most of these polishes, with the waxes, with a paste wax you want to kind of let it dry up and kind of haze up a little bit, with the softer waxes, most of the time you're going to want to buff that back off when it has not dried yet. Usually you don't want that to tend to streak up. And you could either use a machine to either polish that off, or you can use just a brush, or even a cloth. And with a boot like this, yeah, we don't want a real high shine so we're not going to buff it a tremendous amount because the more you buff a shoe and the more friction you put on there, the higher the shine's going to be. But if you did want to get a higher shine you can always, that's what's nice about the high speed machines, is they will easily bring up a shine. And at this point you could leave it alone or you could use a product like this. This is a shine sponge and once you've shined a shoe then you just take and wipe this over it, it has a little bit of lanolin, a little bit of mink oil in it, and these do a great job of just bringing that shine up and it will keep a shine going for a long time. You don't even have to re-shine the boot, you can just touch it back up with the shine sponge. And it's a real easy way to take care of a boot. So that's how you would clean, polish, and protect a boot."