Caring for Your Leather Shoes

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Mike Summers from Eugene, Oregon, Jim the Shoe Doctor. And today we're going to be talking about shoe care. We have a wide variety of products and we have polishes that will clean and protect shoes, and they come in a wide variety of colors. You have dyes that can actually change the color of a shoe, and this is great if a shoe has lost color, or if it needs to be changed in color. This is a shine sponge, so this is a product that you would use after you had shined a shoe to make that shine hold up real long, a real long time, or when a brand new shoe, it gives a little protection to just rub that over it. You have conditioners, and conditioners come in a variety of different types. You have oil, you have the cleaner-conditioner types. This is a leather balm, this is a great conditioner, you can apply this to a brand new shoe to give it a little protection. This will keep the shoe from drying and cracking out. Shoes that are really dried out, you would want to use, like this is a needs foot oil, this will soften the leather back up, keep it from drying and cracking. On a heavy duty boot, jackets, that sort of thing, a spray-on waterproofer, this is a silicon-based spray-on waterproofer, this does a really good job. And then for finer shoes, bags, that sort of thing, you would want to use this, this is going to be real safe to use, it's not going to change color, and this is available most anywhere. It's a really good product to use to make sure that you protect that investment you've made in those shoes. Then you have water-proofers that are the harder variety which are like the Aqua Seal which is silicone-based, Huberd's which is a bees wax and pine tar, and these are good water-proofers. I would lean more towards the Aqua Seal, it's going to condition and waterproof. Then there's water-proofers like Dubbin, this is great for soccer shoes, that sort of thing, this is a pretty good product also. For cleaning shoes, there's the old traditional saddle soap, and this you would actually just rub in, lather up, and then buff it back off. It has a little bit of glycerin in it so it does a little bit of conditioning, not a whole lot, you want to re-treat the leather after you use a product like this. And you've got your paste waxes which are your harder waxes. These give an excellent shine, not too much on the conditioning, so you need to actually use a conditioner along with this to make sure you don't dry your shoe out and cause it to crack. And brushes come in a variety of sizes. This is a polish applicator brush, and this would be a buffing brush. And when you're buffing a shoe you want to make sure that you use a different color brush for a different color shoe, so if you're doing light colored shoes, you want to make sure and get a light color brush with light bristles so that you can see that color so you don't end up transferring like a black onto a lighter brown shoe and causing yourself problems that way. This is a product that is a sports scrub for doing athletic shoes. This product you just apply directly onto a shoe, you just scrub it in and wipe it off, works pretty good for cleaning sports shoes. And then you would also, after applying a product like this, use a conditioner or a polish over the shoe after you've got it completely cleaned. And another product, after you would use, like on a white shoe, would be to put the white back onto the shoe, it would be this white polish. Alright, I think that mostly covers the products that you would use to clean and protect shoes. Alright, thank you."