Hi I'm Kirby Allison
and here at The Hanger Project,
we love to help the well-dressed take care of their wardrobes.
In today's video I'm going to show
you how to repair scratched shoes.
If you have any questions
or comments on this video please ask them in
the comments section below.
I get back to all those questions personally.
It's inevitable with any dress shoe that
as you wear them,
they're going to become scuffed
or scratched.
Most scuffs and scratches can be easily
repaired just
with a little bit of Saphir shoe polish.
So this video, we purchased a pair of Allen
Edmonds on eBay for $50.
As you can see they're incredibly
scuffed.On eBay,
you have so many pairs of valid Edmond's that
are in good condition,
there's really no reason to buy anything
in such poor condition.
I actually had to look harder to find a
pair of Allen Edmonds suitable for this video
than I would have had to look if I wanted to find
a pair in really nice condition.
But this shows you kind of the variety
of scratches that you can find in a pair of shoes.
You have all the way from really deep
nicks and scuffs in the toe of these
heels all the way to some kind
of lighter scratching
and scuffing right here.
Again these are some scratches that happened
probably against some concrete so these are
a little bit deeper into the surface of the
leather all the way around to
just kind of general discoloration
that just happens during the course of
any type of normal wear.
This represents really kind of the worst
condition that you could find a pair of shoes in
and what I'm going to show you today is that using the
Saphir shoe polish,
you can rejuvenate even a pair of shoes
in such terrible shape.
There's two primary Saphir products that you're
going to want to use to repair scuffs
and scratches. Which you choose
is really a function of how bad the damage
is.
Now the first line of defense against
any scuff or scratch is
just a simple Saphir Pommadier
Cream Polish
and this is what we recommend here at The Hanger Project
for the primary care of your shoes.
And the reason is because
a Cream Polish has a higher concentration
of those recoloring pigments
than a wax polish.
So 80 percent of all scuffs
and scratches really can be fixed
just by polishing your shoes
using the Saphir Pommadier Cream Polish.
Now if the scuffs and scratches are deeper,
like what you see on the front
of these shoes.
Then you need to use a product that not
only is going to offer that recoloration
but is going to be able to fill
and kind of resurface
that damage
and Saphir has a product called the Creme Renovatrice
or the Saphir
Renovating Cream that is perfect for this
purpose.
What it is is it's a combination of both
resins and pigments.
Think of the Renovating Repair cream
as that putty.
It has pigment that you can match to the polishes
right so you can recolor
but it's also going to allow you to fill
those holes.
And then lastly depending on how bad
the damage is there's a few other tricks
that you could use.
One is if you see the surface
is really smooth
or you have pieces of leather hanging off,
you can actually use some really fine
grit sandpaper to kind of smooth that
surface off to prepare
that area to be recolored.
Now it's not something that I would recommend going in
really hard.
If you have a high quality pair of scissors,
you can use those scissors to cut
off any type of leather that might be
hanging off the shoe.
And step one, since I really don't know the history
of this pair of Allen Edmonds that I purchased
off eBay. I'm going to use this fear RenoMat
to really pull off anything that might be
on the surface of these shoes.
So I'm going to use this across the entire shoe
to really provide that first deep clean
to open up the leather
and to prepare it to receive the pigments
from the Saphir Pommadier Cream
Polish. So to apply the RenoMat at first
you want to shake it.
And then you just use a cotton chamois.
This is our Hanger Project chamois
to apply this.
Just on the leather using
a medium to firm pressure,
because again you want to pull
anything that's on the surface of this
leather off.
It's very common for the chamois
to actually pull pigment off,
that only means that it's working.
Now I'm using the Saphir RenoMat,
you want to continue to use it until you
see that the surface
has changed.
You're not looking at the amount
of pigment coming off on the chamois
as an indication of whether
or not you've used
it enough.
Because again,
you're always going to get a little bit of pigment
off of the leather onto the chamois
until the point that the shoe is completely
stripped so you don't want to go crazy.
But one or two nice passes along
the shoe using
medium to firm pressure
will really make sure that this product is pulling anything
off that surface.
So I've completed cleaning the shoes using
the Saphir RenoMat,
and you can really see how
by pulling off the polish that
was on top of the shoes,
it really exposes even further
how poor condition these shoes
were in.
And again, these are a pair of Allen Edmonds,
it isn't totally uncommon
for the finish of a pair of Allen Edmonds
not to be completely stable.
So you know,
you can pull a little bit of that factory
finish off,
but here I think again,
what we're seeing,
is just where the shoes were scratched
or scuffed,
pulled that dyed leather off.
Now we've pulled up anything that's sitting on top
that leather just kind of preventing it from absorbing
the pigments
and nutrients from the Saaphir Pommadier
Cream Polish,
I'm going to next polish
the shoes using the pigmented
Cream Polish.
The Saphir Pommadier Cream Polish contains
three to five times more pigments in it
than a standard cream polish
and it does an exceptional job of just
recoloring the leather
and really concealing any type of minor
scuffs and scratches.
So I have three possible color matches
here for these Allen Edmonds oxblood
shoes.
First is the Mahogany,
and then I have a
Bordeaux #8 which is a burgundy,
and then right here I have the Hermes
Red. Now the difference between these
three pigments is that the
Mahogany has more of kind of like a reddish
brown
and if I put that on here,
you're going to see it's probably a little
too light for these shoes.
I'm going to set that aside
and then we have the Hermes
Red, which again,
I think is probably going to do the best job
really matching these shoes.
The burgundy
or the Bordeaux really has
a lot of purple in it.
And as you can see it's actually darker
than the standard pigment in this shoe.
So I think that actually the Hermes Red is going
to be our best match here.
And then I'm going to really
polish the shoes using the Saphir Pommadier
Cream Polish and we'll see what it does.
Now it's not going to take care of all these scratches,
so I just want to take a first pass
with the Saphir Pommadier Cream Polish
to show you what that would do
before using something even
stronger
and more permanent like the Saphir Renovating Repair
Cream. So I've got some of this on my
chamois, I'm just going
to kind of dab this
Okay. So I've allowed the polish to dry.
Now I'm going to buff it off just using this
horsehair brush.
And you can see with one coat of
the Pommadier Cream Polish,
you know we haven't totally concealed these scratches
because it is quite an actual deep
scratch that removed a
lot of that pigment.
So this might be an example of a pair of shoes
that in order to really fully return
these to look like new condition,
you're going to need to actually use
a leather dye which would be
a permanent alcohol based pigment.
But here we're just using the
Cream Polish.
I'm going to play a few more coats
and kind of see how this helps saturate this
leather.
It certainly looks better
but it doesn't look new.
And again, it's a function of
the condition that they were in originally.
So let's apply another coat
and see where that gets us.
So as you can see with this pair of Allen Edmonds,
you know the scratching in the scuffing
in the leather is actually quite deep,
and so even with the pigmented cCream Polish
we're not getting a full saturation
and able to kind of elevate that color
to match the undamaged leather.
So there's two different ways that you can take this,
you know here, in this case,
it actually produces kind of a nice
patina right,
where you have a little bit of natural antiquing,
just the result
of kind of discoloration over time.
Another thing that you can do to
help lessen this is
to antique the shoes,
where you would use a darker polish,
so here I'm using
the Burgundy which you know has a little bit
more purple in it.
It's certainly darker.
And you can use that
to kind of help produce
and develop that patina.
So by taking a darker polish
on those damaged sections of the shoe,
you can kind of darken that area
to help conceal the damage.
So you can see the before
and after shot here.
You know the shoe doesn't look new,
but it was in terrible condition.
It certainly does look better
now. Next,
what I'm going to do is I'm going to use the
Renovating Repair Cream to fill this
kind of deeper scuff right here
in the toe of the shoe.
So here I have some of the Renovating
Repair Cream
and what I'm going to do is I'm just going to kind
of put it into this area.
Kind of fill
those deeper gaps.
But I'm also going to kind of take this around
to some of the areas that have a little bit more
discoloration
and just kind of conceal that area
that's really light.
I'm most concerned
with it on the toe
because I want a little bit more blending the
discoloration
here on this side of the shoe,
I'm ok with that because it honestly,
it just gives it a nice kind of antiquing.
We're going to allow that a few minutes to dry
and then we'll polish on top of it.
So the Renovating Repair Cream's had a little bit of time
to dry. It's filled that scratch,
just going to do one more
coat of cream polish on
top of this again to
help blend that in.
I'm going to use a little bit of this Burgundy
just because I'm trying to burnish
or antique this area of the shoe.
So I'm going to apply that on,
give it a few minutes to
dry, and then buff
it off one last time.
So here we are, these Allen Edmonds had proved
to be a lot more challenging than I anticipated.
You can see that
with the Pommadier Cream Polish
and the Renovating Repair cream,
we were really able to reduce
as much of the discoloration
and the scuffing as possible,
but there's no question that you still see scuffing
without the shoe.
So again,
we bought these for less than 50 bucks on
eBay.
That is quite severe damage to
the shoe. With the cream
polish, you can see it looks better
than it did whatever we received them.
If we were to use a wax it probably would
look even a little bit
better.
And so for this shoe I mean really what
you're going to do,
and what your goal would be,
is to just reduce the appearance
of the discoloration from that scuffing
and scratching as much as possible.
Add a little bit of antiquing
or patina,
and really kind of embrace the condition
of these shoes.
If you have any questions
or comments about anything I discussed in this video,
feel free to ask and in the comments section below,
I get back to all those comments personally
and this will probably be the first in
what is a series of videos on how to
repair scratched shoes.
So check back on the YouTube channel
as we'll continuously post additional videos
on this particular topic.
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I'm Kirby Allison
and thanks for joining us.