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. If you like this video please give
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videos that we publish here on our YouTube
channel. I'm Kirby Allison and thanks for joining us.
