Hi everybody, this is Will from Conner Hats. Today, I’m going to show you how to clean a leather hat. Everything you need to clean your hat is probably already around your house. If not, a quick trip to the local hardware or grocery store will do the trick. The Conner Hat range of leather hats consists of oily leather, which is oil and waxes added as the leather gets treated, and also some suedes.
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As you can see, this suede is quite dusty, and the simplest way to clean it is to take your paintbrush. There are quite a few ways to clean suede. It’s not an easy task, but it can be done. One technique is to take some chalk. It’s much better to have themsame color hat as the chalk, so you would want a brown chalk for a brown hat.
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If there was a stain on this hat here, you would take the chalk and rub it in like
this. That's going to soak the oil and grease up in that chalk, and then you’ll have to take a brush and brush it off really hard. Sometimes a nice hard brush is good to get the tough stains out. You’ll notice as you go this way with the
suede, all of the hairs will come this way and if you go back that way, they’ll go darker, so keep that in mind as well. There are not any problems there. That’s just the way the suede hair moves.
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Rub out that chalk once you’ve got the grease soaked-up. The next technique is
a little more extreme. You take some sandpaper. Sometimes, this can make it a little bit worse. If you rub really hard, you’ll rub off all those little suede hairs, and you’ll end up with a bald patch and you don’t want to do that. So you take it real light and just go steady. Real light, and see how it looks. Then you might want to brush it a little bit to see what happens. Keep going back and forth until possibly you take just the tiniest layer of the stain off, leaving a much better look underneath.
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One other technique you can use is an eraser. This probably isn't the best eraser to use. The best ones that I’ve found to use are those big, clear art
erasers. They’re really soft, and you can erase out and take off dirt and sometimes it will even take out a stain of some kind. Just rubbing away and taking away all the flakes.
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If your stain still isn’t gone after all those techniques, then you’ll have to break out
the big guns, and that is the distilled vinegar trick. You take your distilled vinegar, and you take a rag or an old tee-shirt, you put a little bit on there like this and you let it soak in. Then you rub the dampened cloth over the stain. Then you let it dry completely.
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So the other type of leather we use is wax or oily leather. There’s a few
techniques you can help with stains and dirt marks on an oily leather hat. This is one of the simple ones. Everyone always has a little bit of oil on their hands. If you see a mark on the hat and you just take your thumb, you can sort of smooth out that oil. It is almost like you’re making it bigger, but you’re not really. You’re just kind of working it in, and hopefully, that will take care of a light stain of some kind.
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The next technique is if you really want to get serious about it, you can use
something called saddle soap. What saddle soap does is basically, it can actually darken the whole hat. It will also re-waterproof the hat as well if you need it to, but it will take that stain and sort of mask the stain. The only thing you should be careful though is like I said, it’s going to darken the hat.
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So you want to try some on the underbelly of the hat just to see if you’re ok with
that or if you can imagine it’s all going to get darker. So you take the saddle soap, get some on the rag right here, take it, see how that’s darkened the hat, you just rub it a little bit like that or all around the rim if you like. Take a dry piece of cloth and you want to wipe it down. So look how much darker that hat is. Pretty much you’re going to take a light brown oily hat into a dark brown hat.
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But it's going to get rid of your stain, completely mask it and if you like that new
color, you have an unblemished hat.