It is a fact of life [in the UK] that our walking shoes get muddy. Cleaning our walking shoes isn’t the favourite job of either of us but it helps if you have the right tools for the job. I recently needed to replace the simple suede brush we had as the bristles were wearing down. I found this Kiwi Suede and Nubuck brush in the supermarket and despite it costing more than I expected I decided to see if it was better than the brush I was replacing, as it claimed to have more and better features.
This Kiwi brush is plastic and retails at around £3. Kiwi recommend that the shorter rubber bristles are used for nubuck, the longer bristles can be used for removing soil in crevices and the shaped plastic edge can clean seams.
I found it didn’t work quite like Kiwi proposed. After walks on sticky chalk soils and the thick clay of the Yorkshire coast our shoes were heavy with mud. After each trip we left them to dry for a few days and then tackled the cleaning. The longer bristles worked the same as any suede brush and got a lot of the dried mud off the shoes, along the seams, the sides of the soul and the top. The difficult bit of cleaning walking shoes and one where I hoped this tool might help is the grip pattern on the sole. For walking shoes to provide good traction a complicated grip pattern is designed by manufacturers, with many narrow crevices that get packed full of mud that dries to almost concrete. In addition small stones lodge in these crevices and need removing. Suede brushes cannot shift this mud easily and I usually end up seeking out a twig or a metal skewer to clean out the sole. Instead I tried using the curved plastic edge of the Kiwi brush. This did tackle these areas quite effectively but after only using the tool twice for our four shoes the plastic edge is showing significant wear; Kiwi don’t claim that this is what the plastic edges are designed for but if the plastic used was tougher it would work well for cleaning the soles of our walking shoes.
As this tool will be worn out very soon I will go back to an ordinary suede brush and a metal skewer to remove the soil from the grip on the soles of our walking shoes, as I really can’t justify the expense and waste of resources involved in buying a new plastic brush every six months.
Back on the road again 