Suede & Leather Cleaning
PLEASE NOTE WE CAN NO LONGER PROCESS
SUEDE OR LEATHER GOODS
What you need to know...
Leather is a natural product also known as Suede, Sheepskin, Leather, Pigskin, Goatskin etc.
Leather is the skin of the animal and is referred to as hide before processing. The skins are washed in water, tanned and stretched before being pared and cut to shape. Although prepared in a water process they have to be dry cleaned once made up into a garment.
Each panel in a leather garment has come from a different animal, for this reason colour variation will occur. Hides are batch dyed before being made up into a garment ensuring uniformity of colour on the finished garment. The process also covers up imperfections in the skins, which may only become apparent after cleaning.
Look carefully at suede in particular and you will see natural lines occurring in the skin, the more expensive the garment, the less likely you will notice them. These are natural, they are veins.
All garments have multiple panels making up the item. They will almost certainly loose some colour in cleaning and this will be more noticeable on suede than leather
Suede and Leather has natural oils, these oils can be removed in dry cleaning, the final part of the cleaning process replaces the lost oils, so that the garment returns to its original state.
Leather is fashionable and comes with many different finishes. Popular are painted finishes, this may not be apparent to the wearer, but they do not clean well. In many cases they can appear faded after cleaning as the paint is partially removed. In worst cases the paint can be completely removed even though the care label states ‘dry clean’.
Ball point pen ink can not be removed from painted finishes, because in doing so this will remove the paint as well. Alcohol spilt on Suede & Leather will stain and may not be removed in dry cleaning. When spilt on painted leather it could remove some of the paint, and whilst not necessarily noticeable before cleaning it will after cleaning as the soiling has been removed.
Suede can change texture after cleaning and may well become less supple. This should improve after some hours of wear. Severely soiled and dirty items such as suede may not clean at all well,
Your own hands when extremely dirty do not come easily clean with soap and water so bear this in mind with dry cleaning.
As part of our cleaning process the garments are automatically treated with scotchguard or equivalent silicone product. This will not make the garment waterproof, but will help to protect against soiling.