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Every person has a style, and every style deserves support. Enter your style strategy cheerleader and founder of BU Style, Natalie Tincher. Since 2010 Natalie has worked with hundreds of personal clients as well as large corporations and a major global news network—and she is here to guide you.
In this podcast, you will gain clarity and insights on how to connect your style with your authentic self through Natalie's style expertise as well as interviews with other style-supporting guests like designers, clients, and other professionals in and out of the fashion industry.
Whether you love fashion, fear fashion, or fall somewhere in between, it doesn't matter. This isn't about fashion; it's about exploring who you are and how to own your unique style identity. This podcast will help you cut through the noise and examine your personal style holistically so you can "wear who you are" every day.
0:00:00 - Natalie Tincher
Remember your shoes do support each day's journey, so part of wearing who you are is treating them with care so they can carry you happily through your days. Welcome to Wear who you Are, a podcast that takes the fear out of fashion and holds space for everyone to explore how to connect your authenticity with your personal style. I'm your host, natalie Tinsher, founder of VU Style, expert style strategist, and your enthusiastic friend and safe space of support. I believe that every person has a style and every style deserves a seat. With over a decade of experience working with hundreds of personal clients, I've learned a thing or two about how to help others have a healthy and holistic approach to navigating how to build a wardrobe that reflects who you are. So pull up your seat and let's get started. Hello, happy Wednesday. Thank you for coming back to another Wear who you Are.
Wednesday, when this episode drops, I will be enjoying the beaches of Sitges in Spain, and then I'll be spending a few days eating my way through Barcelona with Troy. It's really been an extra full season, so I am very much looking forward to a little R&R. If you want to head over to the BU style or my personal Instagram account, I've had packing on the brain. So we've included a lot of packing tips and strategies. So if you have upcoming summer travel, I've created resources for you. I'm also happy to report that this upcoming trip pushed me to work through my Wear who you Are community challenge that I issued back in March and that is to tackle my summer wardrobe situation. I have almost tackled it. I'll share more on that later, once I get it all situated and I put all of my thoughts together, my discoveries. It's been really cool to basically treat myself like a client and go through the process. But in the meantime, if you do have summer travel coming, I've linked a packing resource guide in the show notes for you to use to pack smarter and not harder. I'm going to be doing a lot of packing tonight before I leave as I record this. I'm also considering hosting a mini course on packing in the near future. So if this is something that would be helpful for you, let me know. And it's something I get asked a lot by my clients and friends and other people, so I'd love to help make your work or pleasure trips a lot easier. So now onto today's style school.
We've been talking a lot about shoes lately and we're going to wrap up this shoe series with a style school episode centered around caring for and repairing your shoes. So shoes can be a really big investment, as we know. It's one of the things that I usually one of the first things I recommend clients invest in is shoes, handbags, those things that are going to last a long time. There are some key things that you can do to make your quality shoes last for years and years, so we need to care for them. So first let's talk about our typical biggest shoe investment, and that would be leather shoes like boots or loafers, oxfords, nice ballet flats, pumps, that type of thing.
Particularly if you live in a big city like I do and walk a lot, your shoes can get torn up very easily. I actually learned this pretty quickly as a 20-year-old living in London on study abroad. I bought some leather pumps at the time, like pointy toe was first becoming a thing and I bought some leather pumps and the first where they were in really rough shape from the cobblestone. At the time I didn't know what to do. So, um, I think I either got rid of them or like suffered through them looking dingy. So let's keep you from having that issue and let's start with what you can do when you first invest in leather shoes.
So first you should can check the soles of the shoes. If they're the thin leather soles, you have a couple of options. The first one is that you can add what is called sole protectors, which is a thin layer of rubber or plastic that you can add to the bottom of the shoe sole. This provides extra protection against wear and tear, especially for those who frequently walk on hard surfaces like concrete or like a lot of us are doing in the cities. Sole guards also add a little non-slip element, which is helpful during inclement weather, and it also does, like I say, protect the sole. It also helps maintain the shoe appearance on the bottom and prevent the soles from wearing down much too quickly.
If you know your heart on your shoes, you can invest right away and immediately by taking your shoes to the cobbler to have them actually re-soled, and that actually adds an even sturdier and a more adherent sole or sole protector than just the one that you would buy online and add yourself. So the brand that a lot of the good cobblers use is Vibram. It's very popular, very reputable. I do this for all of my thin sold leather flats because, as I said, in the city it's not the city's not very friendly on flimsy shoes. So option one is getting your own sole protectors, putting them to the bottom of a shoe. Option two if you're hard on your shoes, you really invested and you have that thin leather soles, to take it to the cobbler to have them either resold or, better, adhered with an even more quality sole protector.
The second thing you can do for a leather shoe is to have your cobbler add what are called toe taps to them. These are those small metal plates that they add to the bottom in the front of the sole of your shoe. That's the area that tends to scuff. The toe part scuffs more easily, especially if you do walk with a heavy or fast stride. I do this in particular for my pointy toe shoes. I tend to be a little bit clumsy and so I tend to hit the bottom of the shoe on a cobblestone or crack on the sidewalk, scuff them up, ruin the bottom. So if you get those toe taps on it, that helps prevent that from happening and you can have your shoes resold or toe tapped anytime as you wear them down. So if you decide you don't want to do this right away, but you notice they're wearing. You could always take them to the cobbler. You can always have it redone just to extend the life of your shoe.
Next up, let's talk about regular care and maintenance of all the shoes that you purchase. Here are a few of my top tips that you can do. First is just to get your shoe care kit in place. Your shoe care kit could include some of the following things. First, you want a collection of your cleaning cloths, brushes and sponges. All of these accoutrements are used to keep the shoe shined and clean. Again, there are particular tools for different types of leather and cloth and the different types of treatment if you're shining or buffing it or conditioning it.
I have really vivid memories actually as an aside of my dad pulling out his shoe shine kit every so often, because he wore leather shoes to work every day and he'd use an old t-shirt or sock to apply some type of conditioning cream and then he'd have his buffing brush and he'd polish them up. So that's just a really vivid memory that I have. I personally like to spot clean my cloth or canvas shoes with a toothbrush, so I always when I get those toothbrushes from the dentist. You usually don't need all of them. We have a huge collection of them. I put those in my shoe care kit so then I can spot clean with those. I also like to clean the rubber soles of my sneakers or shoes with the toothbrush. Another thing you're going to want in your shoe care kit are lotions and treatment sprays. You'll want specific lotions for all the leather types that you have, whether it's suede, calfskin, nubuck all the different leather types. You want to make sure you have the right conditioning sprays and lotions for those. So I recommend having at least one good conditioner and one waterproofing spray.
Now for the day-to-day care. Here are just a few things to consider to continue keeping your shoes beautiful and keep them for as long as possible, invest in shoe trees. Shoe trees will extend the life of your leather shoes and they will reinforce the shape. I like the cedar ones. They smell nice. They just help dry out the shoe as well.
Another tip for day to day is try rotating your shoes if you can. This is really good practice. You may have heard thisto-day is try rotating your shoes if you can. This is really good practice. You may have heard this, but this is the reason why it's good practice for a couple of reasons. First, it gives the shoes a chance to bounce back. Particularly if there's any foam support in a shoe, this extends the life of the shoe by giving the molecules a chance to get back to their shape. Second, it gives your shoes a chance to dry out. Now we don't maybe want to talk about it, but our feet do sweat. I think some of us, or all of us, have had smelly foot problems, and drying out your shoes helps with the smell and it helps erase some of the bacteria that could build up in them.
Another thing that you can have on hand for that like quick day-to-day care, is quick wipes and stain removers. So that you can have on hand for that, like quick day-to-day care, is quick wipes and stain removers. So we don't always love to have single-use products, but if you need a quick fix, you can get quick shoe wipes. So if you're in a hurry, you're going out the door and you're like, oh shoot, I need a little shoe, needs a little love, but I don't have the time to do the whole shining and conditioning. Just having some of those products on hand is good for you, of course. Products on hand is good for you, of course, for all of this, you can get your shoes professionally shined, cleaned and treated, as you know, I like to tell you to have a good style support team and a good cobbler is one of those things that you should have in your arsenal to really make sure like again this investment, when you're handing it off, it needs to be fixed up, it's in the right hands. That's going to treat it well, I like.
For me, my strategy is I do like light maintenance during the season, whatever season I'm wearing the shoe, to keep them looking fresh. And then for my shoes that were particularly in heavy rotation, like in the fall winter it's a couple of particular pairs of boots I take them to the cobbler at the end of each season to get a little glow up, so they're ready and like new when they come out of hibernation. The next time I did this with a pair of, I remember one of my first investments when I moved to New York was a pair of fry boots that I actually still have and they were getting really rough and I had them rehealed, I had them redone, I had them shined up and they looked totally like new. I was shocked and I was sold on a cobbler for the rest of my life. So, speaking of finding a trusted cobbler, there's some other repairs that you can do when you have this style support team member on hand.
A short list of things that your cobbler can do, just in case you don't know to make your shoes just like new or replace the heels. I truly have to do this a lot. I'm a fast walker because I was a dancer growing up. I walk with my toes out in first position, and so the edge of my heels get worn down really quickly. So whether it's a thick sole or a little stiletto, you can always get the heels fixed and replaced by a cobbler.
Cobblers can remove stains and they can color, tree or color match shoes. So you know, if you spill something on your shoe or it gets scuffed, a cobbler can generally fix that. A cobbler can also fix any zips you have. So like I had a pair of boots that had a back zip and the zipper toggle tongue got broken, and so the cobbler fixed that for me. They can shine up your hardware, they can replace insoles on your shoes and they can also stretch certain spots in your shoes. I mentioned that in a recent episode, but if you have some shoes that have like one or two particular spots that cause tightness, like, say, you have a bunion or you just have like a little bit of a wider foot, they can have you try on the shoe and specifically mark places that you need stretched just a little bit so you don't have to get blisters and you have more comfort in your shoes. You really would be amazed at the magic that they can work on quality leather shoes. It really like if your shoes scuffed and you're nervous, a cobbler if you have a good cobbler can really make it like new. So you don't have to toss them, you don't have to panic, they will take care of it. And there are certainly also a lot of DIY things you can do to keep your shoes so fresh and so clean.
Clean. There are many great resources online for cleaning and treating your shoes at home. I will not reinvent the wheel and go into each of those. Instead, here are two sources that I go to, which I will link in the show notes. First is sneaker cleaning. A lot of people ask about that. I follow my favorite laundry account, jeeves underscore NY. That's the Instagram handle. I follow his formula for white sneaker cleaning. I've linked the full video to this one tip in particular in the show notes.
But here are his steps. The first is to remove the insoles and the shoelaces and the second is to mix up a solution, and he recommends one tablespoon of Borax, one tablespoon of washing soda, two cups of warm water and two drops of dish soap and he says to scrub the mixture into the shoes and that these solutions will help break up the metallic bonds which make dirt so difficult at times. Three is to spray shout on the shoes and rub that in. Let it sit overnight. Four is add shoelaces into a leftover pretreatment and soak that overnight. So that same liquid. Put your shoelaces in those, soak it overnight and then wash in the machine on delicate or hand wash cycle or hand wash using a high quality detergent. Spray down the shoes with hydrogen peroxide and let it air dry. So his formulas are generally really great. Again, I've linked that in the show notes for you to save for future.
On that note too, I do encourage my clients to know that it is okay if your white sneakers are well-loved and worn. I mean, look at, like the brand Golden Goose, they literally built their cult following by selling brand new sneakers that were already scuffed up. Think of it like buying those jeans that my parents used to make fun of me for already being scuffed up. They're like why are you buying jeans that already have holes in them and instead like it was? Isn't it really cool when you get a pair of jeans where you put the work in and you have your own natural scuffs and frays in them? So think of white sneakers like that. Like lean into them being well-loved, especially if it's a pair of white sneakers that are taking you a lot of places. It's always nice to have a pair of kick around shoes that you're okay if they get a little dirty, it's totally fine.
For leather care, an online resource that I really like is Kirby Allison, and that website is chock full of resources to help you identify the right products for each type of material. So when I was talking about that shoe repair kit and that shoe care kit that you're putting together, they have a lot of recommendations for which product, for which type of leather, and most of the products overlap, so you won't necessarily need like one product for each type of leather. They'll give you that recommendation. You just need the right products that will take care of all the leathers that you have. They also have a lot of step-by-step guides on how to treat each type of leather that you have. So there you have it A really quick guide to show you how to keep your shoes long-lasting, how to love them longer so they can support you longer, because, remember, your shoes do support each day's journey. So part of wearing who you are is treating them with care so they can carry you happily through your days.
Thanks so much for tuning in and we will see you next time. Thanks for joining another. Wear who you are Wednesday. If you enjoyed this episode and you'd like to help support the podcast, please share it with others, post about it on social media or leave a rating and review. Be sure to follow along for episode news updates and other bonus style insights on Instagram through my business account at BU style that's, the letters B, u and style or my personal account at Natalie underscore tincture. And don't forget to subscribe to where who you are, wherever you listen to your podcasts. Thanks again and see you next time.