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Unless your shoes are fresh out of the box, your first step is to clean them. If it hasn’t been too long since your last shine (read: you haven’t lapsed in your routine), and your shoes don’t have any stains, you can probably get by with a solid brushing with a horsehair brush and a wipe with a damp cloth. However, if you have stains on your shoes (even water stains), or if it’s been a while since your last shine, cleaning with a cleaner is a must.Shoe care supply After spending eight hours poring over other shoe-care guides, manufacturer recommendations, and reviews, and after evaluating two weeks’ worth of in-shop testing by Stanley Mayes and his employees of three recommended leather cleaners, I’m confident that Fiebing’s Saddle Soap strikes the best balance between effectiveness and value. Saddle soap removes all but the most stubborn stains, prepares the leather to accept moisturizer and new polish, and remains a hard-to-beat value at an average price of $10 for a 12-ounce tin, which will last you around 40 or so shines.Saddle soap, as its name suggests, was created to clean leather saddles. Every company uses a different formulation, and most (including Fiebing’s) keep their formulations proprietary and thereby unavailable for public review. However, after conducting a meta-review of 15 different saddle soaps and reading multiple shoe-care guides, we discovered that saddle soaps rely on a similar, basic formulation of a mild soap that acts as a surfactant and a blend of oils and greases that replenish some (but not all) of the oils that the soap removes. With a soft-bristle brush and a bit of water to get a foam going, Fiebing’s Saddle Soap made quite the sight as a pale yellow foam enveloped my shoe. A wipe of a cloth and a close visual and manual inspection by Stanley Mayes revealed the gentle thoroughness of the saddle soap: It had effectively lifted away the dirt and previous layers of polish that had accumulated on my shoe. But it didn’t touch the original finish—unlike Saphir Réno'Mat, which did a great job cleaning the surface-level contaminants but also ate into the original finish of my shoes. I ran my untrained fingers along the side of the shoe we cleaned with Fiebing’s Saddle Soap and found the surface not particularly dried out or tacky to the touch—a positive sign that the soap hadn’t completely sapped the shoe of its oils (like Réno'Mat) or left an undesirable residue on the surface (like Lexol Leather Cleaner).