Expertise is essential for leather and suede

Leather presents some of the most difficult and challenging garments for the high street cleaner, with dissatisfied and disappointed customers often forming the vast majority of complaints across the cleaner’s workload. Generally, the best advice is for the high street cleaner to find a reliable specialist and contract out the service.

Leather can be cleaned very successfully, by specialists, but highly developed expertise is required, and the customer must be given realistic expectations of the possible outcome. The receiving cleaner needs to be able to recognise potential problems in suede, pigskin, sheepskin and grain leather items and react to these during reception, in order to generate realistic expectations for the customer.

All skin items must be inspected very carefully all over, paying particular attention to shade variations and skin texture between panels, marks and calluses caused by insect bites, areas of loose shaggy suede, stuck on wool replacement patches on sheepskin items (where a damaged area has been covered up by the manufacturer), and any damage to surface colour on grain leather items. Where possible it is also important to identify the nature of stains with the customer. Make a detailed record of all defects and stains for the specialist cleaner and ideally, take good quality pictures of the item. Good, verifiable communication between the cleaner and the customer and between the cleaner and the specialist is critical to avoid dissatisfied customers and potential claims.

Adhesives used in manufacture sometimes migrate to create ugly dark patches near the hems and cuffs. The risk is reduced if a mild solvent is used, but customer warnings should still be given. The specialist will also need to replace the tanner’s oils with proprietary cleaning oils, and this may change the handle and drape. This information should be given to the customer via a suitable history sheet or other document.

Leather needs the minimum of steam to soften the skins and must then be carefully pulled back to size and shape before setting with vacuum. This may have to be done panel by panel if there is a lot of relaxation wrinkling.

Leathers continue to reflect higher margins for the cleaner than most other classifications, but they are also the source of the most critical complaints. British Standards allow the garment maker far greater changes in drycleaning than would ever be tolerated for a textile. The overall colour change allowed is 3-4 on the grey scale, which is quite noticeable, whereas most commercial standards for the change to the cloth of a suit jacket stipulate a minimum of 4 (which is not obvious to most customers).

Shrinkage is also much greater, because the tanner has to stretch the hide in different areas to create flat garment leather for cutting out.

Leather is one of the cleaner’s more expensive services, but it is only profitable if it is expertly executed. If it is sub-contracted, the receiving cleaner must still have the knowledge and skill to handle reception and return correctly. This month we look at just a few of the pitfalls for the unwary.

White seams appear in leather jacket

Fault: after cleaning and pressing, this garment had white embossed seams clearly visible, spoiling an otherwise excellent result.

Technical cause: the whitening has been caused by excessive localised pressure on the double thickness fabric of the seams. The reason for this could be too high a locking pressure on the press, or hard and consolidated press clothing or (just as likely), a combination of both. As a consequence, the clothing no longer has the resilience needed to accommodate the double thicknesses

Responsibility: the cleaner is to blame here for failing to maintain the press clothing in good condition and/or to regularly check and adjust the locking pressure.

Rectification: re-cleaning followed by light steaming and brushing may result in a considerable improvement.

Brown grime appears during cleaning

Fault: after professional leather cleaning of this jacket, the collar displayed worse discolouration than before cleaning.

Technical cause: the leather collar probably absorbed greasy skin oils during wear through direct contact with the wearers neck; this needed careful pre-treatment with a little general leather pretreatment detergent before cleaning, in order to raise the detergent activity in the collar area during cleaning. This would have improved the removal of this occasionally difficult to remove soiling.

Responsibility: the cleaner should be taking at least some of the blame here. Complete removal was probably not possible, but a better result could have been achieved.

Rectification: it is virtually impossible to post-treat this area, without leaving a worse mark. This is because oxidised protein (from skin oils ) bonds very strongly to the leather fibres. It is best left alone now.

Unsightly random marks appear at the hems

Fault: dark, blotchy stains along the seams and hems of this suede jacket developed during cleaning.

Technical cause: the glue used here to secure the hems is slightly sensitive to drycleaning solvent and has softened, partially dissolved and moved during the solvent wash. Some has seeped through the suede to the surface and made it tacky, attracting and retaining dark soiling from the cleaning fluid.

Responsibility: this lies with the garment maker. There are garment adhesives available which are resistant to perchloroethylene solvent, they are not soluble and are designed to avoid this problem.

Rectification: in some cases, the glue marking can be removed by re-cleaning and then the hems can be re-made; but where the glue marking cannot be removed, by either re-cleaning or, if appropriate, by localised stain removal, the garment should be returned to the retailer/ manufacturer with a view to replacement.

Limp handle produces complaint

Fault: after cleaning, this garment displayed a complete change in handle and drape.

Technical cause: cleaning removes the oils put into the skins by the tanner, some of which could be designed to make the skins much stiffer. The cleaner should replace these with a proprietary/universal suede & leather oil, which can, in rare cases, change the handle and drape. This cannot be avoided, unless the garment maker uses oils which will withstand cleaning (and these do exist for use in garment ranges where this is a major issue).

Responsibility: British Standards make reference to standard leather oil, which proprietary cleaning oils replicate. There is no mechanism for the garment maker to stipulate if a different oil is required and no mechanism for a cleaner to use this either. The responsibility lies with the garment maker. If retaining the original oil is essential to maintain the garment properties, then a non-removable oil should have been used.

Rectification: unfortunately, none is possible. In a last-ditch effort to save the garment, it might be worth trying a re-clean using a retex agent with stiffening properties

• If you have problems you would like the authors to examine please send with a good quality, high resolution (300dpi/1MB at least) pic of the item to 
  kathy.bowry@laundryandcleaningnews.com