Manufacturers & brands

The menu on the left displays an ever-growing list of manufacturers and brands of boot and shoe cleaning products. Some may be very familiar, some just a vague memory and others quite obscure. Regardless, they all build a picture of good old fashioned industry built on consumer demand, often fuelled by compelling, artistic and aspirational advertising – all ‘of its day’.

What more mundane and workaday product can there be than shoe polish? What interest can this be to anyone? Well, this website has grown like topsy and all from research into a product created in the late 1800s to make a soldier’s like a little easier, a leather whitener. The picture drawn up of the manufacturer, Joseph Pickering of Sheffield, mirrored closely the rise of the industrious Victorian entrepreneur, the heyday of manufacturing Britain and the changes moving forward into modern times.

The synergy between webbing cleaning products and boot cleaning product became clearer and clearer and so the net spread wider to encompass the fascinating world (to me at least!) of dubbin and boot polish.