My Converse All Stars had reached the point where I was embarrassed to wear them in public. The canvas had gone from off-white to a shade somewhere between cream and weak tea, and the grime had settled into the seams and around the collar in a way that no amount of wiping with a damp cloth would ever touch.
I had already tried throwing them away mentally, so buying a shoe cleaner was not exactly a considered purchase. It was more like: I was scrolling Tokopedia late at night, saw a shoecare package for around Rp100.000, and thought why not. My expectations were genuinely low. Rp100.000 is not serious money, so I was not expecting a transformation — I was expecting a slightly better version of the same yellow shoes.
What the Package Actually Contains
I bought the SimplyKIT shoecare package on Tokopedia, and it turns out it is not one product — it is two, which ended up being the most useful thing about it:
- A 400 ml can of foam shoe cleaner. The label says "Foam Pembersih Sepatu — Untuk Semua Material", which is foam cleaner for all materials. It comes out of the can as a foam rather than a liquid, which matters a lot in practice.
- A zip pouch with the SimplyKIT brushes and a bar of soap. The pouch also has the brand's stamped logo on it, which is a nice touch if you care about not having loose brushes rolling around a drawer.
The whole thing is made in Indonesia, and the packaging is in Indonesian and English. That is worth mentioning because the instructions matter later.
Two Products, Two Jobs
I did not use the same product on the same shoe twice, which turned out to be the most informative part of this whole experiment. I left one shoe completely alone and cleaned only the other, so I could compare the two products directly instead of guessing from memory.
The foam is for the bottom and the sole. You spray it straight onto the rubber, scrub it with the brush, and wipe it off with a microfiber cloth. Foam is genuinely good here. It spreads across the sole, gets into the tread pattern and the little grooves around the edge, and the grit that comes off is visible on the cloth afterwards. The sole of my shoe went from a dull grey to something close to the colour it should have been.
The soap bar is for the canvas. The instructions specifically say that for sneakers — kets in the Indonesian text — the soap is the better option, and after using it I understand why. Foam gets absorbed straight into canvas. You spray it on, and instead of sitting on the surface where you can scrub it, it soaks in and you end up spreading the dirt around more than lifting it. The soap bar gives you something you can actually work with on fabric, because it lathers into a foam only after you have rubbed it onto the brush with water.
I have since used the same two products on a pair of non-sneaker shoes, and the whole thing was even easier — no canvas to worry about, no absorption to fight, and the sole came out just as clean.
The Process
Neither product is complicated, and neither needs any special technique. This is the entire routine:
- Wet the brush. Dip it in a small amount of water. Not a bucket, just enough to get the bristles wet.
- Apply the cleaner. For the foam, spray it directly onto the part of the shoe you are cleaning. For the soap, put two or three drops onto the wet brush.
- Scrub. Small circular motions, working section by section. The instructions say to scrub with the brush, and that is genuinely all you need — no special brushes, no machines.
- Wipe. Microfiber cloth, and wipe rather than rub, so you lift the dirt off instead of pushing it back into the fabric.
That is it. Four steps, and the whole pair takes longer because you stop to inspect your work than because the cleaning itself is hard.
Before
Here is the pair as it looked before I touched anything. Both shoes, same lighting, same angle — this is what Rp100.000 was up against.
The discolouration is fairly even, which is a little misleading in a photo. In person the dirty parts are concentrated: the toe cap, the collar, and a general yellowing across the toe box that no longer looks like canvas at all.
After
One shoe cleaned, one shoe untouched. Left is cleaned, right is not.
The difference is obvious even before you look closely. The cleaned shoe reads as off-white canvas again, and the two shoes no longer look like they came from the same pair. The red trim on the cleaned shoe looks brighter too, mostly because the canvas next to it stopped being the dirtiest thing in the frame.
What It Does Not Fix
Being honest about this, because it is the part most shoe cleaner reviews skip.
There are stains that did not move. The darkest grime right at the edge of the toe box and along the seam where the rubber meets the canvas is still visible on the cleaned shoe — noticeably lighter than before, but not gone. No amount of extra scrubbing made those specific marks budge, which tells me they are not just surface dirt sitting on top of the fabric. They have had years to work into the fibres.
So the honest framing is: this cleans and refreshes a sneaker very well, and it does not rescue a badly neglected one completely. If you want a pair that looks new again, a cleaner is not the answer. But if you want a pair you would actually wear again instead of hiding in the back of the closet, it is absolutely enough.
Is It Worth Rp100.000?
For me, yes, and the reason is not the single pair — it is the number of pairs after it.
I paid roughly Rp100.000 once, for a package with enough cleaner in it to go through many pairs of shoes, and the first pair already came out visibly better. Divide that price by the number of shoes it actually gets through and the cost per pair is small. It is also the kind of purchase that lives in a bathroom cabinet and gets used, rather than the kind that expires in a drawer.
The two-product design is what makes it good value for me. I would have been annoyed if it had been a foam-only package, because foam on canvas is genuinely the wrong tool, and the can even says "for all materials", which is a much broader promise than the foam deserves.
Who should buy it: anyone with canvas sneakers who has been meaning to clean them but never wanted to spend real money on a proper service. The low price removes the risk, and the soap-plus-brush combination does more than I expected.
Who should skip it: anyone whose shoes have deep, set-in discolouration and who expects a professional-level restoration. This is maintenance, not resurrection.