Hello, Kansas City. Welcome back to the Bespoke Automotive Refinement podcast. We are so glad that you joined us today.
If you haven’t yet checked it out, please do go through our past episodes and hear more about what Kansas City Car Detailing Services that Bespoke has to offer, but also there’s some really great content, how-tos, insights, do’s and don’ts, everything you need to know about how to maintain and preserve the quality of your car. Today, we have with us Thomas Thill, the founder and creator of Bespoke. Thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your wisdom.
Thank you so much for having me on. You know, I just, I love coming on here and talking about all the different Kansas City Car Detailing Services that we offer and breaking down what services are included in all of our packages. One thing we talk about a lot is how to preserve the exterior of the car, how to preserve the paint, and how to keep your car looking nice in the winter.
We’ve even talked about iron remover, things like that, but today I want to talk about how do you maintain the interior of your car, how do you maintain its cleanliness, the longevity of the leather, if you have fabric in your car, how do you clean those, and then also what kind of services that Bespoke has to offer in order to make your car feel and look at its absolute best. One thing that I’ve seen you do on somebody’s car is when somebody uses tanning cream or lotion and they’re wearing shorts and they sit in their car, it kind of creates this white film on the seats. Now, is that something that you are able to remove or restore the leather of somebody’s car if there are stains?
Absolutely.
So, I remember in your particular instance you had reached out to me and you had told me like you had tried a couple of different things to get it off. Do you remember what those were? Did you use a detail spray? First I tried water, that did nothing, and then I tried like leather conditioning wipes you can get from like any Walmart gas station, that kind of thing, and at that point I was like oh there must not be a way to fix this because I didn’t want to use like house cleaning products on the leather. So, leather is very porous.
So, if you were to put leather under a microscope, it has tons of tiny little holes and over time those little holes get filled with body oils. You know, if you go to the gym, if you sweat a lot and then you sit in your leather seats, you’re gonna get like a salty white ring around your leather seats and then you know in your instance they got the tanning lotions and tanning oils on there. So, going over it with a water or a wipe isn’t necessarily going to get the oils out of the pores or the salts, body salts, whatever, out of the pore.
So, you can 100% get that out but you have to use a certain type of degreaser, a non-acidic degreaser, and you have to use a special brush designed for leather to work those pores without scratching it. So, basically what we do, what I do when I do an interior detail is I start with using just an interior detailer on the leather and that gets everything off the surface. That
shows me what’s in the pores, that shows me what needs to be worked out.
Then I use a special degreaser, it’s a non-acidic degreaser, so if it dries on there it’s not gonna damage, not gonna leave an etching in the leather. I spray the entire seat down and then I go over it with what looks like a paintbrush but it’s actually a leather brush in a circular motion. I work all of the leather areas trying to get all of the contaminants out of the pores of the leather.
I actually remember I sent you a video of that. You were able to see like… It was unbelievable what you’re able to get, like they look better than new. Yes.
It felt good, it smelled good, it was incredible. Yes, so leather is, on one hand it’s extremely delicate, but on another hand it’s very durable. So you can get a lot, you can work leather really really really hard and restore it.
You know, there’s a lot of people that have an older car that has cracks in the seats. I’m sure you’ve seen that before. A lot of people think that their seats need to be restored.
They don’t. They need to be cleaned and reconditioned. So especially on tan seats you’ll begin to see cracking on the side bolstering.
You may look at it and think well it needs to be restored, but really what it needs is to be cleaned and reconditioned. When you see cracks in a leather seat in the side bolstering, what you’re actually seeing is the pores of the leather has been stretched out in those areas and it’s picking up all of the dirt in your jeans and your pants. You have to scrub it a lot harder to get the dirt and the oils out of those cracks, but once you clean them and once you recondition them, I can make cracked leather look almost brand new.
Wow, that’s amazing. When I bought one of my Corvettes, I bought a C6 E06 and it was a very rare specced car. It had the silverish white interior when I bought it and the car when I bought it was in extremely rough shape.
You know, the paint was oxidized. The paint on that car actually looked like the hood of that truck that I worked on. It was very oxidized and so the interior had never been properly cleaned outside of someone just hitting it with Armor All Wipes and that beautiful white leather on the seats just looked ruined.
I think a lot of people that test drove the car and looked at the car thought it needed new leather. That was one of the first things that I did was I deep cleaned and reconditioned all of the leather in that interior and it made those white seats look brand new and very plush and rich again. It’s amazing what you can do to restore a car, but also if somebody just needs a basic cleaning, you’re also able to help them in that instance.
Another area that people contact and ask about a lot with our Kansas City Car Detailing Service packages is if you were able to remove pet hair. That’s a very common thing that people have when their pets ride in the car and then there’s pet hair everywhere or if it’s in the fibers of the material of their seats, things like that. Are you able to remove pet hair? Absolutely.
Early in my detailing career, back when I was too broke to do this full-time, I got a job working at a car dealership that was notorious for buying repo cars. So these cars never came in clean. They were always very dirty and I got to learn how to remove pet hair extremely efficiently.
I used to remove pet hair when the carpet was wet. I actually learned that wetting it down gives the carpet friction for the hair to stick to versus when it’s dry, it doesn’t have friction. So when it comes to pet hair, I begin by blowing out all of the carpet with compressed air.
That removes a lot of it. Then I have an assortment of brushes that can work the carpet to almost loosen the fibers of the carpet to be able to get the hair out. If that doesn’t work, I have what’s called a pet rock.
A pet rock, you scrape it along the carpet and that picks up any other pet hair that wasn’t coming out before. That’s amazing. So if somebody is wanting to have the interior part of their car done, what packages do you offer for that? What levels? Well, I have so many different Kansas City car detailing services and packages.
I would say when it comes to pet hair or cleaning the leather, that’s something that you can add onto a maintenance detail if it’s really needed. But the ultimate detail and the complete detail, both those services are included in that. So let’s say you get a car, is that something that somebody can request to have or will you automatically upgrade their package if needed? I will only upgrade the package if the car is left in my care and the person is not home, the customer is not home.
So if someone purchases a Kansas City car detailing service from me and they leave me their car and they leave, there’s trash in the interior and it’s excessively soiled on the interior, that’s something that’s just going to be tacked on because no one’s going to be told you’re going to be charged extra because your car is extra dirty. As far as pet hair removal and leather cleaning, the leather cleaning is included in the complete detail and the ultimate detail. And if the pet hair is very minimal on an interior, I don’t charge up.
Like when I did your Jeep, it didn’t really have that much for me to upcharge it. But if someone has a Husky or a dog that sheds a lot and it’s white hair and a black interior, I will 100% be upcharged. So if somebody wants to receive a Kansas City car detailing service performed on their vehicle by Bespoke Automotive Refinement, how do they get ahold of you? So you can reach out to us at 620-282-0402 or you can go online to bespokerefinement.com. You can look at all of our different Kansas City car detailing services and you can look at all of the vehicles that we’ve worked on.
You can look at the different packages that we offer that break down all the different services that we offer within those packages for all of our Kansas City car detailing services.