Hide & Heel · A Pettigrew Lab utility · Coming soon
Boots don’t dry out on a schedule. They dry out on your feet.
Hide & Heel is an odometer for leather. Log a pair, say roughly how often they go on, and it counts wear hours and miles instead of days on a calendar. When a pair crosses its line, your phone says so, by name.
- Being built now. Android first, then iPhone. Runs with the phone in airplane mode.
- $0.99 once. No account, no subscription, no ads.
Lucchese ropers
Oil tanned · Double leather sole
- Next service
- 3 days overdue
- Odometer
- 214 mi. Heel and tap at 86%.
- Air
- 22% relative humidity
NotificationTime to saddle soap and oil the Luccheses.
Why this exists
A paper tag in the boot, or a spreadsheet nobody opens
People who wear real leather already know what it needs. Saddle soap and conditioner on the boots, edge dressing on the welt, protectant on the suede, a cobbler before the heel eats into the stack. What nobody can hold in their head is when, for eight different pairs, each worn a wildly different amount.
So the fix ends up being a paper tag tucked in a boot, or a phone reminder set for the first of the quarter. Both are wrong in the same two ways. The quarterly reminder oils a pair that sat in the closet all spring, which is how a finish goes gummy. And it says nothing at all about the pair that went through a wet, salted October at ten hours a day, which is the pair that actually needed it in week three.
Wardrobe apps do not help. They are built to plan outfits and count what you own. Not one of them knows that a boot has a heel, that a heel has a life measured in miles, or that the same pair asks for oil twice as often in Denver as it does in Houston.
How it counts
Four things, and then it leaves you alone
The setup is a minute a pair. After that the app is a notification every few weeks and nothing else.
Log the pair
Maker, leather, what the sole is built on, and the day you last conditioned them. A photo if you want one. That is the whole form.
Say how often they go on
Days a week and hours a day, roughly. Roughly is enough: a pair worn five days at ten hours is a different animal from one worn on Sundays, and the app only needs to tell those apart.
It reads the air
Dry air pulls oils out of leather faster, which is why the same boots crack in Colorado and never do on the Gulf. The app takes humidity from the phone’s own sensor where there is one, and from a number you type in where there isn’t.
Your phone says the pair’s name
When a pair crosses its line, a local notification fires. Not a digest, not a badge on a folder. The name of the boots and the job they need.
Try it
The model, running right here
This is the same module the app ships, doing the same arithmetic on numbers you set. Move anything and watch the date move with it.
Next conditioning
4 weeks29 days
Counted from the day you last conditioned them. Today that lands on October 24, 2026.
- Hydration lost per week
- 15.8 points
- Wear hours in between
- 206 hours
- Miles on the soles in between
- 83 miles
The notification that firesTime to saddle soap and oil the Luccheses.
Bickmore or mink oil, worked in warm, one thin coat at a time.
These starting numbers are tuned to land where bootmakers’ own guidance lands, not measured off a hide. The app moves them: mark a pair conditioned earlier or later than it predicted, and that pair’s own rate follows what you actually saw.
And the odometer half
Miles are the argument at the cobbler’s counter. The heel is what gets there first, and by a long way, which is the single most useful thing a new owner learns from watching it.
| Part | Miles before a cobbler | At this pattern |
|---|---|---|
| Heel and tap | 250 | 3 months. Wears three times faster than anything under the ball of your foot. |
| Leather single sole | 400 | 5 months. The dress sole. Thin, and the first thing rain finds. |
| Leather double sole | 700 | 8 months. What most western boots are built on. |
| Studded rubber | 900 | 10 months. Quiet, dry, and it hides its own wear until the studs go flat. |
| Commando lug | 1,200 | 14 months. Outlives the welt if you let it, which is the actual mistake. |
What it tracks
Five jobs, each on its own clock
Conditioning is the one people think of. It is not the one that costs money when you miss it.
Clean and condition
The main clock. Saddle soap, then the conditioner that suits the leather, on the pair the model says is thirstiest.
Heel and sole
The odometer. A heel caught at two hundred and fifty miles is a twenty dollar job. The same heel at four hundred has eaten into the stacked leather under it and the number changes.
Edge dressing and welt
The strip nobody looks at until it greys out. Comes due on its own cycle, well behind the conditioner.
Waterproofing and salt
Log a wet day and the protectant clock resets shorter. Road salt gets its own flag, because salt is not weather, it is a thing you rinse off tonight.
Rest days
A pair worn two days running never dries out between. The app tracks the rotation and tells you which pair has had a day off, which is free and buys more life than any tin does.
Leathers
Five hides, five different answers
Every one of these has a different rate in the model, and a different tin at the end of it. Thirstiest first.
| Leather | What goes on it | The thing owners get wrong |
|---|---|---|
| Veg tan and bridle | Saddle soap, then a light coat of conditioner. Let it sit overnight. | The thirstiest thing in the closet, and the one most likely to be left alone because it still looks fine. |
| Oil tanned work leather | Bickmore or mink oil, worked in warm, one thin coat at a time. | Oil darkens it. That is the finish doing its job, not damage, and a second coat will not undo the first. |
| Chrome tanned jacket leather | A cream conditioner. Skip the oil: it will go blotchy on a finished hide. | Hangs in a closet eleven months of the year, which is where most of its drying happens. |
| Suede and nubuck | Brass brush and a protectant spray. Nothing that soaks in. | Conditioner is the wrong answer here. Hide & Heel tracks the protectant instead. |
| Shell cordovan | A deer bone on the ripples, and conditioner about twice a year. | Almost everybody over conditions it. The app will tell you to leave it alone. |
The deal
Ninety nine cents, and then nothing
It works with the radio off
Every calculation happens on the phone. Put it in airplane mode in the barn and the app behaves exactly the same, because there was never a server in the loop.
One price, once
Ninety nine cents at the store, and that is the end of it. No subscription, no tins to buy from us, no affiliate links dressed up as advice.
Nothing leaves the phone
No account, no sign in, no analytics and no ads. Your collection is nobody’s business, and it is a poor thing to hand an advertiser anyway.
Questions
What people ask first
Do I have to log every single wear?
No. You set roughly how often a pair goes on and the app counts from that. Tapping a pair on a day you wore it makes the count sharper, and skipping it for a month costs you nothing worse than a forecast that is a few days off.
Where does the humidity come from?
From the phone’s own humidity sensor where the phone has one, and otherwise from a number you type in once for the room the leather lives in. Neither one needs the internet, and neither one needs your location.
What if the app is wrong about my boots?
Then it stops being wrong. Mark a pair conditioned earlier or later than the app predicted and that pair’s own rate moves toward what you saw. The shipped numbers are a starting point, not a verdict.
Does it tell me to buy a particular conditioner?
It names the kind of product the leather wants, like a cream rather than an oil on a finished hide. It has no affiliate links and no store, and it will never sell a slot in that recommendation.
Does it work for jackets, bags and saddles?
Jackets and bags, yes, and they are on the list of leathers. Tack is the same model with different numbers and will come after launch, once there is a saddler to check the figures against.
How do I get my collection out of it?
Export the whole thing to a file from settings, any time, no charge. It is your list. An app that holds your data hostage is a worse app.
Who is building it
Joel Pettigrew
Pettigrew Lab
Pettigrew Lab is a family run studio that ships one working product a month. Hide & Heel is this month’s: small, offline, and the kind of tool that earns its place by being right about one thing.
Want to know when it ships?
One email when it is in the store, and nothing else ever. If you keep leather and something on this page is wrong, that email is also where to tell me, and I would rather hear it before launch than after.