I thought I would share my experience regarding my 2 year old leather sofa, one year after adopting 2 cats. Let me preface this by saying, even though one was a small kitten and the other only 1 1/2-2 years old when I got them, they are "good" cats. They have never used the furniture as scratching posts and these scratches are all from jumping onto or off the furniture or chasing each other on it. So if you have cats that use your furniture as a scratching post, I expect your experience will be very different. I also have kept the sofa covered with throws as much as possible, especially when I am not home, but sometimes they slip and stuff happens.

This is what I mostly saw on the back behind the cushions and less so on the arms. I have since put a matching piece of leather from H&M over one arm and that has stopped the marks there. If you were willing to use arm caps it would go a long way towards protecting against that. The large back cushion is a scratch I just found when I got home last week and the throw I had covered it with had slipped off. I suspect a chase ensued after I left for work, but I cannot prove it, lol.





At Duane's suggestion I requested a bottle of touch up dye that H&M provides at no charge. Today I finally took out a fine liner paint brush to see what it could do. I am happier with the arms and back than the cushion, but they are all a big improvement. I am posting larger photos of the retouched areas because I want you to be able to see that they are still there if you look closely enough.





[url=https://flic.kr/p/2jD1uXx]

My "technique" was to paint over the scratch and then use a paper towel to remove any excess from the non scratched area by just rubbing it over over the areas with the wet dye with the paper towel. For the most part, the dye absorbed into the scratched areas immediately but was still wet so could be removed from the finished area. When it started to dry on the finished areas before I removed it, a bit of saliva on the paper towel and rubbing it well removed it. A wet paper towel as back up might do the same thing. The back cushion has a bit more texture to the leather and the back and arms are smoother, so the scratches are still more visible on the back cushion because of the texture was interrupted.

I will try to wait a couple more years and then consider weather to invest in replacing any of the cushion casings. That will depend on the condition of the rest of the sofa, how active the cats still are, etc. I will be keeping an eye on whather H&M keeps my sofa and the leather in stock in case I want to replace any before they discontinue it, if they do eventually. I wanted to share this because I found little information available about this when I was looking for it. I hope it helps.

I need to do my cleaning and conditioning in the near future, I have done it a couple or 3 times, but need to do it more often. I will be interesting in seeing if the cleaning removes any of the "touch ups" I did. I wanted to apply the dye before the cleaning and conditioning because I didn't want the conditioner to prevent the dye from being absorbed into the scratched areas. Not sure if that would be an issue or not. I will be covering any remaining little areas before doing it in any case.