Some County Dry Cleaners Press Their Case for Picking Up and Delivering Clothes to Homes, Offices, Even Closets : LAUNDRY TO GO
The dry cleaning business is picking up. Literally.
A handful of Orange County companies have discovered that they can make a tidy profit by going out and gathering dirty laundry, rather than letting it come to them.
For a small service charge--or for no charge at all--half a dozen dry- cleaning companies will drop by your home or business, plunk your dirty clothes into a sack and then shuttle them back, sometimes the next day.
One of them, Kuster’s Quality Cleaners, will even hang cleaned gowns or shirts in your closets. Another, Rainbowman, claims to have once used a private airplane to please a customer who wanted same-day service.
Sounds impossible, you say?
Not according to the dry cleaners, who say they’ll stop at nothing to keep customers from getting steamed.
The trend toward home delivery is the latest step in the evolution of “cocooning” for affluent and young professionals. The same folks who are too busy to cook or go to the movies are also too busy to trek to the dry cleaners, business owners figure.
“It’s such an amenity. These people are so thrilled not to have to spend an hour out of their day,” said Seth Morrell, who owns Rainbowman in Costa Mesa. “And they know if they give it to us on Monday, they’ll have it in their hands by Thursday.”
Local entrepreneurs who hope to clean up in the delivery dry-cleaning business have opened companies such as Dress for Success in Costa Mesa, Artistic Cleaners in El Toro, and Wilson’s “We Care” Dry Cleaning & Laundry Service in San Juan Capistrano.
What customers are they aiming for? Well-to-do, two-income families in their mid-20s to 50s who make upwards of $50,000 a year. Ideally, they will plunk down at least $60 to $85 a month for clean clothes.
While there are more dry-cleaning vans these days, old-timers in the business are quick to point out that laundry delivery dates back 40 years, to days of milkmen and the Helms truck.
Take Kuster’s in Costa Mesa. The 42-year-old company has offered pickup services “since Day 1,” said Lana Spurlock, vice president and manager, whose father started the firm.
“Those were the good old days. Bread, milk--everything had home delivery,” said Jack Schwartz, the 60-year-old owner of Top Hat Cleaners & Laundry in Anaheim.
When Top Hat’s vans began rolling up to customers’ homes about 18 years ago, Schwartz recalled, most people had gotten used to toting their dirty clothes to the cleaners, so delivery services dwindled considerably.
But as more husbands and wives work, people have become pressed for time. So they’re leaving everything from socks and underwear to baby clothes and purses on the front porch or back step for the dry cleaners.
The pickup business, to be sure, hasn’t always been smooth. There are more than a few examples of companies that have folded.
The way most of the home-delivery services avoid losing their shirts these days is by having set routes that their vans follow on weekly schedules.
Top Hat’s Schwartz, for instance, has 300 to 400 route cards that tell him where to deliver and whether regular customers like heavy or medium starch on their shirts. “All the information’s right there,” he said, although after all his years in the business, Schwartz said the information “is in my head. I’m like the old horse that goes from stop to stop.”
At some homes, Schwartz is so familiar that the owners have left him keys to go inside and get their clothes. Others leave the laundry outside, then receive monthly bills in the mail. “I never see the majority of people,” he said.
The Dress for Success driver has a similar system. That company’s driver makes stops in Irvine on Mondays, Wednesdays or Fridays, then returns them the next day. The service has become so popular that up to 60% of the cleaner’s business comes from regular weekly stops at about 450 customers’ homes, said Deborah Buckingham, one of the owners.
On an average, the customers will spend about $17 each week, Buckingham said. That could be $4.50 to $5.50 for a blouse, $7.50 to $9.50 for a dress, or $3.25 for a pair of men’s slacks. “It’s the same price or less than a lot of cleaners in Irvine” who don’t deliver, said Buckingham. There is no extra charge for home delivery.
Buckingham said the company is able to add no-cost pickup because of the weekly delivery schedules. “It’s all a matter of your system,” she said. “When someone calls, we don’t run and pick up. With the route schedule, we know exactly how much we’ll pick up every day . . . and it more than pays for itself.”
It works so well, in fact, that Dress for Success grosses close to $40,000 each month, according to Buckingham.
At Rainbowman, Morrell agrees that “pretty tight territory management” is the key to delivery service. “Our trucks drive a fixed route. If they had to go all over hell and back, we’d really be spinning our wheels.”
The way that Rainbowman makes delivery work is by not accepting walk-in business. “The way we look at it, you can either have retail walk-in business with counter help and retail rent . . . or vans and drivers. The bottom line is very similar,” Morrell said.
To help the bottom line, Rainbowman won’t accept the occasional laundry bag. “If one person hardly ever uses us, we’ll cut ‘em,” Morrell said.
The company apparently is one of the very few in Orange County that emphasizes its service to businesses, rather than to customers’ homes. Morrell, who bought Rainbowman in November, 1987, believes that business service is more profitable because of the high concentration of customers.
A single office, for instance, could provide as many as 30 customers at a single stop. And even at office parks, “there might be only six or seven people, but there are four or five offices we go to. It doesn’t take a whole lot of time,” he explained.
Rainbowman makes scheduled stops at companies such as C.J. Segerstrom and Pacific Savings Bank, picking up dirty garments from about 600 regular customers, according to Morrell. Workers who use the service bring their laundry to a designated area such as a closet or break room. The bags are tagged with labels identifying the customers and the items inside.
When Morrell took over Rainbowman, the company was grossing about $1,900 a month. The service had a list of 800 business customers, but only about 100 were active, he said. Morrell set about to improve the company’s act, mainly by emphasizing service. Today, Rainbowman grosses about $18,000 each month and Morrell is hoping to franchise the operation.
Competitors say the office pickup business is risky. Several who have tried it say that customers--especially men--just don’t like to air their dirty laundry in public by hauling it to the office.
And even if people are willing to bring their dirty clothes to the office, other problems sometimes must be ironed out.
“You don’t see the people, so it’s hard to collect from them,” said Schwartz, who tried--and gave up on--an office delivery service. “When people have to bring it to work, they forget it. . . . A lot of times, it wasn’t worth going.”
But Morrell says he isn’t worried.
And conventional dry cleaners also don’t appear to be threatened. “We haven’t had any demand for pickup and delivery,” said Kathy Ellis, manager of Continental 1 Hour Cleaners in El Toro. “They’re not cutting in on us. There’s more than enough business.”
