When Todd Feigenbaum and Canadian
marketing guru Darcy Moen shared the stage for a seminar at
Clean ’05 in Orlando, they had already worked together
for over seven years. Oddly enough though, that was the first
time the two had ever met.
“The conversations that Darcy and I
have probably spent the most time on over the years would be
trying to get into the mind of the drycleaning consumer and
figuring out what makes them tick and how we can sell more to
them,” Todd explained.
Ever passionate about learning, Todd has
earned an undergraduate degree in political science, a
master’s degree in public administration, and a Ph.D. in
educational administration and policy studies.
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“Let me put it this way. Before I
got an unlimited calling plan, my phone bills were $200 to $300
a month to Canada sometimes,” he laughed.
The expense of the phone calls may have
been high, but Todd believed he couldn’t afford not to
call, especially with the industry’s slowdown of recent
years. He thinks marketing can make or break a company in such
troubling times.
“It is always of interest with the
continuing onslaught of casual wear and there are fewer
customers to go around in many markets,” he added.
“I think one of our challenges is can we get our existing
customers to spend more time with us?”
Feigenbaum Cleaners has been in business
for almost 90 years now, so surviving a slumping economy
doesn’t worry Todd much. He knows that two generations of
his family struggled through their own trials and tribulations
long before him.
Originally, Todd’s grandfather
Herman hailed from Hungary. At the age of 17, he went off to
London to apprentice with his uncle who was a tailor. Believing
there was no future for his particular skills back in Europe,
he opted to travel to America.
“He found a job in one of the
infamous sweatshops on the Lower East Side,” Todd said.
“My grandmother came over by herself when she was just
16, not speaking any English, I believe. They met in New York,
got married and had three children. They decided that they
wanted to get out of the city and my grandfather heard there
was a tailor shop for sale in Whitehall, NY, which is probably
about 15 to 20 miles from Glens Falls.”
The Feigenbaum family boarded a train for
the two-day trip to Whitehall. After stopping overnight,
however, plans quickly changed. Todd’s aunt — who
was two years old at the time — threw a bit of a temper
tantrum and Todd’s grandmother — pregnant with his
father Louis — suffered from morning sickness.
Instead of proceeding on to Whitehall,
Herman Feigenbaum decided there was a golden opportunity right
where he was.
“What my grandfather noticed was
there was no drycleaners in Glens Falls,” Todd noted.
“The nearest cleaners was 50 miles south in Albany. To
get your suit cleaned, you had to send it to Albany and it
would take days to get it down, get cleaned and get
back.”
In the beginning, Feigenbaum Cleaners was
a humble operation. For starters, the business was literally
run out of the family home.
“Their living room was the call
office,” Todd said. “They did the cleaning in the
back room and had a separate tailor shop a few blocks away
where they would take the clothes over and press them. Then
they’d have the clothes hanging on racks in their living
room and people would come pick them up.”
The family also offered home delivery
service using one of the first delivery trucks in town. Prior
to that, Todd’s father Louis often transported some
garments to customers on his bicycle.
The company underwent major changes years
later when Louis Feigenbaum and his brother Bill came back home
from service in World War II.
“Behind the home, there was an old
19th century horse livery that had become a silk factory in the
early part of last century,” Todd explained. “It
had gone out of business during the Depression, so they bought
the barn and cleaned out all of the leftover silk fabric and
expanded their business into the barn. They were able to put in
a lot of new equipment.”
Then, in 1952, the two brothers added on
a separate cleaning room for big belly washers and built a new
call office, an office and a fur storage vault.
“The vault was built very
well,” Todd said. “During the Cuban Missile Crisis
in 1962, that’s where we were going to hide out if things
got a little hot.”
In the 1960s and 1970s, the family
struggled through the advent of wash-and-wear clothing and a
subsequent decline in business. Todd’s mother, Margaret,
joined her husband to help run the plant in the mid-1970s. A
decade later, Todd and his wife, Julie Frazier, got involved in
the business.
Before he became the owner of Feigenbaum
Cleaners, Todd had already spent a lot of time in other fields
of work.
In Washington, DC, he worked for an
organization that placed students and internships in Capitol
Hill.
After earning a degree in political
science and education at Vassar College, Todd worked for a
management consulting firm in Cambridge.
In the mid-1980s, Todd was working as a
research analyst in Albany for the state legislature when he
noticed that his father’s health was failing.
“I said to him, ‘Why
don’t you let me come in and help you build the business
up? You’ll sell it in a year, maybe, or I’ll take
over... whatever’,” Todd recalled. “We worked
out all of the plans. He passed away the next morning. I kind
of got thrust into it rather quickly.”
At that time, Todd was 30 years old and
had a little knowledge about the business.
“I knew a little bit about
maintaining equipment and inspection and assembly,” he
said. “I knew a little about spotting and pressing. I had
done all of the jobs a bit, but there was a lot to
learn.”
The first thing he did was send himself
to every class that NCA ran and signed up for every
correspondence course from IFI.
“I learned every job in the plant
because I didn’t want to be in a position where an
employee can say, ‘I’m the only one who can do
this’,” he said.
Despite all of the knowledge Todd gained,
the business still struggled for a couple of years. However,
things turned around shortly after Todd enlisted the aid of
consultant Sid Tuchman who helped him realize that he could
improve his production systems and be more efficient.
“In this industry, we’re
often putting out fires,” Todd said. “There are so
many pressures to get the work out on a daily basis that we
don’t take the time to pull back and ask why we keep
having the same problems.”
One problem that Todd worked on was
making his marketing more effective. He also added drop stores
— he has five locations altogether with 25 employees,
plus they offer delivery routes and valet service at six
hotels.
One of the staples of Feigenbaum Cleaners
has always been fine quality — the kind you expect from a
company started by a European tailor.
“We are always trying to do things
the right way... lifting the pocket flaps on suit coats to take
out the pocket impression, pressing every collar — a lot
of those details of the higher quality work that we have always
been known for,” Todd explained.
That commitment to excellence was one of
the reasons Feigenbaum Cleaners was chosen to clean the Olympic
Torch relay team’s clothing in 2002. It was fast
turn-around work, but nothing new for the plant who had cleaned
all of the costumes for the production crew of the film Billy
Bathgate (which starred Dustin Hoffman) ten years prior. A lot
of old gangster suits, muddy jockey uniforms and fancy gowns
had to be cleaned in a hurry.
“Our crew would work all day long
— it was October,” Todd recalled. “We had a
lot of work coming out of our storage vault that had to be
pressed in addition to all of the seasonal stuff coming in.
Then, we’d take a break and come back at 9 p.m. and the
movie truck would arrive. We would work until maybe 3 in the
morning and get their truck loaded back up, come home and start
at 7:30 a.m. all over again.”
Those were the kinds of jobs Todd’s
father used to warn him about.
“My father had never really wanted
me to come into the business because it was a tough
business,” he noted.
Tough or not, Todd has managed to
maintain a successful plant while keeping very active in other
pursuits.
He belongs to two chambers of commerce in
the Glens Falls area and works with the Warren County Economic
Development Corporation. He is also involved in numerous
community organizations, including the school board in Glens
Falls.
With so much education under his belt,
Todd could probably excel at dozens of other career choices,
yet he is content to remain a drycleaner.
“There are probably a few other
things I could do, but it’s only taken me 20 years to
figure out how to be a drycleaner, so maybe I’ll stick
with that for a while,” he laughed.
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