For Barbara “Bobbie” Harvey, there was never a question about what she was going to do with her
life. Her parents, Fran and Theo Sadler, started the family cleaning business
in 1951, and Barbara began helping out when she was just a toddler.
She was a natural for the job, so much so that she never found a need for
another one.
Almost six decades later, she owns and operates the family business, which is
now in Severna Park, MD.
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Geographically speaking, Barbara may not have needed to move at all; however,
she has managed to move a long way up in the industry.
Last June at Clean ’07, she was inducted as the first female president of the Drycleaning and
Laundry Institute (formerly IFI). Oddly enough, her term coincided with the
association’s centennial birthday bash.
“I tell people it only took me a hundred years to get there as the first woman
president,” she laughed.
Now past the halfway point of her one-year term, Barbara is very pleased with
the results so far.
“They haven’t impeached me yet,” she said. “There haven’t been a whole lot of dragons to slay this year, so it’s been a pretty comfortable year.”
It has also been a crazy one. It kicked off with a wild celebration when IFI
hosted its 100th birthday bash in Las Vegas, and Barbara was extremely
impressed with the member turnout.
“It was a great party,” she recalled. “We expected maybe 350 to 500 people, and we had 900, almost 1,000 people, show
up. You can’t buy that kind of camaraderie — you know, for the members to get together like that. Let’s face it, the lights were coming up, the band was going down, the food was gone
and people were still there.”
In addition to kicking off her presidency with a bang, Barbara also had the
pleasure of being the first person in that post under the association’s new name. In fact, it was Barbara who headed the group that instigated the
change.
“We appointed a committee and we did a little bit of polling and a lot of
talking,” she said. “We probably had 20 variations of names before we came down to DLI. We put the
laundry back in. When it was International Fabricare, it didn’t say drycleaning. It didn’t say laundry.”
Instead, it said “fabricare,” a word that Barbara had firsthand experience with — thanks to the name of her own cleaning business.
“My business is called Fabricare By Fran and people often come up to me and say, ‘What do you sell — fabrics?’ I say, ‘No, I care for fabrics.’“
Barbara’s lifelong career in the industry began when she was only three years old.
“I never had a babysitter. I always went to work, putting struts on hangers,” she laughed.
Initially, the business was simply a “bobtail route” that the Sadler family oversaw, sending the work to a cleaning plant to be
worked on. However, in a few short years, Barbara’s parents bought a plant and taught themselves the tricks of the trade.
“Then, in the mid-1960s, we bought a perc plant in the Glen Burnie area,” she explained. “It was a laundromat/drycleaning plant combination. We had that plant up until
1983, and then I moved the plant as we know it now to Severna Park, and split
the laundromat in a separate location.”
Barbara learned a lot at the plant as her experience grew. In 1969, she won the
Stamford Young Manager of the Year Award and was given a scholarship for four
weeks of management classes at NID in Silver Spring. Still, despite her
experience, there was one area in which she lacked expertise.
“My dad kind of believed that the women in his life should be ladies and should
not be doing the hard chemical cleaning and things like that,” she said. “I had a rude awakening when he died in 1973. I was 25 and had never done any
spotting or drycleaning or pressing.”
It was a difficult time for Barbara and her mother, and, unfortunately, a
decision had to be made quickly.
“When dad died, we literally came back to work the day after we buried him and
mom said, ‘We either have to sell the plant or run it, and if we’re going to run it, we’re going to run it right.’ I said, ‘We’re going to run it.’“
Theo Sadler soon gave her daughter an airline ticket to Joliet, IL, where she
would take a comprehensive preventive maintenance course.
“I was kind of amused in that class,” Barbara recalled. “It was 17 men and me. It’s been that way most of my life.”
Undaunted, Barbara finished the preventive maintenance class, and, about six
weeks later, returned to Joliet for advanced spotting training.
“That was good because I had never had any spotting,” she laughed.
The drive to learn has always fueled Barbara, who now is proud to display her
accomplishments out front.
“I have what I call the ego wall at my front counter,” she said. “It’s full of certificates. Customers come in and say, ‘Wow, you must know what you’re doing.’ But, if you don’t tout it, how will your customers know?”
Customers who peruse the ego wall will discover that Barbara won the DLI
Meritorious Service Award in 2001 for Industry Positive Recognition, and was
also a 10+ membership sponsor at the Jolly Belin reception at Clean ’99.
She is triple certified, as well, which means she has achieved the status of
CED, CPD and CPW through DLI.
Receiving honors and certificates is nice, but for Barbara, it’s really about achieving the best possible quality for the people who support
her business.
“I think that you have to give the customer everything they expect and a little
bit more,” she noted.
Long before she was inducted as president of DLI, Barbara served more than her
share of time on other industry-related boards.
She held various positions for the Coin Laundry Association of Maryland for over
20 years, including three terms as president. Additionally, she was president
of the MidAtlantic Association of Cleaners before she earned a District
Committee Member spot at DLI at the turn of the century.
“Almost every board I’ve sat on there have been little to no women, whether it be CLA, MAC or again
now with DLI,” she noted.
Despite that fact, she continued to move her way up the ladder. Next, she was
voted in as the director for DLI’s District 2. By that time, one of her goals was eventually to be president of
the association, and she is quite proud of accomplishing it.
“It was a goal in life, probably for the entire eight years I’ve been on the DLI board,” she said. “I didn’t really come to this position with an agenda, like some people do. My goal is
to make the industry run smoothly. I’d like to leave it a little better than when I started.”
So far, Barbara is content with her performance during the first half of her
term.
“I wouldn’t have it any other way, she said.
According to Barbara, one of the major issues that member cleaners are most
concerned with across the country is increasingly stringent solvent
regulations.
Though she wetcleans anywhere from 30 to 50 percent of her garments, Barbara
still uses perc for the rest (and has for over four decades). So, the issue
affects her directly, too.
DLI has warned cleaners that despite perc’s strengths as a solvent, it might not be the best horse to bet on in the long
run. On a personal level, Barbara deals with the issue by keeping updated on
the latest technological breakthroughs.
“I think it will be very interesting to see how Street’s new Solvair comes along,” she said. “It’s the biggest thing we’ve seen in a long time, actually, that could really benefit the industry.”
When it comes to giving advice to cleaners, Barbara certainly has an abundance.
“Watch out for the little things,” she emphasized. “Be attentive to your customers. Give them what they need. Educate yourself. Use
the services at DLI. My God, there’s so many. It pays for itself to be a member as far as products and education.
Utilize it.”
While she continually learns as much as possible, Barbara also tries to find
time to teach others.
On occasion, she delivers informational seminars. In fact, she’ll teach one on preventive maintenance at the North Carolina Association of
Launderers and Cleaners’ convention later this year.
She is well aware of the fact that it is the same subject of the course she
attended early in her career that helped her keep Fabricare By Fran open for
business. Oddly enough, taking that course also lead to some much needed
publicity, too.
When an employee for a local newspaper heard Barbara had attended the course, he
had a clever idea for a front page story in the business section.
“He asked me, ‘Do you have a gown to wear?’“ she recalled. “So, I wore a white gown with Malibu feathers. He put me on a ladder with a
two-foot wrench in my hand.”
Next to the picture, the caption read: “Ms. Barbara Harvey is quite proper, decked out like a Broadway show-stopper, but
this delicate wench has a way with a wrench. As a maintenance man, she’s a whopper.”
“I’ll tell you what, that was the best publicity ever,” she laughed. “For a year or more, people were coming in and saying, ‘You’re the wench with the wrench.’”
