National Clothesline

I had the opportunity to visit the new Tide Cleaners in Overland Park, KS, recently and I have quite a story to tell.

This is a very nice place! I was impressed immediately. The most obvious feature is the appearance of the building and the call office — and it really smells nice in there!

It doesn’t look like a drycleaner. I had the opportunity to interview Kash Shaikh, Tide Cleaners External Rollout Leader, at the Procter & Gamble headquarters in Cincinnati and he made it very clear that one of P&G’s goals was to build a store that didn’t look like a drycleaner.

They succeeded! P&G has been studying the retail drycleaning industry for many years and they have learned some interesting things. Among them, they found that 60 percent of drycleaning customers are dissatisfied with their drycleaner’s quality and/or service.

Also, they disclosed a statistic that I have never heard before: 80 percent of drycleaning customers come from within a four-mile radius of the store.

Naturally, they hope to broaden that circle for their stores. It is an interesting statistic. What a way to measure if you are attractive enough to your customers that they will go out of their way for your services!

This plant was designed by the folks at GreenEarth. They worked hand-in-hand with P&G to make this happen.

P&G has a 100-plus-year history with the Overland Park area. It is here that they built this first plant outside of Cincinnati. They know the area and the demographics. They feel comfortable there. For them, this area was the obvious choice to test the waters for this new venture. P&G has bonded well with local charities and local government officials. They are active in the community and have a discreet clothing donation box in the lobby.

There are three plants in close proximity — this corporate-owned store and two other pre-existing plants that were retro-fitted with the Tide branding, processing and layout.

P&G developed its own, exclusive chemicals for GreenEarth technology and the company has a couple of exclusive services, too. The most dramatic is a service called “Back to Black,” which is a secret process that restores faded black fabrics.

Mannequins in the lobby show the prospective customer what the service is and what it does by displaying a polo shirt that was treated with “Back to Black” next to one that wasn’t.

This is a very impressive service. They offer a similar service for other colors, also.

I have always felt that the call office of a drycleaner is the most important place in the plant. Too often, that area becomes a catch-all for everything that doesn’t fit somewhere else. I have seen everything from hanger caddies to sewing machines to boom boxes to trash cans to bags of clothes in the one area that customers see. It looks awful.

Tide’s front room is clean, neat and drop-dead gorgeous! There is a display of Tide retail products in the corner. I doubt that they expect to sell much from this attractive display, but I suspect that this area is all marketing.

To the American public, “Tide” says clean. For this reason, I believe that Tide Cleaners may be a force to be reckoned with. I never had the slightest bit of faith in the ability of powerhouses like Zoots or Purple Tie to make an impact on the industry because they did not have that killer marketing plan. Tide has it, in my opinion, because Tide has been synonymous with clean for 80 years and Tide products are in 40 million homes.

The proof, of course, will be in their ability to keep their promises to their customers. People from outside this business think that running a drycleaning business is so easy. Perhaps they see it as merely throwing in the dirty clothes, pushing a button and pulling out the cash.

Tide will certainly need to understand the intricacies of this business, if they don’t know them already, lest they disappoint the customers that they attract. But don’t kid yourself; they will attract a bunch of them.

After barely more than a month in business, they had a full conveyor of clothes and a very interesting amount of customer traffic. P&G reports that sales are far ahead of projections.

These customers have some interesting conveniences offered to them, too. Tide Cleaners offers what they call valet service, which is a car-hop service.

And lockers! I had to learn more about this service when I saw them. I have seen many cleaners invest lots of money in drycleaner “ATMs” and I have yet to meet a single one that is happy with theirs. There probably are some, I just don’t know them.

You can hook one to your system and have what seems like the ultimate in customer service, but for some reason, these just don’t fly. They can break, and I suspect that really annoys a customer who has no one to complain to at that moment.

Well, Tide Cleaners thought out of the box on this one. If you are a Tide VIP customer (it’s sort of a frequent-flyer program with several benefits), you are offered a key to a locker to pick up your clothes if you expect to arrive at the store after it has closed. This is a great convenience without all of the potential electro-mechanical demons that may surprise your customer at the worst possible moment when they actually need to get their garments.

Many of us can learn from this! This is a very good idea.

To complete their “green cleaner” image, Tide is using EcoHangers. These are the cardboard and recycled plastic hangers that you’ve seen in the Cleaner’s Supply catalog.

As positive as I am about this new venture for P&G, the proof’s in the pudding, so to speak.

Many cleaners think that getting customers is the hard part. That’s the easy part. Some plants are inundated with work but don’t make any money.

The easy part is getting customers, the hard part is keeping them and making money with the number of customers that you have.

If Tide Cleaners can do quality work – and they surely have learned that running a profitable drycleaner is far different than selling a jug of liquid soap — they will succeed with this very interesting venture.