National Clothesline
Though Gina Cosper is a little on the petite side (she stands less than five
feet tall altogether), she certainly generates a big presence with the
customers of her drycleaning plant in Lake Oswego, OR.
Many make sure they shout out a personal greeting or a goodbye to her and some
will even walk into Gina’s Dry Cleaning plant and holler something along the lines of: “Is that damn old lady back there?”
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Showing customers complete respect is one of the foundations of her philosophy
of maintaining stellar customer service.
“I do not allow my employees to call anybody by their first names like Bill or
John or all that,” she said. “Here it is mister or ma’am. We do not say ‘Hi.’ Hi is not a name. I’ve been told many, many times by my customers, ‘I’ve never seen anything like that.’ The customers love it.”
Truthfully, the customers enjoy it largely because such formal remarks make them
special and appreciated.
“When we give change back I don’t allow employees to take it out by their computer and say, ‘Here’s your money” and throw it in their hands,” she added. “They have to count back. To me, this is absolutely unheard of anymore. When I go
to Safeway and they say, ‘Here’s your money.’ Oh my God! The back of my hair stands up. That’s about the rudest thing you can do... to throw money back in their hands.”
If an employee fails to follow any of these rule, they simply will not remain on
the job for very long. For Gina, the art of excellent customer service is a
simple matter of treating others the way that you want to be treated.
“When you yell into the woods, they echo what comes back,” she said.
Perhaps Gina possesses a finer appreciation for the little details in life
because she experienced some pretty harsh times firsthand.
“I was born in Munich, Germany,” she said. “During the war, we were all transferred to foster parents.”
By the age of 22, she and her husband Kurt were ready to take their young son
and leave the country.
“After the war, the outlook was horrible,” she recalled. “Everybody wanted to go to America. If you work hard, you can get something
there.”
The family arrived in Seattle, WA, in 1953 and Gina procured a job with Seattle
Knitting Mills where she worked with every type of garment imaginable, even
leather items.
“I started out by cutting the leather jackets,” she said. “You use a tiny, tiny curvy knife. Picture yourself tracing a picture. You have a
pattern and you go around it with this little sharp knife. The secret is to use
sheepskin and they came mostly from Australia. It’s very expensive. You lay the pattern out to save leather as much as you can.”
Eventually, she trained over two dozen young workers to do the same. She worked
her way up to management and ending up working with the company for over two
decades.
Eventually, Gina become the chief breadwinner for her family in addition to
being a caretaker for her husband who had suffered the debilitating effects of
a stroke. She raced back and forth constantly from work to home, but she always
found enough energy.
“When you are in that position, you don’t feel it,” she said. “You just run on extra energy. After he died, I was exhausted.”
Kurt passed away in 1979, but long before that he had often talked to Gina about
slowing down. They also discussed owning a drycleaning plant.
Having worked closely with textiles for most of her life, Gina believed
drycleaning would be a good fit.
A few years after her husband died, Gina took the plunge and invested the couple’s lifesavings into a business in Lake Oswego.
“It was a good thing I didn’t know all the details at the time. I would have never done it,” she laughed.
In fact, her very first customer made her reconsider her recent investment. At
the time, Gina’s English was much less fluent and she had tremendous difficulty understanding
him.
“That’s what I had told my husband when we talked about going into drycleaning,” she remembered. “I said, ‘I can’t. No way. I’ve got to deal with the customers. I can’t speak English properly.’”
The first transaction was a bit shaky, to be sure. Gina became quite frustrated
when she couldn’t even pronounce the customers name properly.
“The funny thing is, the way he pronounced his name I couldn’t understand it. It just didn’t register. Then, he wrote it down and I said, ‘Wait a minute! This is a German name.’ And he said, ‘Yes, damn you’,” she said.
The two enjoyed a laugh together and the gentleman became a long-time customer.
In the beginning, Gina had to rely more on her charm. After all, she was only
aided by a part-time high school student who arrived in the afternoon.
“I did my own counter. I did my own cleaning. I did my own pressing,” she recalled.
A typical day would begin around 5 a.m. and conclude at about 11 p.m.
Her drycleaning experience was minimal, but she more than made up for it with
boundless energy, a desire to learn and a passion for customers and their
clothing. The formula has proved to be quite successful.
These days, Gina has 29 employees and her business handles everything in-house,
including alterations, wedding gowns and shoe service. She also has four
delivery vans to keep everyone in the plant busy.
Though the business has received a few accolades over the years, Gina does not
like to talk about them or put them on display because it’s “embarrassing.” Instead, she prefers to keep a collection of autographed basketballs in the
front area to show her support of the Portland Trailblazers.
Gina is an avid NBA fan that has been a season ticket holder for almost two
decades. That’s wasn’t always the case however. She recalled when a tall customer inquired whether or
not she performed all the cleaning in-house. Naturally, she said, ‘Yes.’
“He brought in one basket after another and the drycleaner behind me started
jumping up and down and said, ‘Gina, do you know who that is?’” she recalled.
Gina didn’t have a clue. It turned out to be Trailblazer forward Calvin Natt. He was later
traded to the Denver Nuggets where he became an All-Star. He was the first of
many NBA players to take their clothes to Gina’s Dry Cleaning.
In the early 1990s, Buck Williams’ wife invited Gina to attend a Trailblazer home game and she became instantly
hooked.
The core of that team became Western Conference Champions in 1990 and 1992
(falling just shy of an NBA championship both times). During that time, Gina
made sure players such as Clyde “The Glide” Drexler, Terry Porter and Jerome Kersey looked good off the court, too.
Even today, Portland Coach Nate McMillan personally drops off his clothes at
Gina’s. Of course, she makes sure her employees leave him alone.
“I would fire anyone who asked him for an autograph,” she said.
It’s hard to imagine finding a drycleaner more protective of customers than Gina.
There is little she wouldn’t do for them, including lugging home some precious draperies to make sure they
can be placed in an isolated and safe place.
It was doing precisely that several years ago when a fluke accident occurred. A
faulty parking brake gave out and even a rock placed behind the back tire (used
as a secondary precaution) slipped out just as Gina was leaning to put the
drapes in the back seat.
“The car took off backwards down the hill, half of me was in and half of me was
out,” she recalled. “They didn’t think I was going to live. A lung collapsed on the way to the hospital.”
According to Gina, she was 4’ 11” before the accident, which caused her to break five vertebrae, and thus, “quite a bit shorter.”
She recalled very little after having a conversation with the paramedics, (who
were customers, incidentally).
“They asked me, ‘Gina, what day is it today?’ And I said, ‘The first of April.’ They talked to each other and said, ‘Oh, she’s all right.’ That’s the last thing I remember for eleven days.”
Her doctor informed her she’d never walk again, but he didn’t take into account her extraordinary willpower. She was back to work in a
wheelchair in about three months.
“You would never know that I had an accident,” she declared proudly.
Determination has always been in abundance for the tough-but-fair German
immigrant. It has helped her overcome a long difficult road as a business
owner, especially since many counted her out from the very beginning.
Back then, a cleaning chain from California named TLC (Tender Loving Care)
invaded the Portland area with drop-off stores opening on every corner in the
region.
The concerned area cleaners met to raise money for a joint TV ad campaign. Gina
had none to give after investing her lifesavings.
After the meeting she overhead a female plant owner and another plant owner’s wife talk about her in the bathroom.
“They said, ‘She’s that German. She won’t last long. She’ll be out of here in no time’,” she recalled. “I came out, washed my hands and said, ‘Oh, hello ladies” and walked out of there. I showed them. I’m still around but they aren’t anymore.”
