National Clothesline
For many third-generation drycleaners, it often feels like they were born in the
family plant. That isn’t exactly the case with Eric Severson, who oversees the operation of Geneva Cleaners in Geneva, IL, along with his brother Scot, but it is not too far off, either.
Young Eric was born shortly before Christmas in 1970 in a hospital located only
three blocks from the family business. Proud parents Don and Louanne had little
time to bask in the miracle of childbirth, however; there were still boilers to
shut off, after all.
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Distracted by Eric’s birth, the couple had forgotten to pull the plugs over the Christmas holiday.
So, Eric didn’t go straight home when he was released from the hospital.
“When the hospital cleared me to go, my folks figured it would be a good idea to
stop at Geneva Cleaners on the way home and actually take my first photos of
real life in the call office there. I don’t know if it was karma, but it probably was my destiny at that point in time.
Every day for the rest of my life would practically be spent at Geneva
Cleaners.”
While Geneva Cleaners has been family owned and operated for over half a
century, the family has been in the cleaning industry a little longer than
that.
Eric can trace the roots back to his maternal grandfather, an entrepreneurial
spirit who possessed remarkable vision and ingenuity.
“He had all kinds of different business ventures along his tenure before the
cleaning business came into it,” Eric said. “The Glen Ellyn area was growing at the time and needed a cleaners. He had lived
there for years and operated restaurants and dog kennels and figured he’d add a local drycleaning facility to it. He started counting cars at a local
Five Corners intersection, which is unique in that five different traffic veins
come together in downtown Glen Ellyn. He thought: This is the place and
textiles are the thing.”
The business was aptly named Five Corners Cleaners and it proved to be quite a
success. It probably didn’t hurt that Eric’s grandfather had also started a unique family-style restaurant around the same
time and had become quite the community fixture.
“My grandfather had a bit of a family band,” Eric explained. “He was a banjo-playing fellow and he came up with his own rendition of what they
coined the Big Banjo. It became a terribly successful restaurant that was
serving hundreds of families come the weekend. They would flash the words to
songs, almost like a karaoke place that had a sing-along theme to it with
banjos and small bands playing.”
Fast forward a bit to 1957, a One-Hour Martinizing plant was launched in Geneva.
About a year later, Eric and Scot’s uncle, Jim Menke, branched out on his own and bought the plant. He soon sold
it to Eric and Scot’s parents who renamed it Geneva Cleaners.
It was a risky investment for the Seversons. After all, there were already a
handful of other cleaners in the downtown area.
“I suppose you would almost call it suicide today,” Eric said. “But, they weren’t afraid to roll up their sleeves and do the hard work. They slowly outpaced
their competitors. It was six-day workweeks, sometimes seven. They were
producing same day service all the way up until four o’clock in the afternoon. The competitors in the very near surrounding area, one
by one, closed down as my folks grew their clientele.”
By the late 1960s, the business expanded enough for the Seversons to relocate to the nearby unoccupied site of
First National Bank of Geneva.
“As my folks moved across the street, they virtually needed to rent out every
square foot of the facility that wasn’t being used,” Eric said. “At that point in time, there were five tenants who took up different parts of
the building from the upstairs to the downstairs. As the years went on, tenants
slowly needed to find other spots and Geneva Cleaners expanded and grew into
the facility. Then, they actually needed to acquire the business next door and
expand again into that facility, as well.”
By the time Eric and Scott took over the business from their parents in the
early 1990s, it had grown considerably in scope. That was only the beginning.
Since then, Eric estimates that the company has almost quadrupled in size.
Unlike his younger brother Eric, Scot never seemed destined to join the family
business. Still, he was always blessed with the kind of natural mechanical and
engineering skills that would eventually prove invaluable to the family
business.
“I think, growing up Scot had imagined himself doing something different because
he had a real aptitude for engineering,” Eric recalled. “He didn’t spend a lot of time at the facility. He was doing other projects and other
jobs that required his mechanical skills.”
Scott enrolled at the University of Iowa as a double major, focussing both on an
engineering and a liberal arts background. It was at that time that he first
started seeing the possibilities of working alongside his brother and taking
Geneva Cleaners to another level.
Meanwhile, Eric studied communications and textile courses at Eastern Illinois
University. When the brothers started working together at the family business
in the 1990s, it became immediately apparent that their strengths would
complement each other well.
“My responsibilities fall more on the HR [Human Resources] side of things. I’m kind of the people person, as it relates to the business,” Eric said. “Scot’s strengths are totally within the four walls of the building. We refer to his
position as “Bricks and Mortar” because he does everything associated with our facilities and all the mechanics
that go on inside it.”
Rounding things out is Eric’s wife, Kristen, who worked as a schoolteacher before joining the company in
1995. Now, she works as the operational manager and assists with all of Geneva’s departments.
When the Severson brothers first worked together, the company didn’t have a single computer. Since then, it has undergone an extreme makeover. Now
it has as many as 40 running at busy times as garments are bar coded and then
tracked through various cleaning stations with top-of-the-line technology.
“We wanted to leverage technology, bring in a new era of cleaning and a different
style because we knew the times were changing,” Eric noted. “We also wanted to come up with new ways of marketing the product and the service
that maybe other cleaners hadn’t done in the past.”
Having a good downtown location helps. One unique way the Seversons market the
business is through the use of window displays and shadow boxes that run the
length of the building.
“The visual merchandising team is a major force for us in the downtown retail
community,” Eric said. “At times, our windows will tell a story. They’ll have community involvement. We have families who stop by and ask when the
window display will be changing. They’re interested in what’s coming next. It catches their attention and drives them to the web site or
gets them to come in.”
Once customers do show up, there is nothing the Severson family enjoys more than
being able to help them.
“It’s not uncommon that we have brides here in transition from pictures to church
and we’re helping them in a moment of crisis,” Eric noted. “Those little snapshots happen frequently. We see it with flags that were draped
over coffins at one point in time, clothing collectors who have priceless
heirlooms that need to have specific procedures done — to be able to fill those niches probably becomes the most rewarding part of our
job.”
Certainly one of the biggest ways that Geneva Cleaners can help people is
through its restoration division. It was through the company’s affiliation with the Certified Restoration Drycleaning Network that it had the
opportunity to work with the television show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition on
two occasions.
The first time was in 1997 when the ABC program visited a family in Chicago who
had purchased an uninhabitable brownstone infiltrated by rats, rotting timber
and bad plumbing.
Geneva Cleaners restored the family’s dirty and damaged garments and also cleaned the clothes of the show’s crew, free of charge. Eric enjoyed his behind-the-scenes access and was warmly
received by everyone.
“They really rolled out the red carpet,” Eric recalled. “It’s a way to make textiles fun for the whole company. I think for CRDN across the
country, the whole group feels that way.”
More recently, the show asked for Geneva’s help once again to help a family who purchased a farm in rural Illinois.
Unfortunately, the mother then fell ill with acute myeloid leukemia. If that
weren’t enough, the 100-year-old wiring of the old farmhouse caught fire and it
completely burned down.
The mother eventually beat the cancer, but years of therapy and doctor visits
drained the family’s finances and they still had nowhere to live and very little to wear... that is
until the Extreme Makeover crew rebuilt the house and Geneva Cleaners restored
their wardrobe.
“The whole family was living in a camper outside the house,” Eric recalled. “To be able to go in and be a part of something that got them on their feet,
well, that’s just cool stuff.”
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