National Clothesline

Parkway Cleaners of Edmond, Oklahoma, first opened its doors in 1959 on the first birthday of Mark Neighbors. Started by his father, Ed, and his uncle, Bud, Mark’s earliest memories center on the family business.

“I don’t have memories where I have not been here. I’ve been here forever,” he said. “We’ve got a picture of me at a few months old sitting out on the grass as my dad and uncle put the roof on the building. They are carrying up joints to put across the roof on ladders. I am sitting there watching.”

The two brothers started the business from scratch. Mark’s father had previously been a banker and his uncle had been a drycleaner in Oklahoma City. Sensing that the area was starting to go downhill economically, he felt Edmond

would be the next great place to launch an enterprise.

“My dad and uncle had worked together on the estate after my grandparents had died and they decided they worked well together,” Mark noted. “My dad is the youngest of 13 kids. My uncle was the seventh child.”

The building was originally about 1,100 square feet, but the company has expanded greatly in the same location, as well as the surrounding areas, during the past half century.

“Over the years, that building has now been built on so much it’s about 25,000 square feet,” Mark explained. “We’ve added some more buildings down the street. We own about 120,000 to 130,000 square feet of building and we operate about 35,000 square feet.”

Today, Mark owns the business with his brother Brian. After growing up around the plant, Mark always knew that he wanted to work at the family business. He started full time at the age of 19.

“When I came in, Dad was one of the best production and accounting guys that have ever been in the industry,” he said. “He was wonderful. He was good with customers but I took more after Mom and I was great with customers. So, I took over customer service. We grew at 30 to 40 percent a year for eight years in a row.”

According to Mark, Parkway Cleaners has never had a down year. Instead, it has increased business every single year. However, back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, things felt a bit out of control.

“It was the best of times and the worst of times,” Mark recalled. “It was hard on a business to grow that fast and keep up with it, but it was wonderful that we were growing that fast. We worked ourselves unbelievably hard to keep up. There were times we tried not to get anymore business, which sounds silly, but we just couldn’t keep up with the physical growth of the plant. When you double the drycleaning, you need more racks, more conveyors, more presses, more cleaning machines, and it’s very expensive.”

While keeping up with such fast-paced growth was often a logistical nightmare, the secret of the plant’s success was really quite simple. It is one thing Parkway has never changed.

“What our business is all about is satisfying the customer,” Mark emphasized. “That’s all we do. We want to completely satisfy the customer — anything they want, we want to do for them. You know where some people are not happy with special requests and challenges? We think of them as blessings because that gives us the opportunity to shine.”

Satisfying customers is much easier said than done. Mark believes an owner must wear five different hats to run a good business.

“One hat is sales, which is customer service,” he said. “One hat is marketing, which is getting people to know where you are and to come in. One hat is production. One is accounting. The other one is the president’s position that helps everybody else balance out the other four jobs because everybody wants a little bit more in their department.”

One department that got quite a few upgrades a few years ago was production. Parkway Cleaners embraced the concept of automation in a big way.

“We put in automated bagging machines and an automated assembly conveyor from MetalProgetti, and we’ve put in automated racks and storage conveyors. The maximum garments that the conveyors can hold at one time is 32,000. MetalProgetti said we were the largest system that they had put in at the time,” Mark noted. “We have less people than we did 15 years ago, and yet business has grown every year.”

The rule of thumb is simple. If any changes improve efficiency or quality, then Parkway Cleaners is willing to try it. However, quality cannot be compromised at the expense of efficiency. Satisfying the customer must always come first.

Installing automation has increased overall efficiency and has helped to improve customer relations at the same time.

“We actually just finished our last inventory of the year,” he said. “In the last year, as far as inventory shows, we’ve only misplaced one garment. We handle about a million garments a year. We actually know where that garment went to and the guy did get it. For some reason, we didn’t scan it out of the system, but because we have the technology to tell, we know we’ve cleaned that garment 12 times since then. We know he has it.”

While technology has been an important contributor to success, it is hardly the only one.

“It’s not just the technology. We also have a great staff,” Mark emphasized. “Our staff if very long tenured; 75 percent of our workforce has been with us over five years. We work hard to get the right people. We do a lot of testing, a lot of interviews. Everybody gets interviewed at least three times before they get hired.”

Parkway also emphasizes ongoing training. The company may have several dozen employees, but every one of them is trained on a weekly basis.

Another thing that separates Parkway from other cleaners is that the Neighbors family have also long owned a local high-end clothing store (Parkway Men’s Wear) and shoe store (Mark’s Shoe Room), so they understand the perspectives of both the retail and service industries.

“The two industries really go hand in hand,” Mark said. “I often joke and say, ‘We service what we sell.’ If there is ever a problem and everyone else is always trying to say it’s the other guy’s fault… well, it’s always my fault, both sides.”

Of course, Mark doesn’t mind taking the blame, as long as the customer leaves feeling good about Parkway.

“We try to make light of everything and not make it too serious. After all, we’re just cleaning clothes,” he added. “It takes a lot of work to do it every day. The joke at our business is, ‘I only work a half day — 12 hours.’”

When Mark’s uncle decided to leave Oklahoma City and try a cleaning plant in what he hoped was a thriving location, he certainly picked the right place. Edmond has proven to be the perfect host city.

“It’s one of the most vibrant, dynamic cities in the U.S.,” Mark said. “I love Edmond and I love the people here. It’s all about friends and family and working with each other.”

The city also tends to have high standards. Mark, who wears a $4,000 suit to work every day to be more professional, doesn’t concern himself with competing cleaners; instead, he worries more about meeting the high expectations of the citizenry.

“It’s a very educated community, very worldly. They’ve traveled the world over and they know the difference,” he said.

As much as Mark loves his fellow citizens and neighbors, the feeling tends to be more than mutual.

Parkway Cleaners has been selected as the city’s Best Dry Cleaners for over 25 years. Parkway Men’s Wear has been chosen as Edmond’s best retail clothing store every year since the award started in 1999. Also, Mark’s Shoe Room has been cited as the city’s best since that award began six years ago.

While Mark, his brother, Brian, and sister, Jana, have often contributed to the local community in many ways, perhaps the most profound manner has been through the donation of the University of Central Oklahoma’s Jazz Lab in 2002. It is considered one of the premier facilities for teaching jazz music in North America.

“We donated the land and about a third of the cost of the UCO Jazz Lab,” Mark explained. “The thought behind it was to help UCO. Also, there was no live entertainment in Edmond. UCO wanted to do a jazz lab, which was a teaching facility Monday through Friday and then have live music on Thursday, Friday and Saturday night.”

Mark also took over the Edmond Jazz and Blues Festival in 2000 and it has been selected as the Oklahoma City Metropolitan area’s Best Music Festival every year since 2002, drawing a crowd of about 15,000 annually.

While Mark admits that he isn’t the biggest jazz fan in the world, his efforts stem from something else.

“I’m really more of a fan of the people of the community and helping them,” he said.

For Mark, that feeling keeps him grounded. He remembers once selling a $20,000 suit to a client of his clothing store after the man sold his company for millions. The customer may own the nicest suit in Oklahoma, but Mark would treat it the same as any other garment that comes to Parkway.

“We just want to treat everybody well, because they’re all good people and not all of us get the opportunity to sell a company for mega millions and buy a super nice suit,” he said. “Every single customer is important. Every single one. Nobody is less important.”