Content about Store Profiles

PLYMOUTH, Mass. — At Mayflower Laundry, located in a former shopping plaza, it’s all about providing good customer service, says owner Neil King.

“We take care of our customers, that’s number one. We have a clean place. We are open seven days a week, 6 to 10. There’s always an attendant on duty. We have the right mix of machines, to let customers do their laundry in a hurry if they want to. We offer personalized wash, dry and fold. We have pickup and drop-off to offer maximum convenience.”

As a result, Mayflower takes in $360,000 in revenue annually. The company earns a profit out of that volume by keeping a rein on expenses—doing 25% of its own repairs, holding down utilities to 20% of volume, and having no debt. It helps that the operation depends little on marketing, rather relying on word of mouth to generate most of its business. Finally, rent plus fees are a reasonable 11% of volume.

The 2,000-square-foot Laundromat has a transportation company and a health club as plaza neighbors. It is right off the main road and has unlimited parking. Inside, the facility is clean, spacious, with many individual workstations. A ceramic-tiled waiting room contains padded seats, magazines, as well as children’s toys. Framed paintings adorn some walls. A glass-walled office at the entrance is where management and staff do their paper work. This placement allows close monitoring.

Two 50-pound dryers and 36 30-pound dryers, all from American Dryer Corp. (ADC), are positioned along one wall. Mayflower’s washers, manufactured by either IPSO or Continental Girbau, include two 75-pound front loaders, eight 40-pound front loaders, five 25-pound front loaders, six 25-pound high-speed front loaders, two 40-pound high-speed front loaders, and two conventional top loaders.

Several vending machines, including a soft drink machine, a snack machine and gum machines, stand alongside the seating area. “I don’t make much out of the Coke machine, but I fill my snack unit by going to BJ’s (Wholesale Club) and I do OK,” King says.

1,800 WASH-DRY-FOLD POUNDS WEEKLY

Keeping the customers happy largely falls on the shoulders of King’s manager, Michelle Ligue. She and her staff of four part-timers are responsible for maintaining clean premises, solving customer problems, and keeping the flow of wash-dry-fold work going. The staff processes 1,800 pounds each week at $1.10/lb.

“I’ve been here 12 years and I know most of the customers,” Ligue says. “And I know 90% of wash-dry-fold customers’ phone numbers. It’s important to keep up with the work, including in-store customers, wash-dry-fold work, cleaning, and the paperwork.

“I train them [her staff] to have a system, do one customer at a time, plan ahead as to which machines to use. The worst thing is to confuse orders. For this to work, it’s necessary to be a multitasker, because a staffer might have four things needing attention at once. We each do our own customers’ wash-fold-and-dry work, so we make sure their stuff comes to them the way they want it.

“For instance, I have a woman customer who owns a lot of rental property. She color-codes everything. She is very particular about the folding. I make sure I give her exactly what she wants. It makes a difference in staffers’ take, for 75% of wash-dry-and-fold customers tip.”

As for hiring, Ligue doesn’t hire anyone too young. An applicant should have some previous laundry or hotel experience and must be used to doing physical work to be considered. Ligue says she can tell if a person is going to make it based on the first hour of training. She is not opposed to letting people go after a day.

EXPANDING ON PICKUP AND DELIVERY

King is doing pickup and delivery for eight customers and is in the process of expanding that business. “It’s good business because it is priced at $1.35 a pound, and it gives us more to work with,” he says. “The key is to keep the customers bunched together and to develop an efficient route of pickup and delivery.” He is placing a series of eight ads that will run in the newspapers of nearby wealthier communities to build up clientele.

“Price isn’t a problem,” says King. “Many prospects are two-career households and they want the convenience and are willing to pay for it. We even have customers come in here who have washers and dryers at home, but use us because they can do all their laundry in an hour and a half. We focus on convenience in this portion of our business.”

Mayflower also does a big business in comforters because the bedding is too big for conventional machines. Cleaning dry mops for municipalities is another specialty.

Having a clean facility is key to a self-service laundry’s success, according to King; he believes customers won’t use a dirty Laundromat. At Mayflower, there’s a cleaning checklist for every shift—morning, noon, and night. Dryer lint traps are cleaned three times a day, because the presence of lint inhibits air circulation and retards drying.

King attributes the ability to control expenses to having new equipment. “Our utility costs run 20% of volume, which is 5% less than industry average. Newer machines are highly efficient, three-phase machines. It also helps that all dryers are powered by gas.”

King motivates his staff by paying them 20% of the wash-dry-fold business that they do. This keeps them turning out good product. Finally, it helps that everything is owned. Mayflower operates with a $50,000 equity line of credit, but doesn’t owe a cent on the investment.

With the company well positioned in the Plymouth-Kingston-Duxbury market, King has no plans to open another operation. Instead, he wants to build up drop-off and pickup service and continue relying on his staff to run the enterprise. This way, he only has to spend a few hours a day at the laundry and can devote more time to his real estate and other business interests.

“It’s a good business because you don’t have to be there, and you can still make money,” King says.

CHICAGO — The general structure of chairs and tables typically found in coin laundries today really hasn’t changed much in recent years, but the palette of colors and textures that are available has become quite expansive, according to some manufacturers of such furnishings.

Caco Mfg. has been making Solomatic® fiberglass seating and folding tables for coin laundries since 1960.

“We’re still using the same molds that we have for 50 years,” says Caco Mfg. CEO Randall Chaffee. “It holds up, a good design. But the colors and the textures have certainly changed.”

Chaffee says his company can now create granite-type finishes commonly seen on countertops. “It used to be just solid color, gel coat. Anymore, I’d say 70-80% of our business is the granites.”

If someone is looking at the high-pressure laminate furniture made by High Mark Mfg. for their store, they’d better be prepared to spend some time studying color samples. The company has more than 500 different colors from which to choose.

“Laminates have come such a long way, we’ve got laminates that look like granite, stone, stressed,” says High Mark Mfg. President Peter Valconesi, whose company produces fiberglass and laminate furniture, both standard and custom in design. “You can get anything you want in a laminate these days.”

Beyond standard-size tables and benches, High Mark makes custom furniture ranging from folding tables to wrap-around bulkheads. It will soon begin distributing stainless steel folding tables in response to market demand.

“They’re trying to match the equipment with the tables by going stainless and stainless, or they’re going to our laminate,” Valconesi says of his laundry customers. “We provide a lot of other products for the stores, such as bulkheads, countertops and shelving units, then they’ll match the tables to that stuff.”

RJ Papalini is celebrating its 50th year of manufacturing furniture for drycleaners, coin laundries, gas stations and mini-marts. Its product offerings include tables, chairs and benches, both standard and custom in design.

The company is accustomed to seeing coin-ops utilize bright color schemes to attract customers, but President/CEO Richard Pennington says he is seeing slight changes in that trend.

“Depending on which geographical area you’re talking about, the owners still want to have bright colors and really stand out,” he says. “In places that are not quite as economically challenged, they’re looking at softer colors, browns and earth tones.”

Where once they may have slapped a coat of white paint on the walls and been done, some laundry owners are going to great lengths to create a comfortable environment.

“A lot of these new Laundromats, they’re even at the point where they’re hiring decorators to come in and help them choose their colors and choose the space,” Chaffee says.

But any time spent discussing accents, balance, or motif will be a waste of time if the furniture doesn’t stand up to the rigors of laundry life.

“It’s function first,” Chaffee says. “They have to have tables there for their patrons to fold clothes on. They have to have an easy and durable break area for them to sit down.

“It has to be tough,” he continues. “Laundromat customers are tough customers, especially in unattended stores. There’s very little that will hold up as well as fiberglass.”

A coin laundry owner may be tempted to purchase mass-market chairs or tables from a retail outlet or a home improvement store, but it’s really only a short-term solution.

“We see it all the time, but two or three years later, they come back to us because that stuff just doesn’t hold up,” Chaffee says, adding that you have to “put the right kind of furniture in there or it disintegrates.”

“If you buy that stuff and put it in your Laundromat, it’s not designed for a Laundromat,” Valconesi says. “It’s gonna last you six months, then you’re going to buy in again.”

“The old adage is ‘You get what you pay for,’ and spending a few extra dollars now is going to definitely pay off in the long run,” says Pennington.

MARFA, Texas — A well-known business strategy is to run two businesses under one roof, share the overhead, and mingle the clientele. Perhaps the best example of this in our industry is Tumbleweed Laundry.

Daniel Browning is the “Laundromateur” who pulled off the magical feat of combining an ice cream parlor, coffee shop and Laundromat. The genius is that Browning has a monopoly in all three markets.

Relaxation and Art

Marfa is a small town of 2,200 residents with quite a bit of tourist trade. The reason for tourism is twofold: the place is a relaxing area to visit, with Big Bend National Park nearby, and it is the home of Chinati, the contemporary art museum, which designates Marfa as an art town.

In the 1970s, a successful New York artist named Donald Judd purchased a 550-acre former German prisoner-of-war camp. He began creating his abstract sculptures—large metal boxes as well as concrete shapes—and setting them all over the grounds as well as inside the 30-odd buildings. Then he invited other artists to come and work, and encouraged them to leave many works at the facility.

He got backing from the Chinati Foundation, thus Chinati was born. With daily guided tours at $25 a person, Chianti attracts serious art fans. All this is most unusual for a remote west Texas town that’s a 21/2-hour drive to the nearest city, El Paso, and close to the Mexican border.

Laundry Born in Former Hospital

So, back to Browning. Moving from Austin to Marfa, he and his wife envisioned a Laundromat since there wasn’t one in town. He produced a 130-page business plan, purchased a building, and set about creating a going concern. He dealt with Dexter equipment because he thought the company offered a good financing package. The total equipment cost came in at the $75,000 range, but he only had to put $40,000 into the venture.

The building he found that would work was an old, tiny, seven-room hospital. “Half the people living in Marfa today were born where the dryers are,” Browning says.

By doing all the construction work himself in nine weeks, he converted the hospital into a Laundromat and upstairs apartment.

His idea was to combine retail, commercial and wash, dry and fold (flip and fold). He went after flip-and-fold volume, but found that it was too sporadic and created too many hassles to make it worth dealing with. But he won hotel and restaurant trade, and his commercial operation was off and running.

One day, Browning was doing a side job, fixing a coffee shop’s espresso machine, when the owner said they were closing. Browning’s wife had been in the coffee business in earlier years, and she sometimes talked about opening a shop in Marfa. Something clicked. Why not combine a coffee shop alongside a laundry, and throw in ice cream to boot?

Browning studied his floor plan, and it became clear that he could give up some space for a coffee shop. Approximately a year and a half ago, the coffee shop/ice cream parlor came into being. It helped that the second coffee shop in town had closed, so he has a monopoly.

Perhaps Kaki Aufdengarten, Browning’s regular employee, says it best: “We’re the only Laundromat in town, the only coffee shop, the only ice cream parlor, so in a sense, we’re not a company. We’re a public service.”

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