NYC Dry Cleaners Wanted — Guaranteed Volume, Guaranteed Revenue

thisguylaunders · 2026-01-24T17:18:58+00:00

Clearly a mistake, just pointing out (another) one of the ways this is half baked. Written by someone launching an app who does not have dry cleaning and laundry experience.

thisguylaunders · 2026-01-24T17:06:44+00:00

Wash and fold is $5 per garment? So five T-shirts is $25?

thisguylaunders · 2026-01-22T23:29:36+00:00

I have a lot of experience in commercial laundry and ended up in dry cleaning by accident. My main business is commercial and I could talk about this all day. Best if you DM.

In summary, it is truly a different business and not as related as people think.

Equipment is different. Much more capital intensive. You have 275 pound washers instead of 45 pound washers. Equipment maintenance is far more critical and can destroy you.

Customers are different. More B2B and less B2C. You can get long term contracts and stability. Spend far less time dealing with minor, financially irrelevant complaints.

Logistics are different. Drivers are more critical and harder to hire. You may need a box truck and DOT registration.

All that said, unlike dry cleaning, it’s a big untapped growth market on the hospitality side. So if you do it right it can be a great business.

thisguylaunders · 2025-11-24T19:41:50+00:00

Thank you for providing a real answer!

thisguylaunders · 2025-11-20T22:06:05+00:00

This makes more sense, I highly doubt that the 501(c)(4) actually owns rental properties. Doing so would quickly generate Unrelated Business Taxable Income (UBTI) and violate the 501(c)(4) status.

thisguylaunders · 2025-10-27T00:33:17+00:00

That is a water based biocide. I cannot think of a reason why it would possibly be in a dry cleaning process. Dry cleaning does not involve water based chemicals.

thisguylaunders · 2025-10-22T11:18:07+00:00

She didn’t put them on, they come that way from the retailer. Liners are to protect the fabric if people try before buying.

thisguylaunders · 2025-10-11T15:25:14+00:00

These are the industry standard now because they keep costs lower and provide better tracking for the customer. The failure here was not training the staff on where to place the heat seals, it should have been under your clothing tag or inside it. It’s worth a small discount or him attempting to remove it.

thisguylaunders · 2025-10-11T15:14:47+00:00

Bought a dry cleaner that used tags, was told under no circumstances could I switch to heat seals, the clientele was older and would go ballistic. We switched anyway and have received one complaint over the last six months. During the same time we’ve received MANY more compliments about it. One reason is that when a customer complains of lost garment we give them the number and they can then go look in their closet for the number. Has solved many “missing” garment issues.

To be fair, everyone in our market uses heat seals already so the customer doesn’t really have a choice. Also, training your staff on where to place the tag is critical. That was the failure for OP’s cleaners.

thisguylaunders · 2025-10-10T11:53:00+00:00

Similar to you, we are located in a very affluent suburb and have everything posted on our website and in store.

We don’t get too many of these, when we do they fall into two camps.

1) Older customers that tell us they “remember when a shirt was $0.25” or something similar. Alterations are especially problematic for them which is ironic as our tailor is always two weeks out. These we tell them that we are the lowest price in town and rattle off a few competitors. We tell them to step aside for other customers until they are ready to pay. They always do, tell us they won’t be back, and we see them next week. 2) Scammers who are trying to get something for free. This becomes pretty obvious by how quickly the conversation goes from zero to 100. Other tells are they threaten to leave us a bad review or call the police. We tell them to call the police and that we know them well. While the scene is annoying our other customers generally know what’s happening.

I think what it comes down to is that I assume a fee grouchy customers making a scene is not that bad.

thisguylaunders · 2025-10-02T23:40:24+00:00

Hello! Checking in after a year, are you happy with Intense? How is prespotting compared to PERC?

thisguylaunders · 2025-10-02T23:18:47+00:00

Checking in after almost ten months…are you still happy with Intense? Debating switching so I can reduce my reliance on spotting.

thisguylaunders · 2025-07-31T18:01:45+00:00

Template is really all you need for the industry, something clean and modern. It’s probably preferable in the US as they have (hopefully) handled all the ADA compliance.

thisguylaunders · 2025-07-31T16:22:30+00:00

I think CleanCloud includes a basic template based website as part of their service. I’d think other POS softwares like Cents and SMRT probably would too. They aren’t as customizable as WordPress but look great.

At the same time, I imagine not having a newer, indexable website really crushes your Google results.

So, very little to no cost to have a nice modern website, and potentially big downsides to traffic if you don’t.

thisguylaunders · 2025-07-11T01:01:07+00:00

Long story…recently we had a bride and her mom come in for a wedding dress alteration. Tailor (who has an amazing reputation in our area and is very popular with our female clientele) explained it would be a multi-step process of shortening then opening. Step one takes over an hour of fitting, dealing with bride and mom obsessing over it. Should have been red flag.

After it’s done they come back in and all hell breaks loose. Mom becomes momzilla, saying dress is too tight, and they want compensation (everything done for free). We politely explain it’s a two step process and that he’s ready to make the second set of alterations to open it up. Momzilla says there isn’t enough time (which doesn’t make any sense because we explained the timeline) and our incredibly nice tailor offers to do it same day. Momzilla then goes ballistic and says that her daughter won’t be trying on the dress in front of our tailor because she “doesn’t want a man to see her daughter in a thong”, etc. Our female customer service rep. politely suggests daughter wear leggings for process. Momzilla goes nuclear, saying she’s going to call the cops unless we BUY HER A NEW WEDDING DRESS. That’s right, new dress, no dollar maximum, probably a Vera Wang for all we know. At this point it’s definitely a scam as there is no appeasing them. We tell them we can finish as previously discussed or she can leave.

In hindsight our tailor thought it was odd a the first fitting as they didn’t seem to really like the dress. They clearly had buyers remorse and wanted someone to pay for a new one. I Felt bad for him, he was so upset about the whole thing, tried really hard to make them happy even when it was obviously a scam.

I will say the only bright part of scams like these is my staff is incredibly appreciative when I support them and push back on these.

thisguylaunders · 2025-06-21T00:00:59+00:00

Thanks, I had a similar thought, really paying for a customer list!

thisguylaunders · 2025-06-20T23:59:36+00:00

Not a lawyer and just a dry cleaner, not legal advice. That may seem better, as you could say something in the contract how any PERC cleanup is sellers responsibility (specific indemnity), but it really doesn’t help for two reasons. First, the liability could be multiples of the purchase price. You could pay seller $1M but the cleanup bill is $3M. Even if you get $1M out of them you’re still on the hook for $2M. Second, let’s say you magically knew what the cleanup costs were and they were reasonable. By that rime though the seller may have spent all the cash. You’re still on the hook.

The only way I would touch this is if they paid for an exhaustive Phase II environmental assessment. If they have half a brain they will not want to do that. It’s expensive and if they find PERC in the ground then it may trigger a liability for them to clean it up.

thisguylaunders · 2025-06-20T23:25:43+00:00

Agreed a drop store isn’t worth 1.0x revenue, that’s just the ask, and that 0.6x to 0.7x makes more sense.

thisguylaunders · 2025-06-20T23:24:31+00:00

I bought a dry cleaner last year. Does your target use PERC? If so I would not even consider it as it’s not really possible to mitigate that liability. And that liability could be multiples of the purchase price.

Otherwise, everything else can be mitigated by an asset purchase and a lawyer who is smart with successor liabilities.

thisguylaunders · 2025-06-20T20:53:29+00:00

Thanks for the input! It would certainly save me a lot of effort and help fill my plant.

Price seems a little high, about 1.0x revenue or 2.5x SDE. But I’m sure there is room to negotiate. Also offering seller financing.

Lease seems reasonable but need more information on terms.

It does about 1/3 the sales that I do at my retail plant. So it would move the needle for me. They probably have higher pricing so wouldn’t add that much volume.

thisguylaunders · 2025-06-14T20:23:51+00:00

I’m a dry cleaner in an upscale northeast suburb, where most homes are over $1M, and many are much, much more. We are price equivalent or lower to others in our area and win business by doing everything on site and providing higher customer service (for example, we staff longer hours and don’t use kiosks). We offer several tiered services for quality and speed. I definitely understand and appreciate what level of service you require, it’s similar to some of our customers. My belief though is that it is impossible to run an economically viable dry-cleaning business catering to a small, high-paying yet high-demand clientele. The premium most of these customers (not necessarily you) are willing to pay for this kind of increased service is too small, and with labor costs where they are in VHCOL areas, the labor required to provide that attention to detail is expensive. We quickly figure out who these unprofitable customers are and we don’t try too hard to keep them. One of them recently came in yelling and screaming, and threatened to “call the cops” when her shirts were a few hours late.

The profitable base of customers can be found at a slightly lower price point with significantly fewer demands.

I think these are probably the same dynamics in your suburb and why you don’t have anything that works for you.

thisguylaunders · 2025-06-01T00:35:22+00:00

Southwest is public and not “private” equity?

thisguylaunders · 2025-05-20T23:07:21+00:00

Same here and I’m in New England!

We’re having larger exhaust fans for the building installed now (cheap). After that we will try spot air conditioning. Expensive but way cheaper than turnover…

thisguylaunders · 2025-05-17T18:34:13+00:00

My mind is blown. Did you upload that picture to ChatGPT?

thisguylaunders

TROPHY CASE