HOWARD’S WAY Howard Bradley
Inspiration from across the pond
Howard Bradley looks back at the huge influence the US drycleaning industry had on his own family’s UK business in the latter half of 20th century
F
rom my UK perspective I have always taken a great deal of interest in the drycleaning industry in North America and with The Clean Show in Orlando coming up, it got me thinking again about the industry on the other side of ‘the pond’.
We used to have big shows in the UK but nothing in scale to The Clean Show 2025 in Orlando. I regrettably have never got to the show, whichever great city it has been staged in, and not for want of trying. I have been in the drycleaning industry in the UK for more than 53 years. I started at a time when the industry was really growing; unit dry cleaning shops were popping up on the high street in every town and the people within the industry actually cared a great deal about the skills of the individual. A Hoffman presser or a garment spotter were recognised as highly skilled personnel and this was generally reflected in good rates of pay.
Many of the staff at that time were veterans of the Second World War, and I remember well our first Hoffman presser,
unit shop that the Bradley family opened into just one American unit and still have room to park a Duesenberg.
Jim King, whose brother had sadly been killed at the landings at Salerno, Italy I knew many of the industry legends in the UK and was lucky enough to have met and learned from some of them and, generally speaking, one only heard about our own UK-based industry. Nearly all of those people have now passed on, but we are still very lucky to have the likes of Roger Cawood and Richard Neale around (LCNi’s resident experts).
Back in the day, to coin an American expression, the occasional news piece in LCN about a development or story from the US would pique my interest – the physical size of the drycleaning unit shops when I saw photos of the. would leave me speechless. I realise that shop space was often small in the UK high streets compared with in the USA due to lack of land space but you could have probably fitted 10 of our first
I always had the desire to increase my personal knowledge of the drycleaning industry and read whatever publications were
available.Finding any books on the subject was not easy in the age before home computers and Google. I remember when I found a copy of ‘The spotting manual of the dry cleaning industry’, the first book that came my way. It was an American book, published in 1945. This book proved totally invaluable while I was learning the ropes and became a great reference guide for me.
Drycleaning sales representatives spent a great deal of time showing how to pre- spot or post-spot and remove stains using their companies’ own products, not always successfully. The book, however, was not aligned to any company and became my go-to companion for how to treat anything with anything…
I was fortunate enough once to have spent a week in a CRDN facility in Ann Arbor, Michigan, hosted by the charismatic Wayne Wudyka and saw first -and the huge (by UK standards) cleaning facility and how advanced the whole drycleaning restoration business was. The capacity of the equipment and throughput of work was eye -pening. It was a time that had a great influence on me especially showing that you don’t just wait for customers to come into the shop to get business. Think big was certainly something that stayed with me as was the friendliness of my hosts. So, from this side of the Atlantic to the other side, please enjoy your show and remember how good you are.
39
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45
