“It’s been a fast and furious couple of months,” said Kevin Dubois, CEO and president of Clean Franchise Brands, who has been CEO of Lapels for 15 years. “I used to joke around about getting to 500 stores within my lifetime.”
Martinizing Dry Cleaning, 1-800-DryClean, Pressed4time and Dry Cleaning Station are the four laundry and dry cleaning companies acquired; Bizziebox, a locker company to store customer orders, is the fifth. “We’re the largest in the world,” Dubois said. “The master plan is to take advantage of the network.”
Former owner Huntington Cleaners of Michigan decided earlier this year to sell its dry cleaning systems but keep CDRN, the textile restoration franchise. Dubois said the pandemic of 2020 at first wrecked the dry cleaning business.
“In April 2020 we were down about 80 percent from where we’d been in March. All of that was simply people not going to the office to work. By October we got back to 40/50 percent, and a lot of continued growth was laundry—wash, dry and fold, and we started promoting that,” he said.
“I’m happy to report, two weeks ago we passed over the pre-pandemic level. We’re back to where we started and a little something,” he said when reached June 1. “We have people coming in now every day with bags and they’ll say something like, ‘I put this in my mudroom in April 2020, and now I’m finally bringing it in.’”
Greybull became a minority partner in Lapels in 2018, an investment that helped the brand through the pandemic. “It made a huge difference for us. It would have been a much different scenario” without Greybull, he said.