What you need to ask and know about your local Dry Cleaner

Article by guest author Peter Brooker

I interviewed Hamza, owner of Garment Spa, a Dry Cleaners in Chiswick. I wanted to know more about his business, and what I as a customer should be doing to help preserve the life of my shirts.

Are shirts still driving your sector?

YES. Especially post COVID, shirts are making a comeback. There's a lot of businesses that actually require their staff to work from offices now. The industry has seen a massive bump.

Would you say that I can get away with just washing the shirts in the washing machine? Or should I be definitely coming to someone like you?

You have to be careful with the care label on your garments. A lot of manufacturers don't take any ownership. They were just, for example, they just put 'dry clean only' right? When it's polyester or cotton fabric, right? We know cotton can be washed now, people normally try to get stains out at home. Especially around the collar and the cuffs. They'll wash it at a higher temperature. So what happens at high temperatures is you get shrinkage. You get colour loss. You reduce the age of factual fabric. When you bring it to a professional director, the highest temperature we're washing is 40 degrees. Maybe 25 especially for the darker stuff. Yeah, and we are not using anything toxic. There's no bleach.

So what that does is you actually getting more out of your garments. You're not stressing the garment.

And so I also heard that we have to bring your shirts with the buttons wrapped in tin foil, take out the collar stays. What else would you say to people?

The collar stays 100% because we removed them before we actually wash the shirts. Because what tends to happen is they come out and then they will block your washing machine. Because they're not, they're not sewn in. And once we've actually washed and pressed your shirt, we'll replace it. But people should be in a good habit of just taking them out before they bring their shirts in.

And we should bring the shirts unbuttoned?

Yeah, bring it open. And you should know what the stains are from, right? Because if you tell me a stain has been there for six months, yeah, I don't have much hope. But if you had a stain from last weekend, and you know it was tomato sauce, for example. I know what sauce is, I'm 99% certain I can get the stain out.

So I know you do alterations here. Is that also a big part of the industry, would you say?

So alteration is, yeah, massive. I mean, probably a third of the business that we do is alterations and repairs. And it is obviously what companies like Shein and stuff that are making really cheap, horrible stuff throw away. You know, wear it once, throw it away. But my clients, people who get the garments dry cleaned, are the kind of clients who look after their garments. They're not in the habit of buying cheap crap. So we get a lot of repairs.

Is there a competition between you and other dry cleaners on the street?

I wouldn't call myself a traditional dry cleaner. We're one of the greenest dry cleaners in the country.

What makes you a green dry cleaner?

So we’re totally plastic free. Okay? We don't use any toxic chemicals in our dry cleaning or laundry. When you get the garments back, then it's not covered in plastic. It's covered in stuff that is made out of potato starch. Which is a waste product, right? Okay, so these clever Germans came up with this chemistry of converting it into a garment cover. Our bed linen goes out in brown paper packaging. Our duvets go out in these non-woven, breathable bags. Basically, everybody's got a summer and a winter duvet, yeah? So when you get a duvet cleaned, you're going to store it away. A lot of the dry cleaners wrap in plastic, right? So what tends to happen is, when you open it for the next winter, it's really moldy. The stuff that we've got is breathable.

Why is it important for you to do this?

I have first hand experienced what toxic dry cleaning chemicals do to you without existing machinery. I don't want my staff to suffer. I don't want my clients who were walking in to suffer. And I've got two kids. I want to be around and leave them a good example of how you can run a sustainable business.

For more information contact Hamza at Garment Spa here.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash