RAVE FabriCARE'S True Quality Cleaning Blog

The notion of airing out your dry cleaned garments & household textiles is absurd

You’ve heard the “advice” countless times before: air out your dry cleaned garments and household textiles before bringing them into your home.

In this post, I’ll tell you why that conventional notion makes no sense whatsoever and what you can do to avoid the prospect of having to air out your garments and household textiles.

New players are always promising to revolutionize the dry cleaning industry

Every new entrant into the dry cleaning market place will enthusiastically tell you all about their plans to “revolutionize” the industry. 

They’re always full of “new” ideas that, they believe, will turn the dry cleaning business on it’s proverbial head and generate wealth beyond their wildest dreams.

More specifically, they’ll tell you that they’ve developed a “new concept” — a better mouse trap. And that everything will be “different” and “better”.

Dig a little deeper and you’ll soon recognize that most of these “new” ideas have been around for quite a while and that there’s nothing new to be found.

Fact is, the only thing “new” about their concept is the glitzy marketing package that surrounds the very ordinary product they deliver.

In this post, I use Procter & Gamble’s franchised operation, Tide Dry Cleaners, to illustrate my point.

Dry cleaners don’t care. Really. You might think that they do but they don’t.

Every dry cleaner swears that they really care about your fine garments and household textiles.

But do they really care?

Out of 26,000 dry cleaners in the USA, how many really care about your fine garments, household textiles and accessories? I’d bet fewer than 25.

In this post, I’ll explain why the work delivered by value (discount), ordinary (middle market) and most wannabe (illusion) dry cleaners is incompatible with caring.

Tell your dry cleaner to remove their glued on or heat sealed barcodes

Many dry cleaners glue or heat seal barcodes on your fine garments and household textiles.

When you ask dry cleaners why they glue or heat seal barcodes on your fine garments and household textiles, they’ll tell you that they do so in order to “track your items through their production system”.

That’s the pronounced reason or spin. The real reasons are different.

So the critical question is this: What should you do if you discovered that your dry cleaner glued or heat sealed a barcode onto any of your garments or household textiles?

The overwhelming majority of dry cleaning customers probably couldn’t care less. All they want is a “cleaned and pressed” garment or household textile at the cheapest possible price.

Other customers — particularly those with a large investment in their fine garments and household textiles — may frown upon this practice. For those individuals, what are your options?

In this blog post, I prescribe a course of action and, if that fails, an alternative approach.

Evaluating the construction of bespoke garments: Hand vs. machine work

There are a number of online forums catering to members with an interest in bespoke garments.

Over the years, I’ve followed many threads (questions, answers and comments) relating to the construction of bespoke garments. While some of these threads were both interesting and educational, I’d invariably come away a little confused by the discussion.

When the threads involved a comparison between the work of different tailors, my confusion was magnified.

Something was missing: a mental construct that I could apply to the discussion to sort the wheat from the chaff.

Then I read a blog post by Derek Guy on www.dieworkwear.com entitled “What’s the point of hand work?”.

In this blog post, I identify the reason for my confusion: Unless the hand work and the machine work is specifically identified and labelled, it’s almost impossible to follow a thread discussion and make qualitative assessments between the work of different tailors.

The Hanger Project’s video review of RAVE FabriCARE’s bespoke garment cleaning service

It’s quite common for dry cleaners to tell you all about the “quality” of their cleaning. This applies across the board to all cleaners, even value (discount) cleaners, ordinary (middle market) cleaners and wanabee (illusion) cleaners.

It’s also quite common for customers of dry cleaners to post online reviews and offer testimonials for every category of cleaner.

However, it’s quite rare for a client — particularly a client with both a deep understanding of the technical aspects of the construction of bespoke garments and the experience to assess true quality cleaning — to offer a 10 minute plus video critique of the work delivered by a dry cleaner.

In this post, Kirby Allison, founder of The Hanger Project, offers such a critique.

Although Kirby Allison is a long standing bespoke client of RAVE FabriCARE, neither Kirby nor The Hanger Project are affiliated with RAVE FabriCARE.