HANOVER — Kleen Laundry, an Upper Valley institution with roots dating back to the eve of the 20th century, closed its three dry cleaning retail outlets on Friday, leaving customers in the core towns of Lebanon, Hanover, Hartford and Claremont with limited options to get their clothes dry-cleaned.
The move follows a series of mounting difficulties for the Lebanon company, which recently suffered a boiler malfunction at its plant that resulted in delays in cleaning garments, the closing of its West Lebanon retail store and laundromat earlier this year, and the closing of its Lebanon laundromat on Mechanic Street last year because of an unpaid water bill to the city.
“As a business, (dry cleaning) has not been profitable for us for several years due to declining sales, which have mirrored national trends for dry cleaning services,” Kleen co-owner Ned Hazard said. He called the decision “so difficult” in light of “the unfortunate impact that it will have on our loyal employees and customers, some of which we have been employing (and) serving for decades.”
Hazard said closing the dry cleaning operation resulted in about 10 people losing their jobs out of the company’s 110 employees.
Each of the three Kleen dry cleaning stores will be open for limited morning hours after Tuesday this week for customers to retrieve their items, the company said. Items not retrieved from the Hanover or Claremont stores before noon on June 21 will be transferred to the Lebanon location on Mechanic Street, which will be open for pickup from 8 a.m. to noon until Friday, June 28, when it will close permanently.
The closing of Kleen’s dry cleaning services leaves New London Cleaners in New London as the sole remaining dry cleaner in the Upper Valley, following the closing of Roger’s Fabricare in Windsor in December, which had provided dry cleaning drop-off and pickup service at locations in Lebanon and Norwich. College Cleaners in Hanover and White River Junction closed several years ago.
(River Valley Club at Centerra Park has contracted with New London Cleaners to provide a drop-off and pickup service for dry cleaning, which is available weekdays at the club’s FITshop and open to nonmembers. Also, Carpet King & Tile in Norwich recently restarted a Monday and Thursday dry cleaning drop-off and pickup location serviced by Modern Cleaners & Tailors of Rutland.)
Kleen’s commercial laundry division, which serves institutions and businesses, continues to operate.
Dartmouth College, which owns the building where Kleen’s Hanover store is located on Lebanon Street, said it will seek to find another cleaner to fill the space.
“We are disappointed that our long-term tenant, Kleen, has decided to close operations on Lebanon Street in Hanover. Dartmouth’s Real Estate Office has already begun to look for a new dry-cleaning tenant and has been in touch with E&R Laundry in Manchester, which currently runs a pick-up service at the Tuck School of Business. We will continue to talk with them and pursue other options for the space,” college spokeswoman Diana Lawrence said in a statement.
Jeff Owens, owner of New London Cleaners, said that within hours of Kleen posting notices at its retail outlets on Friday morning he began receiving calls from people inquiring about his dry cleaning service. Owens has operated the one-location dry cleaning business for 30 years, which was in his wife’s family for 25 years before that. He said he had been looking at opening a pickup/drop-off location in Lebanon or Hanover for some time but now expects to pick up those efforts.
“I’m sad to see them go because they’ve been up there for a long time,” Owens said of Kleen. He said rumors that Kleen’s dry cleaning was having problems “have been kicking around for a long time and we knew it was coming, but we just didn’t know when.”
“We’ll get up there,” Owens said. “But it won’t be overnight.”
The dry cleaning industry has been shrinking for some time as people shift to more casual dressing and wash-and-wear apparel that does not require ironing and pressing. Once a common feature of nearly every town along with a mom-and-pop drugstore, bookstore and stationery store, demand for dry cleaning has been declining steadily.
“The only men who wear suits and ties any longer are bankers,” Owens said.
At its peak in 2010, the U.S. dry cleaning industry had some $11 billion in revenues, according to market research firm IBSWorld. But as households have cut spending in the wake of the Great Recession, revenues have been falling at a rate of 0.7% annually and fell to $9 billion in 2018, according to the firm.
“It’s been pretty tough,” said Peter Blake, executive vice president of the North East Fabricare Association, a regional New England trade group of dry cleaning professionals. “People are more into casual wear and moving away from dry cleaning … just like people going to church on Sunday. It used to be in dresses and suits. Attitudes have become a lot more relaxed in the past 10 years.”
In addition to societal changes in fashion, Kleen Laundry has experienced its own business difficulties in recent years. Long owned by the Gosselin family, who bought the company formerly known as Lebanon Steam Laundry in 1928, the family sold a majority stake in the business to a group of investors in 2006, which six years later was merged into industrial launderer Envoy Services of Manchester.
Then the unexpected death of the head the investor group left a hole in Kleen and Envoy’s top management, as well as its relationship with the company’s chief bank lender. Kleen ended up filing for bankruptcy in 2016 and renegotiated with its creditors before emerging from bankruptcy in 2017.
Although Kleen is largely known as a dry cleaner in the Upper Valley, some 88% of the company’s revenue comes from commercial laundry services it provides to institutions in northern New England. But that business, too, has come under pressure from competitors.
John Lippman can be reached at jlippman@ vnews.com.
