t took him almost a
decade to figure out the elusive secret of drycleaning, but Ray
Rangwala, owner of The Cleaning Store in Glendale, CA, eventually discovered it.
“The secret to drycleaning is that there is no
secret,” he said. “You start off using the cleanest
solvent. You hire the best people. Then, you add a lot of good
old-fashioned elbow grease, along with all of your skills.
Charge a fair price for your service. Then, you inspect and
reinspect each garment thoroughly. Lastly, make sure that you
do this with pride.”
While it sounds simple enough to him
now, there was a time when Ray strongly believed that money
couldn’t be made in the drycleaning industry, despite
what he was told almost 17 years ago when he bought The
Cleaning Store with his father.
“The salesman told us you put the
clothes in the machine, take them out, and the dollars would
come out along with the clothes. The money would flow,
basically,” he laughed.
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At a young age, Ray learned English in
school and by reading Reader’s Digest magazines.
Ray’s father, a lifelong painting contractor with his own
business, always hoped his son would have a future outside of
India.
The little extra money that the family
managed to save was spent on traveling to other countries. Ray
first experienced America when he was eleven. He visited Boston
for six weeks and was immediately fascinated.
When he was 17, Ray and his brother, Bill,
moved to America, intending to save enough money to bring their
parents over someday. Ray attended college in Bethlehem, PA,
and later studied at Penn State University.
“I didn’t know what I was
going to do with my life,” he recalled. “I was
going to college and none of those things interested me. The
thing that fascinated me the most was marketing.”
Though Ray never graduated, he gained
knowledge that would be useful to him later in life. He soon
grew tired of Pennsylvania's cold weather, so he and his
brother headed to California hoping to make their fortunes
there.
Ray enrolled in marketing classes at
California State University while he spent his evenings holding
down several jobs, including one for a Safeway grocery store
where he met Cindy, his wife of 17 years. “She was a
cashier and I was a box boy,” he said.
In their spare time, Ray and Bill
investigated business opportunities. “We were looking for
a business to get my parents involved in because my dad was
getting sick and there was nobody to take care of my parents
because me and my brother were both here,” Ray explained.
“So, it was better that my parents come here. And, you
know, all of us had the American Dream.”
After Ray and Bill found a turn-key
drycleaning plant in 1995, Ray’s parents moved to
America. Originally, Ray only intended on helping his father
long enough for him to get the business running smoothly.
Things didn’t work out that way; the business
barely ran at all.
Shortly after earning his operator’s
license, Ray still felt that he needed more experience.
He didn’t feel ready, but he didn’t have a
choice. “Suddenly, everybody was looking at me saying,
‘What do we do?’” Ray said. “I was
spotting the clothes and damaging them left and right. I
didn’t know when to stop. It was trial and error. I did
it the hard way, basically, writing checks every time I made a
mistake.”
Ray’s early business philosophy was
to save costs no matter what. He and his father bought
cheap soap and equipment and offered discount dollar
drycleaning to save customers money.
“Back home, one Indian rupee is like
a dollar, except right now it’s almost worth $45 or
something,” Ray said. “We worked hard, but for us,
a dollar was so important that we did everything at the lowest
dollar level. We thought, ‘How can you charge $2?’
because $2 meant a lot of money to us. We were penny wise
and pound foolish.”
or the Rangwalas, the American Dream had become
an American Nightmare. Ray worked constantly, but had no money
to show for it. For ten years, the family struggled just to
keep the business open. Unfortunately, the daily stress began
to take its toll. “My dad had a major heart attack,
probably caused by not being able to meet payroll and
worrying,” Ray said. “He had a quadruple
bypass.”
Shortly after, Ray’s parents turned
the business over to him and left to sell their apartment in
India in 1997. They both believed that money could not be made
in the drycleaning industry, but they wanted Ray to prove them
wrong.
Looking back, it’s much easier for
Ray to see the problem. “In retrospect, I was not doing a
great job. I was doing a decent job of putting my heart into
it, but putting your heart into it when you don’t know
what you’re doing doesn’t help,” he said.
At the time, the problem was almost
impossible for Ray to see while he was working long 12-hour
days with no relief in sight. “If say, ten years ago you
called me and asked what kind of work I did, I’d be
adamant about telling you how good of a job I was doing,”
he said. “Thinking about what I used to do then, I know I
was doing a horrible job, but nobody could tell me
otherwise.”
The first simple change that Ray
implemented in his plant was some inexpensive cleaning and
remodeling. “My store started looking prettier, and,
automatically, my business went up,” he said.
Next, Ray used better soap and started a
marketing program that did not use coupons. He also offered his
customers a six-part promise, which included: always using pure
distilled solvent; keeping clothes odor-free; being
environmentally responsible; pre-spotting each and every
garment; no broken buttons; and all clothes will be ready on
time.
Lastly, Ray asked himself a tough question:
how could he do a better job of cleaning clothes without
raising his prices? The answer turned out to be fairly simple.
“I knew my answer was to charge more
and do a perfect job rather than charge less and do a lousy
job. I started competing on quality rather than on price
because the price conscious people were only loyal to the
price,” he said.
ay’s new strategy worked perfectly.
“From that day, when my parents went to India, until
today, business has gone up at least 15-20% every year,”
he added. During that time, The Cleaning Store was recognized
by the California Cleaners Association in 2001-2002 as the
“Drycleaner of the Year” in the state of
California. The plant also won “Glendale’s Best
Cleaners” awards in 2000, 2001 and 2002 in annual
readers’ polls taken by the Glendale News Press.
Ray’s store, which cleans costumes
for the Pasadena Shakespeare Company, the Noise Within and the
Glendale Center Theater, has certainly come a long way over the
years. As much as he enjoys having esteemed customers and
earning public recognition, the real reward for Ray has been to
show his parents that the drycleaning business can be
successful.
Now that his business is doing well, Ray
has drastically cut back on his hours to enable him to pursue
other interests. In addition to being an active CCA member, he
serves on the board of directors for the Greater Los Angeles
Dry Cleaners Association.
He is also active in several charitable
projects. Most notably, he has directed many youth projects for
the Glendale Rotary Club. “Most of my business comes from
my community,” he said. “I love to give back to
it.”
One of the group’s pet projects is
helping Estado 29, an orphanage in Mexico which houses 55
children. Most recently, Ray began looking for a used washer
and dryer to meet the orphanage’s cleaning needs. He
finds the work very rewarding. “If I ever were to retire
from this business, I’m going to run an orphanage,”
he said.
Ray and Cindy have adopted an orphan of
their own; their daughter Sarah is seven. The couple has also
raised Cindy’s son, Russell. He is now a U.S. Marine.
The demands of parenting haven’t
been easy, especially since Cindy works as a detective on
assault cases for the L.A.P.D. “She doesn’t help me
in collecting the damn checks when they bounce,” Ray
joked.
Having more time to raise Sarah has made
Ray realize just how much his life has changed in the past five
years. “It was tough with Russell because I was working
12 hours a day so I could never raise him the way I’m
raising my daughter now,” he said. “All the things
I’m doing with her, I never did with my son because I was
too busy working.”
“I can now say that drycleaning is a
great business,” he continued. “At one time, it was
horrible because I was competing on price and it was miserable
because I couldn’t stand out from the crowd. I hate to
see other people going in the same boat. I was there once,
too.”
Now, Ray hopes that he can help other
cleaners in a similar situation who have yet to learn that
there is no secret to drycleaning. “It’s not easy,
but I know how to do it. All you have to do is do a great job
and the customers will line up outside the door,” he
explained. “You have to work hard, charge a decent price
and do it right. It’s not a secret. It’s a
given.”
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