It’s 4:30 on a Friday afternoon as Norman Sutton rounds the corner for his final stop of the day after hours of making laundry pickups in the 90-degree summer heat.
Over the nearly three decades he has owned Sutton’s Dry Cleaning, work hasn’t gotten any easier for Sutton and independent dry cleaners like him in Baton Rouge. In fact, a continuously shrinking customer base has made profit margins all that much tighter, as Business Report details in a feature from its recent issue.
Baton Rouge residents of a certain age can recall a time when a downtown stroll, trip with the family to Sunday service or a Saturday night in Death Valley called for men in fresh suits and ladies in their finest dresses. Perhaps more than anyone, those in the dry cleaning business look back most fondly on those days, when customers knew them by name and relied on their services to look their very best.
But over the years, changing trends in fashion, cheaper clothing materials, new technology, demographic shifts and intensifying regulations have stunted growth in the dry-cleaning industry across the nation, and led to a number of local closures. For most, the shift began about 20 years ago as casual Friday gave way to business casual every day.
“That trend has probably hurt my business more than anything,” says Ricky Welsh, owner of Welsh’s Cleaners, which has four Baton Rouge locations.
A family business since 1965, Welsh started his career in the industry in 1983. It wasn’t until the late ’90s and early 2000s that he noticed a gradual shift to more casual wear was impacting his business.
“Did it affect it overall? Yeah it did,” he says. “We started seeing back in the ’90s that people would bring us their nicer things, and their wash-and-wear they’d keep at home.”
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