A family business that still presses by hand

There is a version of this business that scales faster. You take in garments at a storefront, truck them to a central plant two states away, and run everything through one process at one temperature. It is cheaper per piece and it is how a great deal of dry cleaning in America now works.

We do not do that, and the reason is not sentimental. A wool suit, a beaded silk gown, a linen blazer and a down comforter need four genuinely different treatments, and the only way to give them four different treatments is to have a person look at each one and decide. Centralized processing cannot afford that decision. Our own plant can.

So we keep the cleaning in our own hands, and we keep three counters across Greenville and Greer — each with its own phone number and its own staff, with drive-thru lanes at Thornblade and Woodruff Road. The trade-off is that we will never be the cheapest cleaner in the Upstate. The upside is that your jacket comes back with its shoulder shaped rather than flattened, and when something needs fixing you talk to the person who can fix it.