Drop your trousers This is literally what you can do with Peters’ Cleaners’ new pods. Mary finds out more and can’t understand why no-one has thought of this before
trend when it comes to high streets. It is one of the few towns with a destination high street. People will wander into town on a Saturday and are happy to drop their dry cleaning off and then go or a coffee and enjoy the independent shops. But this is very unusual. I closed one shop in Peterborough as it just wasn’t busy enough and did some thinking.’ Vicky dissected the business from top to bottom. Her research quickly showed that the current trend was that people wanted to buy time. They either YOU wanted to be working or out R enjoying life. If you are busy
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’We are all about caring for fabric,’ says Vicky, ‘which we do very well and our custo ers appreciate the service we offer Unfortunately with rising costs it quickly became apparent that there was no money in dry cleaning despite the excellent service and having a large customer base. There wasn’t enough revenue to be able to keep the three shops open and pay staff to clean and run the shop. High Streets were rapidly changing so decisions had to be made about the future of the business. ‘Stamford is a great shop, it’s always busy so will never be E closed. But Stamford bucks the AG
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VERY HIGH STREET used to have at least one dry cleaner; I’m sure Stamford at one point had four. But times and habits change, as do fabrics. And of course Covid has hastened the demise of many a dry cleaning business. But one person reversing the trend in a big way is Vicky Whiter (the perfect name for an owner of a dry cleaning business), owner of Peters’ Cleaners. She is revolutionising the dry cleaning business with the introduction of the self service cleaning pod. Established in 1963 Vicky bought the business in 2016. An ex Stamford High School girl, Vicky had spent many years in London working in business development as well as travelling for work. A move to a village near Stamford and the birth of her daughter led her to re-evaluate her life. ‘I wanted more time rather than money so started looking round for something else to do as y current ob was not going to t in with having a young child. My father told me Peters’ Cleaners was up for sale. It had a great reputation and large list of clients but had done very little marketing over the years so I thought it shouldn’t be that hard to turn it around and give it a new lease of life; so I bought it.’ Peters’ Cleaners’ main business is the cleaning, pressing and repairing of businesswear which they have a great reputation for. They clean 65,000 items a year including high end wedding dresses, curtains, bedding and of course, its mainstay, clothing. They also do repairs, ta e up he s replace ips and offer a pressing service (which is very popular).
40 March 2022 / theactivemag.com
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