2016 was a year of disruption. I had been working alongside my family inside a partnership — building something, learning the trade, putting in the hours. Then one side of that partnership saw an opportunity to exit. And on their way out, they didn't just leave. They consolidated. What had been a shared enterprise became the largest dry cleaning operation in the Pittsburgh market. I was on the other side of that transaction with a choice to make.
I purchased Duro Cleaners.
What I inherited was a McKnight Road storefront with decades of history, a handful of negative reviews left over from previous ownership, and a PERC machine old enough to order a drink at a bar. I was a very small player in a market that had just gotten a whole lot bigger on one side of it. There was no roadmap. There was no safety net. There was just the business, the bills, and a decision about what kind of operator I wanted to be.
The PERC machine was the first real decision. Perchloroethylene is what most dry cleaners have run on for decades — it's cheap, it cleans, and it's a likely human carcinogen. The EPA has been moving to ban it for years. I made the call to invest in a 100% eco-friendly approach instead. Not because it was easy — it wasn't. It cost more. It required new equipment, new chemistry, a new way of thinking about every garment that came through the door. I chose SYSTEMK4, a bio-based solvent derived from American corn, non-toxic and fully biodegradable. The right decision for the community and the environment, even when it was the harder one for the balance sheet.
All of this happened while I was starting my family. My wife Sarah has been the constant through every hard season this business has put us through. Her support isn't background noise — it's the reason I could make the long bets when everything was uncertain. Together we have two kids. And I'll be honest: being a father changes your relationship with the word "quit." There is no quitting. There is no option to fold. There are two children watching what their father does when things get hard.
Dry cleaning is not a glamorous business. It gets harder every year — costs rise, margins compress, customer expectations grow, and the market doesn't wait for you to catch up. We survived COVID when it nearly wiped us out. We made the decision to go fully delivery-based when the retail model stopped making sense. We moved. We rebuilt. We rebranded as Wash, redid our processes, invested in equipment, and built the systems that would make us better every single day instead of just keeping the lights on.
What drives me forward is simple: what a customer deserves when they trust us with a garment. That trust is not a small thing. A suit that matters. A dress with a story. A shirt that needs to be right. Every item that comes through our door carries someone's expectation that it will come back better than it left. That's the job. That has always been the job.
We are a small business. We are asking you to take a chance on us. If you want to support something local — something built by a Pittsburgh family, with Pittsburgh values, for Pittsburgh people — you are in the right place. The brand is modern. The attention to detail is years in the making. The commitment to quality is not a marketing line. It is the only reason we are still here.
We are the dry cleaner Pittsburgh deserves.
