didn’t want my father’s name to be tarnished,” says Yaakoub Hijazi, president of Paterson, New Jersey-basedWhen his father, Youssef, died in 2011, four months after being diagnosed with lung cancer, Hijazi was a 19-year-old student at Montclair State University. He soon learned that his dad’s $4 million commercial laundry and dry-cleaning business was on the brink of collapse. “When you go bankrupt, your name is destroyed,” he says.
Laundry is a cutthroat business, priced at 30 cents to 45 cents per pound in New York. Price-cutting to gain market share is rampant. Stumbles abound. Prestige Industries, once Hijazi’s biggest competitor, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2017, and its assets were subsequently bought by a private equity firm that owns laundry firm PureTex Solutions. “The entire market is fighting over the same 200 hotels,” says Sang Cho, CEO of Prestige until 2012, who founded Cooperative Laundry in 2018.
On a November visit to the Paterson, New Jersey, headquarters, Hijazi showed off one of his four giant tunnel washers. The dirty linens arrive in 800-pound bins labeled “Star Laundry Baba Joe 1948–2011” for his dad. Next, 135-pound loads pass through modules that scour dirt with 180-degree water and brighten colors with hydrogen peroxide and 6 to 11 other chemicals. Separate compartments in the tunnel and computer coding allow multiple hotels’ linens to be washed at the same time.
When Hijazi took over, he got hit with a lot. “And when you’re 19 years old, people are not going to listen to what you say,” he recalls. The company faced a cash crunch, sewer liens, tax liens and fines from the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Hijazi borrowed $300,000 to pay off everything, ditched the middling dry-cleaning business and hired an OSHA consultant to address the safety issues.
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