THROUGH THE AGES — Third-generation owner Jessie McLauchlin and her husband Branden.
For residents of DeLand, the recent closure of Mitchell Cleaners — the long-standing dry cleaning and laundry business in the heart of Downtown DeLand — may have appeared abrupt and unexpected.
But for third-generation owner and operator Jessie McLauchlin, the choice to shutter the business she grew up in, and has been at the helm of since 2013, was no snap decision.
Beacon staff spoke with McLauchlin and learned a bit about the three generations of ownership that began with her paternal grandparents, Gordon and Myrtle “Myrt” Pierson, in the 1970s.
According to McLauchlin, Gordon and Myrt had been the owners of land that is now known as Blue Spring State Park, and in the 1970s, they sold their property to the state of Florida and decided to purchase Mitchell Cleaners.
At 309 N. Woodland Blvd. in DeLand, Mitchell Cleaners had already been a successful dry-cleaning operation since the 1950s, and when the Piersons purchased the business in the 1970s, they had a decision to make.
“Pierson, their last name … is a town very close to us, so they didn’t want people to get confused and think that ‘Pierson Cleaners’ was in Pierson, not in DeLand,” McLauchlin said. “Also, the Mitchells had built a very substantial and lucrative business, and [my grandparents] didn’t want to lose any of their customers when they took over the business from Mr. Mitchell, so it stayed Mitchell Cleaners.”
McLauchlin reflected fondly upon her years of growing up in a family-owned and -operated business, and of observing her grandmother interact with fellow DeLandites throughout a typical workday, in a place that served as a veritable hub of Downtown activity.
“I remember we always had a glass dish filled with Tootsie Rolls for the customers, and my grandmother always sat up front,” McLauchlin said. “My grandmother was a very outspoken woman, and everybody would just come in and catch up on the town gossip.”
“That’s what I remember most about my childhood — everyone standing either in the store or out front … holding their clothes, kind of draped on their back, with their fingers on the hooks … just standing out there talking. It was just kind of like a town meetup spot for everyone to catch up,” McLauchlin reminisced.
As the years progressed and as business grew, McLauchlin’s father — Gordon Pierson Jr. — stepped in to work alongside his parents in the 1980s.
“My dad stepped in and helped my grandparents because they were so busy. Back in the day, the plant used to do 800 to 1,000 [articles of clothing] a day,” McLauchlin said. “We also had one of the only fur vaults in Central Florida … so we stored a lot of furs. That used to be very big … [but] has since died out.”
When McLauchlin’s grandfather passed away in 1987, Gordon Jr. continued to work alongside his mother and thus began a tradition of multigenerational ownership following Myrt’s passing in 2008.
“[In the] late 1990s, early 2000s — we were really doing very, very well. But then … 2006, 2008 is when … it just took a really big crash,” McLauchlin described of a significant downturn in business, and in relation to the nationwide financial crisis and recession of the time.
“Around 2006 to 2008 … things definitely changed for a lot of businesses. When we used to do 800 to 1,000 pieces of clothing a day, we [then] saw a deficit of about 50 percent of our profit. We went down to 300 to 400 pieces of clothing a day,” McLauchlin said. “[We] just kind of changed with the times. We were able to stay in business. It wasn’t as lucrative … but we were still there, we were still able to make a living.”
McLauchlin did not always have plans to succeed her father in ownership of Mitchell Cleaners, but a fateful call in the mid 2000s altered her personal and professional path forward.
McLauchlin was working in law enforcement, processing evidence, when she received a call from her family’s business accountant, who was also a close family friend.
Her father had been making some concerning and out-of-the-ordinary accounting and financial errors.
Unbeknownst to McLauchlin — Gordon Jr. had been experiencing seizures but had not expressed to McLauchlin what was occurring.
“He didn’t want to bother me with the information because I had just gotten married, I had just had a child. I had a life of my own, and he thought he was going to mess things up for me if he bothered me with any of that information,” McLauchlin said. “He knew I would step in … he didn’t want to alter my life in any way.”
Unfortunately, after seeking care, it was determined that Gordon Jr. had been experiencing seizures and additional symptoms due to a brain tumor.
“There were a lot of things that my dad didn’t keep up with, that he used to be able to, and I think a lot of that had to do with the brain tumor, because he didn’t know he had one,” McLauchlin said of her father’s diagnosis.
When Gordon, Jr. passed away in 2013, McLauchlin jumped into learning the ins-and-outs of running Mitchell Cleaners as an owner.
“I grew up in the business, but I had only worked the front counter position … customer service,” McLauchlin said. “By the time I got into the business, my dad had had several surgeries on his brain, [and] he was no longer able to communicate with me. Everything I had to learn, I had to learn from either prior employees or from anyone who I could gain any kind of knowledge from, because my dad could no longer communicate,” McLauchlin described of her succession of ownership.
In order to gain technical knowledge of operating a dry-cleaning business, McLauchlin attended courses at an official school of dry cleaning.
According to McLauchlin, “There is only one [professional dry-cleaning school] in all of the United States — The Dry Cleaning and Laundry Institute. It’s in Maryland, and you can become a certified dry cleaner. They teach you the proper way to do everything.”
“I was very excited to gain this knowledge. I was going to take out a loan on the business and start doing drop off and deliveries. That way we could gain [a wider] customer base and try to get back to that piece count that we used to have,” McLauchlin said.
Unfortunately, like many small-business owners, McLauchlin’s vision for growth was derailed by the dawning of COVID-19, and McLauchlin, once again adapted to unexpected professional circumstances.
“When I went in for my loan in order to amp up the business, it was around the time that COVID had started … so [the loan] helped me stay alive,” McLauchlin said. “Had I not gotten that loan during that time, we would have already been shut down.”
But I was able to secure that loan right before COVID hit. So instead of using that loan for what I was going to use it for, we used it to survive,” McLauchlin said.
“After COVID, we saw a drop in revenue, and we were only doing 100 pieces of clothing a day. From 2006, 2008 … that’s a 90 percent profit loss. No business is going to make it with that substantial of a loss.”
As COVID-19 era business operations continued, McLauchlin was able to keep the business afloat with federal Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans, and while she has witnessed continued growth in DeLand over the past four years, Mitchell Cleaners still hovered at a 100-piece-per-day average.
“We were just running at a loss for such a long time that it finally caught up, and it was just like, ‘we can’t do this anymore,’” McLauchlin lamented.
“I probably should have tried to sell the business a little bit earlier than I had, but … [there are] state regulations that are a part of dry cleaning sales that I didn’t realize when I went in to sell my business. Something that I thought was only going to take me a couple of months ended up taking me a lot longer than I had anticipated because … [the state] has to make sure that, especially with as long as Mitchell Cleaners has been around, that we’re not contaminated,” McLauchlin said.
“We don’t use any of the contaminating solvents — we use eco-friendly solvent, but they still have to check every dry cleaners to make sure … because there’s another type of solvent that is very harmful to the environment, and if people use that and they dispose of that incorrectly, it’s very bad for the environment,” McLauchlin described.
The sale of Mitchell Cleaners is now complete, and while McLauchlin was able to report that it will no longer operate as a dry cleaning business, she is not certain of the new owner’s plans.
McLauchlin said that any remaining clothing items that were not collected prior to closing have been given to B & O Cleaners, at 1000 N. Woodland Blvd. in DeLand, and as of publication, McLauchlin estimated that there were around 20 orders remaining to be picked up. “They can always email us at mitchelldrycleaners@gmail.com or contact us via FaceBook, and we will double check,” McLauchlin said.
