Mr. Neat’s suits up for drycleaning run

LOVELAND – Signaling a move into Larimer County’s retail drycleaning market, Mister Neat’s Formalwear has closed on a 1.5-acre parcel in the Loveland-Fort Collins Industrial Airpark, where it will build a new warehouse and cleaning facility.

“We are prepared to take this full force and hope to be recognized as the dry cleaner in Northern Colorado,” Mister Neat’s president and founder Mark Burke said.

Corporate headquarters for the chain’s 11 retail formalwear stores will move from downtown Loveland to the 19,000-square-foot building under construction by Sinnett Builders Inc.

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The new building and retail stores in Loveland and Fort Collins are expected to open around the first of the year.

“The family business in Iowa is drycleaning,” Burke said. “They have 20 stores and four production plants. We’re just bringing the expertise that they have in Burke Cleaners to Colorado.”

Burke is the oldest of five brothers, three of whom are involved in the Quad Cities operation in Iowa and Illinois, which includes eight formalwear stores. His youngest brother, Tim Burke, is in intensive training in Davenport, Iowa, and will join the Colorado drycleaning operation as a partner.

Jack Springer, executive director of the Chicago-based International Formalwear Association, said the move into drycleaning is a fit for Mister Neat’s, because it allows better control of the product.

“Many members of the association are also in the drycleaning business because they can do a better job than anybody else,” Springer said.

Burke said his current drycleaning contractors are doing a fine job of preparing formal suits for the next rental, but bringing the majority of the work in-house will allow Mister Neat’s to better pace the cleaning and distribution.

“I don’t think we’ll be saving a tremendous amount of money, but we will be speeding up the time it takes to get the tuxedo back out to the customers.”

Burke said the new building is fairly utilitarian, though it features state-of-the-art drycleaning equipment.

Tuxedo packages will be assembled at the plant, where workers will make sure that each renter gets the right coat, trousers, shirt, studs and accessories. Assembly is currently done at the downtown Loveland plant. Centralization of cleaning, assembly and processing frees store employees to devote most of their time to customer service.

At Burke Cleaners, customer-service extras will include home and business garment pickup and delivery.

Burke was a senior marketing major at Colorado State University in 1974, when he disregarded the advice of his professor and classmates, who had taken the idea of Mister Neat’s on as a class project.

“The class said, “Not a chance in hell,” Burke said.

“But when you’re 22 and you don’t know any better, and you’ve got nothing to lose, you can take the gamble. We had a lot of business from western Nebraska and southern Wyoming, and that was the thing the other students and the professors didn’t take into consideration.”

In the early years, Burke had a couple of stores, including the flagship shop in the Foothills Fashion Mall, and a backroom full of six different styles of tuxedos that all rented for the same price. When an order came in, he would throw the suits in the back seat of his car and meet his Greeley manager on the highway halfway between the two cities.

Today, trucks filled with literally hundreds of styles of tuxedos run daily from the Loveland plant to stores as far south as Colorado Springs. And though the chance of seeing Burke hand off a garment bag on the shoulder of the highway is less likely now, he hasn’t lost sight of the customer concern that motivated those early emergency runs.

“If we can’t get it to the store, we’ll drive it to the house,” he said.