Shaw also figured his less-toxic cleaning method would be a big selling point to shopping-center landlords. “I knew it’d be easier to find good locations for my stores with a C02 machine,” he says. It’s getting more difficult for perc stores to get good locations, Shaw adds. “Landlords are very concerned with the toxic problems with perc, especially the water and land contamination.”
Shaw knew that in order to drum up and maintain business, he’d have to be in the most upscale, high-traffic areas. Location is a huge part of his success because his target market is people who are concerned about environmental issues and who have clothes that are on the expensive side. “The stores had to be located in nice areas,” he says, “and areas that have a lot of storefront traffic. My biggest advertising dollars are actually spent on paying the high rents in these great locations. In my business, that’s the best marketing my money can buy.”
Pricing, too, has been an ongoing learning curve for Shaw, who charged $1.75 to clean a dress shirt and $3.95 for pants when he opened in 2001—about the same as the other dry cleaners nearby. He wanted to attract as many new customers as possible so he kept prices competitive, but he didn’t realize that the costs of running a C02 operation were as high as they are. Now, he charges $3.39 for a dress shirt and $6.50 for pants—about 20 percent more than the other neighborhood cleaners. “I can charge a premium price because I have something no one else has,” he says. “But again, it’s not necessarily just because it is better for the environment, it is because it gets your clothes clean and because it has no odor. And clothes also last longer with this system. That’s another benefit of C02 that I really wasn’t aware of until I started doing this.”
Perhaps Shaw’s biggest stroke of marketing genius was his seemingly minor decision to put his high-tech, futuristic-looking C02 washing machine right in the glass window at the front of his first store. It went completely against what the franchiser recommended in its business manual, but, says Shaw, “these machines are so cool, I decided to put them right in front by the large windows. Then I put in track lighting and shiny black tile, and a palm tree. When people walk by, to this day, many of them stop and ask me what the heck it is. They’re not sure if it’s a brewery or what. The machines themselves are my biggest marketing tool. Not just what they look like, of course. But what they do.”
Shaw’s hurdles are virtually the same as those for any other green business, says Josh Dorfman, creator and host of “The Lazy Environmentalist” on Sirius Satellite Radio and founder & CEO of several green companies. “Shaw’s biggest challenge is simply demonstrating to his customer base that these machines actually get your clothes clean,” says Dorfman. “I learned early on in the process of marketing a green company that you need to find the perfect balance between telling your story as a values-based business and making sure your consumers know that your product actually does what you say it does.”
The image of the eco-friendly business isn’t always a positive one, Dorfman adds. “It’s the old ‘wearing-a-burlap-sack’ mentality,” he says. “Some people are still uncomfortable when they find out you run an eco-friendly business because they still associate that with inferior products. So to combat that, you have to do everything a little better than everyone else. You have to have the best design and the best service and the best Web site.”
Shaw caters to this same philosophy. In fact, he’s shifted much of his marketing energy lately to his Web site. For green businesses, the Web is often a starting point in attracting customers who research eco-friendly products online. His hits have more than tripled in the past few months, so he’s redesigning the site, making it easier to navigate, adding content, and using it to offer monthly and quarterly specials. His Web enhancement is linked to a national “Find C02” Web campaign, which Shaw and a few other C02 operators across the country have launched to help people find CO2 stores and learn more about them.
Over the last year or so there’s been a crucial tipping point in the green movement and the shift in public attitudes has benefited businesses like Shaw’s. Former vice president Al Gore’s documentary on global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth,” put environmentalism into the spotlight, and there’s growing political consensus on combating climate change and the development of sustainable businesses. That’s helped make environmentally friendly products from hybrid cars to solar energy panels and greener dry cleaners more mainstream. But, according to green business experts, this shift could not have taken place if the eco-friendly products themselves hadn’t also improved.
“You have to provide the customer a benefit first, beyond the fact that you are doing something to protect the planet,” says Jacqueline Ottman, a green business guru who has helped more than 60 Fortune 500 businesses learn how to seize opportunities by addressing consumers’ environmental concerns. She says the bottom line with Shaw’s operation is the same as with any other company, green or not: the product has to work. “He is in a good position,” says Ottman. “You see so many industries now where green products are becoming mainstream. It’s not because they are green products, it’s because they are effective products.”
In the dry-cleaning world, where perc has been the industry’s standard cleaning method for more than 50 years, it took a lot of starch to go against the tide. But Shaw knows he won’t be the lone CO2 shop in San Diego forever. The California Air Resources board voted in January to phase out the use of perchloroethylene by 2023, citing studies that link the chemical to bladder, esophageal and other cancers, so there will likely be other green cleaners sprouting up along the coast. Nonetheless, Shaw is circumspect about the changing market: “I’m enjoying this for now, but there’ll come a time when I’m not the ‘only’ this and the ‘only’ that,” he says. “When that happens, I’ll just have to reinvent myself once again, somehow, with an all-new marketing strategy.”
