New Flagship Store For Superior Cleaners

By Nancy K. Crevier

Even as paving machines continue to smooth the parking lot and as carpenters measure, cut, and place new shelving into the new 6,200 square foot flagship store at 36A Kenosia Avenue in Danbury, Superior Cleaner & Tailor’s owner Frank Magliocco welcomes customers into the nearly finished storefront. The Kenosia Avenue Superior Cleaners is the seventh such business the Newtown resident has opened since taking over the Newtown Superior Cleaners on South Main Street and the White Street Superior Cleaners when his father, Anthony Magliocco, retired from the business in the early 1980s.

“My father opened the original store on Church Hill Road nearly 50 years ago across from where the Blue Colony Diner is,” recalled Mr Magliocco. “It was called Hi-Way Cleaners, and was right off of I-84 there. I still actually have customers who used the original Hi-Way Cleaners,” he said.

Hi-Way Cleaners briefly passed out of the hands of the Magliocco family, and it was during that time that the exit 10 cleaner burned to the ground. His father went back into the cleaning business, opening the first Superior Cleaners in the Colonial Plaza on Route 25 and shortly after, the White Street storefront in Danbury.

“I worked in the first Hi-Way Cleaner,” said Mr Magliocco. “I was just a little kid, but I would sweep up, wait on customers, that sort of thing.” His post-high school days took him all the way to California, though, where he earned his accounting degree at the University of San Diego and became a CPA.

But recognizing that the family business had great potential, he returned to Connecticut and joined his father at the Newtown location. By the time he bought out his father in 1984, Mr Magliocco realized that the best way to service his customers was to grow.

“I saw that the business had to grow and specialize and that’s what we did,” he said.

From two stores in 1984, he has added a store in New Fairfield, one in Corporate Center on Ridgebury Road in Danbury, two in Southbury, and now his newest and largest on Kenosia Avenue.

“Small businesses are getting squeezed. You have to be progressive and you need to accommodate new technology. This is the fourth major upgrade I have done in my stores,” said Mr Magliocco, indicating the new, specialized equipment that fills the brand new Kenosia Avenue building.

Along with state of the art dry cleaning equipment, the newest Superior Cleaners, where all of the items collected from the other six stores end up, houses manually programmed computerized wet washers and dryers that offer “superior” cleaning that can be as gentle or aggressive as is needed for optimum results, said Mr Magliocco. The wet washing service provides clients with a much more precise cleaning and pressing than can be achieved at home, and is a look that many of his customers seek for all of their clothes.

All new tensioning and form finishing equipment is “one of the newest breakthroughs this decade in the industry,” Mr Magliocco explained, and he has added finishing equipment in this plant that is just for blouses, as well as a sweater board that can block out sweaters in such as way as to make them practically new again.

The efficiency of the new machinery also means that fewer pollutants end up in the environment, said Mr Magliocco. “Every dry cleaner uses a chemical or solvent. But with the newer equipment that meets all EPA standards, we have less odors, and any residual waste is handled by licensed haulers.”

 A trolley system as complex as I-84 swirls neatly pressed clothing along steel rod highways that swoop from ceiling to eye-level. As the newly dry-cleaned and washed items make their way from station to station, they are checked by staff who make sure the clothes meet rigid requirements before they are packaged for shipment to the satellite stores where customers will retrieve them.

Customer service has always been the top priority for Superior Cleaners, said Mr Magliocco, and it is through the efforts of his wife, Patti, who assists behind the scenes and at the front counters, and his well-trained staff of 40 at the seven stores, as well as his personal involvement that he is able to provide quality service. “We service everything. I don’t turn anyone away. If we don’t do it on premises, we can send it out,” he said.

Three Superior Cleaners trucks, with a fourth to be added in the spring, provide pick-up and drop-off service to home customers and to corporate clientele, while two trucks move items from the six other stores to the Kenosia Avenue location for cleaning and repairs.

“And no one has a tailoring staff like we do,” said Mr Magliocco. He speaks proudly of his longtime tailoring staff, Christopher Notaro, with 50 years of experience; Beatrice Rahl and Irene Rocha, with more than 20 years of tailoring experience each; and Antonia Curra who attended design school in Italy and serviced high-end customers in New York before moving to Southbury; as well as all of the other tailors in his stores. “From sewing a seam to designing a suit, we can do it,” Mr Magliocco claimed.

All of his staff is cross-trained so that they can competently step into any position that needs to be filled, Mr Magliocco said. He can count on his managers, like Chris Menezes and Carla Trevisan, to be on top of things from the moment an item is left at the front counter until it is safely back in the hands of the customer. “My managers are in tune with me. The people I have [working for Superior Cleaners] are what make me different from the competition. Everyone is very versatile.” The managers are all required to spend time in the flagship store to learn how the internals of the operation works, he said. “That way, they know what is going on and why things happen the way they do.” Having that knowledge helps his staff provide the best service that they can to customers, he said. A newly upgraded computer system that allows the staff to see what is going on in any of the satellite stores has also streamlined the efficiency of the business, said Mr Magliocco.

Big machinery will soon stop grumbling outside of the new store and the finish work on the interior will be wrapped up in the next two weeks, Mr Magliocco said. The soft opening will give way to a grand opening in mid-November.

With a new store that can handle three times the volume Superior Cleaners now handles, Mr Magliocco said, “We can grow for generations to come here. I want to be the best.”

Superior Cleaners & Tailors has seven locations: the Colonial Plaza on South Main Street in Newtown; 36A Kenosia Avenue, Danbury; 154 White Street, Danbury; Corporate Center, Ridgebury Road, Danbury; Heritage Plaza, Route 39, New Fairfield; Bennett Place, 316 Main Street South, Southbury; and Southbury Plaza, Southbury. The stores are open from 7 am to 7 pm, Monday through Friday and from 8 am to 6 pm on Saturday.