About Us

Dry cleaners are like restaurants: a great restaurant uses the best ingredients, employs the most skilled chefs, and takes the proper amount of time to prepare its dishes to perfection.

Likewise, a great dry cleaner will use the highest quality solvents, employ the most skilled technicians, and spend significantly more time on each garment they clean than an average dry cleaner does.

Many people have the misconception that their garments will be handled the same regardless of which dry cleaner they choose. But in actuality, the way a garment is handled, and the way it looks after being cleaned, will differ significantly between a great dry cleaner and an average one.

Even most washable garments are actually better serviced via dry cleaning in order to preserve their color, luster, softness, and body.

Periodic dry cleaning can also help extend a garment’s useful lifetime, and ensure that each time it is worn, it is vibrant, stain-free, and professionally pressed to drape properly on your body.

We utilize the highest quality solvents, employ the most skilled technicians, and spend significantly more time on each garment we clean than average dry cleaners do, ensuring that your garments always look their absolute best.

Do dry cleaners somehow blow stains out with air, or cast them out with a magical spell? Well, you might be surprised to learn that we utilize dry cleaning machines that look a lot like giant (huge!) front-loader washing machines. The dry cleaned clothes tumble in these large machines that are filled with liquid. However, the liquid is a solvent that contains no water.

The term "dry cleaning" actually comes from the fact that the liquid solvent contains no water, and is therefore "dry". This is essential because when washed in water, fibers tend to swell, and then when dried they shrink, distort, stiffen, fade, tear, or felt. But when dry cleaned, the fibers remain stable.

For this reason, most structured garments (garments constructed with more than one layer of fabric) absolutely must be dry cleaned. This is also true for garments that contain certain fabric types, trims, ornamentation, dyes, and pigmentation. But even garments that can survive being washed in water will benefit from the dry cleaning process, remaining soft, vibrant, and properly sized after repeated cleanings.

Well, there are actually a few reasons. But the biggest reason is that dry cleaning machines are ineffective in removing some types of stains. Those stains must be individually removed, by hand, after they leave the dry cleaning machine. In fact, more than half of the stains we receive require the attention of a skilled technician to be removed.

And this is where the great dry cleaners really separate themselves from average dry cleaners. The technician must be able to properly identify the type of stain in order to choose the correct method of removal. Trying to use acetic acid to remove milk stains will be just as ineffective as trying to use amyl acetate to remove coffee stains.

We utilize over 20 different CP-grade (Chemically Pure) spotting agents, each of which are effective in removing specific components of stains. The technician's skill in identifying the type of stain, and then being able to choose the correct spotting agent (or combination of spotting agents) to remove the stain, is the key to either removing the stain, or failing to do so.

There is also technique involved, which is sharpened over years of practice, and through continuing education. It is important to note that most dry cleaners have little, if any, formal training in their craft. But our technicians have received formal training from the New York School of Dry Cleaning (located in Manhattan), as well as periodic off-site seminars on solvents, dyes and pigments, fabric composition, weaves, and spotting techniques.

We also regularly invite consultants to our plant to help us stay current with the latest cleaning technologies and techniques. Perhaps most importantly, our technicians can leverage decades of experience, as we have developed expertise in the dry cleaning process over four generations in the industry. All this contributes to why we can often remove stains that other dry cleaners cannot.

Here's the bottom line: your clothes shouldn't have any "dry cleaning smell" if they are processed properly. None. And I'm pretty sure you'll be disgusted when you discover the real reason why your clothes pick up an odor at some dry cleaners.

Dry cleaning solvent is volatile by nature, meaning it evaporates very readily. So when your clothes are dry cleaned, the solvent actually evaporates quickly during the drying cycle, and does not remain in your clothes.

So what is that smell then? Well, many dry cleaners re-use their solvent over and over again, load after load, day after day, in order to cut costs.

As you can imagine, all the dirt, grease, and body oils that are removed from clothing (and their associated smells) build up in the re-used solvent. However, the "dry cleaning smell" you may have experienced is actually primarily due to bacteria that builds up in the dirty re-used solvent.

So, if a dry cleaner re-uses dirty solvent, although the solvent evaporates away during the drying cycle, the odor from the bacteria in the solvent remains on the clothes. That's the foul "dry cleaning smell" you may have experienced, and although it is common at many dry cleaners, it will not be present if your clothes are processed properly in clean, pure solvent. We use fresh, pure solvent in each of our cleaning loads ensuring there will be no "dry cleaning smell" left in the garments we clean.

At a good dry cleaner, absolutely not. At an average dry cleaner, probably. The reason is the same as why some dry cleaners leave an odor in your clothing: solvent purity. A high quality drycleaner (such as Très Bon!) will clean white garments only with other white garments in pure, crystal clear solvent.

The result is a beautifully clean, perfectly white garment. But what happens at poor dry cleaners that re-use dirty solvent? The solvent not only develops an odor (as previously explained), but it also becomes visually dirty and turns black and opaque as dirt and dyes from dark colored clothes accumulate.

When you clean a white garment in that dirty dark solvent, you can guess what it looks like afterwards. If your dry cleaner "greys" your white clothes, it's a clear indication that their solvent is not... clear... at all.

Pressing is one of the most important stages of the dry cleaning process, as it plays a pivotal role in finishing the look of a garment. A bad pressing job can make a quality garment look terrible, and a good pressing job can often make a mediocre garment look and fit great.

When pressed properly, a garment will have no wrinkles, and will drape on your body the way the designer intended.

However, pressing is one of the most time consuming parts of the dry cleaning process, and therefore the most costly in terms of labor. Low quality (low price) cleaners survive by processing as many garments per hour as possible, to keep labor costs per garment low.

The dry cleaner didn’t practice good load separation. Most likely they cleaned your suit with a bunch of sweaters, and the sweaters’ lint got all over your suit. A quality dry cleaner sorts garments into various classifications, and cleans each classification separately. Garments should be sorted by color, material, ornamentation, lint content, and bulk, and cleaned in separate loads.

The more classifications, the better. However, all of this sorting requires more separate loads to be processed, increasing overall processing time and cost. A low quality dry cleaner may cut corners and clean incompatible classifications together instead of separately.

However, a high quality cleaner may take it even one step further, cleaning more delicate garments individually in net bags. Some of the most delicate garments must be cleaned entirely by hand to avoid damage.

Buttons do occasionally break or fall off during processing. However, there is no excuse for receiving a garment with broken or missing buttons.

Garments should look great and be ready to wear when you take them home. What good is a shirt or pair of pants that can’t be buttoned? That’s why we practice tight quality checks on every garment before it is approved for packaging.

In addition to checking buttons (and replacing any missing ones), we ensure that all garments are pressed to perfection, and no stains are overlooked. At minimum, 4 pairs of eyes check each garment before it is approved for packaging.

A quality dry cleaner puts so much effort into making a garment look great. If the garment is subsequently wrinkled or soiled during storage, all of that effort would be wasted. Robust packaging isn’t just for presentation - it ensures that garments will not lose their quality in the aisles, or on the way to their owners’ closets.

Quality dry cleaners utilize tissue paper to give a garment body and prevent wrinkles from forming when stored. Stuffing a shirt’s sleeves and collar will prevent them from collapsing, which in turn prevents wrinkling.

We also utilize collar supports to keep collars from drooping. Sweaters are folded over a hanger to prevent them from being stretched and distorted by their own weight.

A quality dry cleaner will also insert a piece of tissue paper inside before it is folded to prevent creases from forming at the folds. Molded plastic forms are fitted over hangers for men’s sport jackets to ensure the collars and shoulders maintain their proper form. Touches like these ensure that your garments look great all the way until you’re ready to wear them.

They don’t have the specialized machinery necessary to launder shirts, and therefore outsource their shirts to wholesalers for processing.

The dry cleaner has no control over the quality of work performed, and the wholesaler processes shirts as quickly as possible in order to minimize cost per unit.

As you can imagine, the result is poorly pressed shirts, and poor stain removal. We hold the belief that your laundered shirts should look their best, just like your dry cleaned garments. So in order to ensure the highest level of quality, we launder your shirts ourselves, on premises.