Microfiber Wholesale

For almost 75 years we've been able to carve out a niche with small business owners who recognize that using higher quality cleaning supplies makes cleaning easier and is less expensive in the long run. Our company started in 1946 when my grandfather, Landon Haney, moved from Nashville to Los Angeles after returning home from WWII. He began distributing mops, dusting cloths, brooms and brushes to janitor supply and hardware stores. He soon found a niche selling cleaning products to industrial laundries, which rent textiles to businesses and launder them for their customers. Back then things were different, our warehouse backed up to railroad tracks and products arrived from the mills in box cars. I remember coming to work as a kid with my dad, John. I'd work in the warehouse part of the day, then get to spend time in the office filing with my grandmother, who also worked there. I remember typing out notes to my grandmother on the big, heavy typewriters for writing invoices and purchase orders and playing with the check writing machine. I still have one of each in my office today to remind me how easy I have it with computers. I'd also go into my grandfather's office, who was a little intimidating. His office was piled high with stacks of unfiled papers and product samples. He was usually on the phone and I'd listen to him. Most of the business was conducted on the (rotary) phone and it seemed to hinge on his or my dad's personal relationship with customers. This was a key element to our business: relationships. Both my dad and my grandfather were exceptional at building relationships, and it's something I've always admired and emulated. I learned from them that building a good relationship wasn't about telling the customer what they wanted to hear, it was about being honest, consistent and fair. There were dozens of laundries in our area that we sold to, most of them run by an owner/operator. These owner/operators had the pulse of their business, they knew that for them to succeed they needed to be able to provide their customers with high quality goods that performed, and they were willing to spend more to get them. If they were providing inferior products, they would hear about it directly from their customers. High quality products are more durable and effective, and our customers knew that. These were other key elements to our business: quality and effectiveness. I came to work here full time around the year 2000. My grandfather had long since retired and my dad had been running the business for a couple decades by then. Business was still good, but it was starting to change. The owner/operators that we had been able to build relationships with were reaching retirement age and had started to sell their independent laundries. Most were sold to large, (sometimes) publicly traded laundry companies. Sometimes the people we'd built relationships with stayed on, and we continued doing business with the new ownership, but sometimes they didn't and we lost customers. Over time, customers lost to acquisition added up. We learned quickly that the things that mattered to an owner/operator, relationship, quality and effectiveness of a product, weren't the most important things to the huge companies that had acquired our customers. We were introduced to microfiber in the early 2000's. My dad was a cleaning geek, and I was becoming one too. I'm not sure how to describe how we felt about microfiber from the beginning, but it was a cross between amazement and love. There was nothing quite like demonstrating it to people who had never seen it before. I remember the first time I demoed a microfiber flat mop. It was with a group salespeople from one of our laundry customers. We were in the breakroom at their plant, early in the morning. The floor had already been mopped that morning with a regular cotton mop. I made the bold prediction that a few passes with the microfiber mop would result in a filthy mop pad. They insisted that I was wrong, that the floor was clean. So, I mopped and showed them the filthy pad. They instantly became converts and my dad and I continued proselytizing the benefits of microfiber to anybody who would listen. However, we were still losing customers to acquisition. It was clear that our business couldn't continue this way for much longer. Around that time my dad, who was my boss and mentor, was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. He didn't let that stop him from working, He was a tough man and came to work every day, even days he had chemo. In 2005 I attended a seminar about selling online. It was one of those high-pressure things like a vacations time share presentation. I've always been susceptible to a good sales pitch, my dad used to say I got "the fever", meaning I was going to buy what I was going to buy and nothing was going to stop me. This was no exception. I walked out of the hotel ballroom ready to use their software to start selling mops online and I built our first website. It was called MopsPlus.