Clearing skies after some evening light rain. Low 48F. NNW winds at 10 to 20 mph, decreasing to less than 5 mph. Chance of rain 60%..
Clearing skies after some evening light rain. Low 48F. NNW winds at 10 to 20 mph, decreasing to less than 5 mph. Chance of rain 60%.
Kristin Dudley shows the initial process of pressing a shirt.
Kristen Dudley shows the process of washing clothes at Sparkletone Dry Cleaners.
Robin Kocert, 54, behind the desk in the lobby of Sparkletone Dry Cleaners.
The shirt collar and cuff press in the back of Sparkletone Dry Cleaners.
Clothes line up on racks in the back of Sparkletone Dry Cleaners.
Kristin Dudley shows the initial process of pressing a shirt.
Kristen Dudley shows the process of washing clothes at Sparkletone Dry Cleaners.
Robin Kocert, 54, behind the desk in the lobby of Sparkletone Dry Cleaners.
The shirt collar and cuff press in the back of Sparkletone Dry Cleaners.
Clothes line up on racks in the back of Sparkletone Dry Cleaners.
When clothes are dry cleaned, they do actually get wet.
Everything from formal dresses to Breakfast Club costumes are washed in a solvent called perchlorethylene that removes dirt and oils without damaging the clothes.
“An aspirin won’t dissolve in the solvent like it will in water. It’s just gentler, you know, then agitating it in a washing machine,” Kristen Dudley says.
Dudley, 51, is one of two sisters who own Sparkletone Dry Cleaners. The small business on East State Street in West Lafayette has been named Small Business of the Month by Greater Lafayette Commerce.
Dudley runs the equipment at Sparkletone while her 54-year-old sister, Robin Kocert, handles customer service. They have both worked at the family-owned business on and off since they were children.
“I worked here through high school and college,” Kocert says, filling out a ticket for a stack of shirts. “Then I went off, I had my kids, worked part time, but I’ve been back here for 10 years now working full time.”
When asked what has contributed to their 66 years of success, Dudley says, “Good customer service, getting spots out, good pressing.”
“We offer the quickest service in town, that’s kind of our thing,” Kocert says.
“We have customers who have been coming here for over 50 years,” she says. “It’s so fun to get to know them, watch their kids grow up, have weddings.”
Kocert says wedding dresses and ball gowns are part of the regular rotation at Sparkletone because of customers who work at the local theaters and participate in the annual Feast of the Hunter’s Moon festival. On Monday, one of the dresses hanging in the back was a long, pink formal gown covered in white applique.
The back room where the equipment is operated is separated into a laundry side and a dry cleaning side. The dry cleaning machine looks like a steel washing machine as tall as the ceiling, hulking over shirt presses, collar presses and racks of hanging clothes.
Dudley says it takes about 45 minutes to do a dry-cleaning load that includes a drying cycle.
“If there’s food on them, we have to use the steam gun first,” she says.
Dudley said that every time she cleans the complicated pipes and traps on the back of the dry cleaner, something breaks.
“This machine stays glued together with lint,” she says, then gestures to several cylinders. “This is the dry lint trap, like in a dryer. And this is for wet lint, also called a button trap. If a button pops off of a suit or something, we can usually find it, but if not, we’ve got about 65 million buttons up there from owning this business for so long.”
Sparkletone does small mending jobs, like button replacement or hemming. They also clean Santa suits and American flags for free.
The wrinkles are removed from wet shirts using a collar press and a shirt press. The collar press is made up of three curved, hot surfaces that use high pressure and heat to flatten shirt collars and cuffs.
The shirt press is slightly more complicated, requiring the shirt to be hung up with air hoses inserted into its sleeves. As the hoses release jets of hot air into the shirt, it inflates like a balloon. All of the machines release frequent loud blasts of escaping steam. Dudley says she burns herself “all the time.”
Kocert and Dudley’s grandfather opened Sparkletone Dry Cleaners in 1956 in a building that used to be a Kroger grocery store. The establishment has lasted despite obstacles.
“In the past two years we’ve had people jump the Starbucks curb and hit our building, two people in six months,” Dudley says. “They hit the gas instead of the brake and came through the building. We didn’t have to shut down, so that was fortunate.”
Both sisters say that after the crash incidents, they had to have the walls rebuilt.
But despite the pandemic and car crashes, their business is reportedly doing well. Dudley says the oddest item a customer has ever brought in was a duck costume with a fully plush head.
“We get a lot of costumes because of Purdue with their Breakfast Club,” where students go bar-hopping in costumes. “We do a lot for ROTC, Purdue is so supportive of us,” Kocert says, before she is cut off by the ding of the front door.
She greets the customer with a cheerful “Hey, Mr. McMurray! How are you?”
The customer, Ron McMurray, has reportedly been driving from Monticello to use Sparkletone Dry Cleaners for eight years.
“They always have a smile on their face, like that,” McMurray says, nodding at Kocert. “So it’s worth the trip. … They know not to heavy-starch my jeans when I’m traveling.”
“His heavy-starch jeans set off the metal detectors for some reason at the airport,” Kocert says.
McMurray started coming to Sparkletone when the dry cleaner in Monticello closed.
“A lot of the small, little towns around here don’t have dry cleaners anymore,” Kocert says of smaller towns not having as many professionals as they once did.
Kocert says of being the Small Business of the Month, “We’d like to thank the Greater Lafayette community, the surrounding towns, Purdue University, you know, just thank them for their support over the past 66 years. It’s been awesome.”
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