Blog Masonry Full Width

May 2, 2014

Winter Storage Tips

We stopped by the Twin Cities Live studio yesterday to share some winter storage tips for your favorite garments!

Here are a few of the tips for storing your winter garments until next season:

-Clean your clothes before you put them away. Food and beverage stains can attract clothes moths and silver fish.
-Once you get your clothes back from the dry cleaners, remove them from the plastic garment bag. Your clothes need to “breathe”. And, don’t store your sweaters on hangers.
-When storing winter bedding, make sure to wash and completely dry your comforters. Remember, comforters can take up to 8 hours to completely dry.
-Use lemon rinds and baking soda in your closet. Lemon rinds keep bugs from burrowing in your clothes. The baking soda, just like in the refrigerator, will eliminate odors in your clothes. Don’t use mothballs! These will leave a permanent odor on your clothing.

Watch the video here.

April 22, 2014

Featured in the Stillwater Gazette

We’ve got a lot planned for 2014 and are excited to continue to help our customers look and feel their very best – every single day! Check out the recent article in the Stillwater Gazette about this expansive regrowth plan:

“St. Croix Cleaners, a locally owned dry cleaning service, announces it will add two new locations and an extensive renovation and rebranding plan for 2014.

The two new urban locations will be on the skyway level of the Soo Line Building City Apartments in Minneapolis and inside Lunds in the new Penfield Luxury Apartments in St. Paul. These new locations will join a network of…” Read the rest of the article on the Stillwater Gazette’s website.

April 21, 2014

Ways to Prevent Color Fading on Your Clothes

Do you ever have items that seem to fade and wear out in certain parts of the garment? This is often due to wear over time. Certain fabrics such as cotton, linen and ramie are more susceptible to this kind of wear. It also depends on your lifestyle and the quality of the item itself. Unfortunately, their is no way to prevent this. But, their are ways to prevent the wearing out and loss of color on your items and we’re here to share a few helpful tips with you!

Wash darks with darks, and lights with lights. Though this may seem to be common sense to some, many people mix loads. This is a leading cause of fading in both dark and light colored garments. The best way to prevent this is doing separate loads.
Do not stuff the washer. We know that doing separate loads may be time consuming. But in the best interest of your clothes, it is important to not over stuff the washer. Your items will not get cleaned properly and it also leads to more time in the dryer which leads to our next tip…
Don’t spend all day drying your clothes. The more you over stuff the washer, the more you over stuff your drying, the more time it needs to fully dry. Too much time in the dryer is bad for fabrics. It can cause the color to fade and wear out. The clothes need to move freely in the dryer.

March 31, 2014

It's Earth Month! Let's Conserve Water

This April (usually known as Earth Month since Earth Day falls on the 22nd) we’re excited to share more and more reasons why innovative technologies continue to make dry cleaning a relatively eco-friendly practice!

St Croix Cleaners is one of the largest dry cleaning facilities in the Twin Cities metro, if not Minnesota, and that means that A LOT of water is being used clean and press garments.

At a dry cleaning plant, though typical ‘dry cleaning’ does not use water, many other things do require the use of it. Water is used for washing clothes in some machines, for attached laundromat’s machines, and it is also used to create the heat and steam so that we’re able to press your garments to make them look their best.

With 20 locations across the metro, we were cleaning and pressing quite a few garments a day – and that meant we were using A LOT of water ever day. After a bit of research on how we might be able to save some of this water, we invested in a water circulation tower in 2010 that is now on the roof of our facility.

The water conservation tower recycles and purifies the majority of the water we use – saving over 2.5 million gallons of water a year! That’s enough water to fill over 92 Olympic-sized swimming pools!

Just another reason we love to help you look and feel your very best – every single day.

March 13, 2014

Lost Sweater – Found Thanks to Dry Cleaning!

A sweater found in a Minneapolis parking ramp was returned to it’s owner last week – all because of dry cleaning Technology!

That’s right, thanks to significant increases in technology over the past several years, dry cleaning has become an extremely high-tech industry.

Every time your shirt, sweater, pants – you name it – is dropped off with us, it receives a small barcode. This barcode is usually placed in an out-of-sight location so it is of no inconvenience to you and your garments, but the information it holds is extremely valuable. Within that tiny barcode holds all kinds of information about that garment, including things like:

the type of garment it is (shirt, pants, dress, etc)
the fabric, color and brand of the garment
who the garment belongs to
when the garment was checked in at our stores, where it is within the cleaning process and whether it is ready to be picked up
even the amount of times that garment has been to us!

This information allows us to use the utmost care and quality standards in handling and cleaning your garments. And, for one lucky customer, it helped her get her sweater back! Another customer found a sweater on the ground in a St Paul Community Ed parking lot after a theater performance once night. She knew we barcoded our items, so looked at the care label – and sure enough – a barcode! She emailed us with the barcode number, and we were able to locate the customer it belonged to, and to get her sweater back to her! She had just “written off” the sweater – which was one of her favorites and most expensive and never thought it could be located..!

It’s a great feel-good story for a nice Thursday afternoon, eh?!

March 3, 2014

When is the Best Time to Clean My…?

UGGs?

The spring (March, April) is usually the best time to clean these after you have trekked through the snow and salt all winter. It’s important to remove the salt as soon as possible and to place a protective coating on your UGGs before letting them sit all summer. That way, when the unexpected snow storm comes next October, you can pull out your UGGs and be ready to go!

Rugs?

Late spring, early summer is best to clean your household rugs. Just think about all the times you’ve stomped in from outside on that rug, and how much dirt and salt has built up on it. Vacuuming is only able to pick up the top layer – what about the dirt that has worked it’s way inside the rug? It’s best to plan for annual cleanings – just once per year can help your rugs last three times as long!

Winter Coats?

At least once at the end of the winter. Remember, you wear your winter coat almost every day in the winter – and you drive, eat, travel and more while wearing it. Once the snow and ice finally decide to start melting away, and you’re able to switch to a light spring jacket, make sure to bring your coat in to us – that way it’s cleaned and properly stored until next winter!