Dry Cleaning Expert: Brad Doss

Every day at Yale Cleaners, we promise our customers same day dry cleaning and shirt laundry service; drop off by 12, ready by 5. With 12 full service dry cleaning plants, utilizing hundreds of dry cleaning machines, washers and presses, a lot can go wrong. To help us deliver on our promise, Yale Cleaners’ maintenance engineer Brad Doss is charged with keeping all our equipment running.

While you will probably never meet this Yale Cleaners expert, he is always behind the scenes ensuring your clothes are consistently cleaned and pressed to perfection. After leaving the Marine Corp, Big Brad as we like to call him, joined our team in January of 1989. Back then, Brad was a full time student at Spartan College of Aeronautics and Technology.

“Originally, I only intended to work at Yale while going to school, but I quickly saw a future here” said Brad. He went on to say, “I was really surprised by all the different disciplines I got to work in, pneumatics, electric, plumbing, electrical circuitry, just to name a few.”

Over the years, a lot has changed in the dry cleaning industry. In the late 1990’s several of our team members attended a PLC (Programable Logic Controller) seminar that changed the course of our company’s history.

Soon after that conference, Brad began tinkering on a dry cleaning pant press because he was tired of consistently fixing the same mechanical issues. With the help of our computer engineer, he installed a PLC, valves and switches. When they were finished, the press worked better than it did from the factory. From daily operation, to every day maintenance, they have solved a lot of problems. Ultimately, Brad’s little experiment expanded to almost every piece of equipment in our buildings.

Today, Yale Cleaners proudly engineers and rebuilds all our dry cleaning machines, washers and presses to meet our specific needs. This has enabled us to consistently deliver the same quality at every location, reduce operator fatigue and injury and dramatically reduce machine down time.

When asked what Brad likes about his job most, he said “After 30 years, I love to solve new and challenging problems. I like it when I fix a new problem that I have never encountered before.”

We also asked him to share one of his favorite memories at Yale. He said “Building chainsaw go karts! After we built them, we decided to have a race around the corporate office parking lot. We got caught by Grandpa Jim, he was furious. But he quickly got over it when he found out the race before was between his daughter Judy and husband Bill. That was a lot of fun.”

Each day at Yale, we are committed to providing fast, reliable and affordable same day dry cleaning service. Thanks to Yale Cleaners’ expert Brad Doss, no matter what issues arise, we always honor our same day promise.

Brad ended our conversation with a great quote, “Just because something is hard, doesn’t mean you quit. I’m never going to quit when something gets hard, I’m just going to out work the problem.”