UniFirst

During my time with Vision Chemical Systems, I worked with partners in hotel, commercial and industrial laundry, including the St. Julien UniFirst and Aramark.

UniFirst was the work I was most proud of at Vision. I cold called to open the door with my contact in a notoriously difficult to penetrate market. The major players in the industry are UniFirst, Aramark, G&K, Cintas, and Alsco. All of these companies either have their own chemical division within the company or contract with a small handful of major industry suppliers like EcoLab, WSI, and Procter & Gamble. They use massive amounts of terribly toxic chemicals rated at health 3 or 4 - highly caustic and toxic chemicals.

Vision's program uses Health 1-rated chemicals to achieve better outcomes, also increasing textile lifespan and reducing time required, AND energy and water use throughout the process. 

Getting your foot in the door to get all of that out, however, is challenging in this space. Through lots of calling on cold doors, I discovered a willing Production Manager at the Aurora facility and we began the long and arduous process of risk-free testing for them. This meant getting up at 3 AM to drive 50 miles from Boulder to Denver to spin up the first loads of the day around 430AM. I did that 40 or 50 times over the course of the 18 month sales courtship.

I worked with the original owner of Vision Chemical Systems who taught me what I needed to know about the chemistry involved and was often there with me early in the morning to stage the chemicals for manual addition to the huge 450 pound and 750 pound washers. I would stage the chemicals up in the wash alley, staying out of the way of huge, foul bags full of soiled uniforms and flat goods and the wash alley teams manuvering them into the gaping mouths of the washers. They would start the cycles with codes appropriate to the materials being washed and when the distinctive beep-beep-beep signal blared, I would open the manual load door to add our chemical. Meanwhile, in the next washer over, they ran their traditional chemistry from their standard vendor.

At the end of the load, we would compare the results. Over time, we tweaked every single formula to run less time with better results (higher pass percentage, better smelling, softer), shorter dry times, and a lower cost of chemistry. 

We studied how the loads ran with the wash chemistry in place. I crawled under these huge machines catching samples of gross effluent water gushing out into their on-premise water-treatment facility for later study and comparison. This water is contaminated with everything you can imagine, including the disgusting chemistry used to 'clean' them; the process is better described as sterilization through high temperatures and super caustic chemicals that burn skin and can take an eye out faster than you can say "uh-oh."

We took months of load profile results from this real-world testing, gradually moving up the chain of command and bringing more executive leadership into the conversation until the fateful day when I presented with Vision's family ownership to UniFirst's SVP, the grandson of the comapny's founder, and his executive team. They liked what they heard, saw, smelled, and felt when we did a live demo of the product for them -- operational time savings were significant, water savings was huge, and chemical spend would be another cost saving opportunity for them. All of this combined with a lot of conversation in-person, via emails, and over the phone led to the green light to install the Aurora facility and on-board an enterprise account for Vision Chemical Systems.

Learn more at Vision Chemical lessons learned