Julian Stone is a former lab geneticist with a degree in microbiology with genetics from Cardiff University. After starting a masters at St Mary’s in London he quickly realised that was not going to be the route for him, so he looked to transition to law at Guildford.

While toying with the idea of studying law, from his experience working in a drycleaning and laundry facility in San Antonio, Texas as an exchange student, he spotted a gap in the market. People needed their shirts picked up, cleaned and returned, so he started to provide that basic service. One thing led to another. He started leafletting and then an American customer told him that they needed a service at the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square. In 1990 that first store was launched, and the American Dry Cleaning Company was born, providing a laundry and drycleaning service to staff based at the embassy. A year later came the second shop in Hampstead, North West London, servicing the local community and hotels in the West End. In 1994 they opened the first central processing unit. Within 10 years there were 10-12 shops and 150 staff servicing 45 hotels.

Events like the 7/7 bombings and September 11 attacks then destroyed the hotel business which led to Stone deviating his business model from servicing hotels into retail, and had one of the first web based collection and delivery services. He then set out in this direction building the ADCC group to 40 stores by around 2015.

Today, the American Dry Cleaning Company has a team of 220 people across 42 London locations. The business provides a high end laundry and drycleaning service to boutique hotels and London households, covering from just outside the M25 into and across central London.

Stone lives in North West London with his wife and business partner Lucy, four children and a dog. He enjoys playing tennis and golf, long walks, travel, good food, a scary film and being a mentor to young people aiding them on their business journeys.

On industry collaboration …

I support all industry collaboration and I’m involved with the TSA and attend their conferences, and the WCL ones when I can. During Covid I started up a WhatsApp group to help those smaller industry businesses deal with their landlords. With over 40 shops in the ADCC portfolio, I have a lot of experience dealing with landlords of all types and sizes! I could see how landlords were ‘playing’ with small business tenants through the upheaval and uncertainty of the pandemic, and not in a good way. I was able to help so I set up the group – helping with things like template letters and general guidance.

This network still exists today, and I use it to help others in the industry – for example, if someone is interested to know more about equipment or processes, I can invite them to see something in action at one of my stores or at our CPU. I regularly do tours for London drycleaners and let them have a look at how I’m doing something, so they can see if it will work for them.

On sustainability …

I have always put sustainability high on the agenda and we have adopted many eco-friendly initiatives to be recognised as a green and sustainable business. We recycle almost all the water we use through water recovery in the washing machines, we recycle 90 per cent of our steam heating for our production units and we use heat pump technology to help generate energy savings. Our fleet is also made up of electric vans and our packaging is recycled, with the polyrobe made from a potato derivative. That’s just some examples.

I place a lot of importance and I invest time and money in R&D of sustainability initiatives. I was delighted when we were announced as the winners of the Green Impact award at the Laundry and Drycleaning Awards – the LADAs 2021. It meant a lot to everyone at ADCC as offering an environmentally, eco-friendly service has been core to what we do for such a long time. There’s no point in putting the tech, equipment and processes in place to run a sustainable and eco-friendly business unless our people know how to use it. I invest time and money to support training my teams – sending them around the world to learn about wetcleaning, for example, and calling on the expertise of industry experts such as Roger Cawood and Brian Pierce for training.

The industry has come on leaps and bounds to move away from hydrocarbon solvents but we are still known as the ‘dirty men’ of Europe, with others leading the way with solvent bans. Two decades ago, we made a conscious decision to start researching and investing in how to dryclean your garments and household items in a more eco-friendly, non-toxic and odour-free way. We invested in wetcleaning systems 25 years ago. With wetcleaning it’s been clear to me that we need to get the message out to the consumer to tell them that they have a choice. I’ve approached this through social marketing and investing in large LED screens in the windows of our branches, to run information videos to explain our processes, initiatives like our use of ozone, and what happens on the journey of an item. Developing these videos was a Covid project for us, culminating in numerous fun informational and engaging clips that make the public stop and stare at the screens.

Industry career development …

I’ve always looked to promote from within as much as possible. When someone shows commitment and that they are not frightened of hard work, I will champion and support them to develop in the business. I have a production manager who has been with us for 25 years and now manages 70 people in the CPU. Two of my area managers started at the front end booking in work, and they now run 20 shops each.

It’s important that we increase awareness of our industry with young people and open their eyes to the range of skills and career options available across the entire sector. I work with Barnet and Brent council to arrange school trips to our CPU and retail sites. Local secondary school children come and have a tour. It’s great for them to bring the world of work to life and offers them a different learning environment to the classroom.

They always find the shirt machines fascinating! And the cheeky ones always want to know what everything costs! I think we as an industry should pay better to attract people from other industries. We could also work better together and pool our people and resources to create a stronger representation of what we do, for example go together as a collaborative effort at college and university work and recruitment fairs – this would help feed new people into the industry.

Like any industry, we too have many different touchpoints into various career opportunities such as marketing, HR and production. We need to work on roadmaps for training to give a vision of where an industry career can lead – people fall into our industry rather than be introduced to it. We need to change that. There will be no understanding of the potentials in our industry unless we ingrain it at the coalface. To do this we must support our key players and larger organisations to work with government and create apprenticeship gateways and job centre opportunities. We definitely need to kick start and shock the system!