At Microfiber Wholesale, we've always been focused on our relationship with our customers and providing high-quality cleaning products, even before we were called Microfiber Wholesale. For almost 80 years, we have carved out a niche with businesses, both small and large, that recognize using higher-quality cleaning supplies makes cleaning easier and more cost-effective in the long run.
Our company started in 1946 when my grandfather, Landon Haney, moved from Nashville to Los Angeles after returning home from WWII. He began distributing mops, dusting cloths, brooms, and brushes to janitorial supply and hardware stores.
He soon found a niche selling cleaning products to industrial laundries, which rent textiles to businesses and launder them for their customers.
Back then, things were different; our warehouse backed up to railroad tracks, and products arrived from the mills in boxcars. I remember coming to work as a kid with my dad, John. I'd work in the warehouse part of the day, then spend time in the office filing with my grandmother, who also worked there.
I remember typing out notes to my grandmother on the big, heavy typewriters used for writing invoices and purchase orders and playing with the check-writing machine.
I still have one of each in my office today to remind me how easy I have it with computers. I'd also go into my grandfather's office, which was a little intimidating. His office was piled high with stacks of unfiled papers and product samples.
He was usually on the phone, and I'd listen to him. Most of the business was conducted on the (rotary) phone, and it seemed to hinge on his or my dad's personal relationships with customers. This was a key element of our business: relationships.
Both my dad and my grandfather were exceptional at building relationships, and it's something I've always admired and emulated. I learned from them that building a good relationship wasn’t about telling the customer what they wanted to hear; it was about being honest, consistent, and fair.
There were dozens of commercial laundries in our area that we sold to, most of them run by an owner/operator. These owners/operators had the pulse of their business; they knew that for them to succeed, they needed to be able to provide their customers with high-quality goods that performed, and they were willing to spend more to get them. If they were providing inferior products, they would hear about it directly from their customers.
High-quality products are more durable and effective, and our customers knew that. These were other key elements to our business: quality and effectiveness.
I came to work here full-time around the year 2000. My grandfather had long since retired, and my dad had been running the business for a couple of decades by then.
Business was still good, but it was starting to change. The owner/operators that we had been able to build relationships with were reaching retirement age and had started to sell their independent laundries. Most were sold to large, (sometimes) publicly traded laundry companies.
Sometimes the people we'd built relationships with stayed on, and we continued doing business with the new ownership. And sometimes they didn't, and we lost customers. Over time, the number of customers lost to acquisition added up.
In the mid to late 2000s, it became clear that the company needed to change. We had to find new customers that wanted high-quality cleaning products. So, I started focusing on e-commerce. I found that there were still lots of businesses out there that cared about relationships and quality, and that they were willing to buy online.
There were still businesses out there—cleaning businesses, healthcare, hospitality, car washes, and so many more—that understood that if they were providing inferior products to their employees to clean with, they'd hear about it. These business operators understand that if they can use a product for longer, it will be cheaper in the long run because it won't have to be replaced as often.
These types of operators are, to me, what independent laundry owner/operators were to my grandfather and my father.
We found that it wasn’t easy to build relationships with customers digitally. But we work hard at it. We encourage customers to call us by putting our phone number in big font at the top of every page of the website, and having a human being who is helpful to answer the call. We also build relationships by creating relevant content that our customers find useful and that can even help them grow their businesses.
We focus on being ultra-responsive to email and chat. We try to stay in touch with our customers via email marketing, and even though it's marketing, we try not to be too salesy, too often. As the 2020s came upon us, we put even more effort into relationships by hiring account managers who have the time to learn about you and your business.
Since the time my dad passed away in 2011, we've turned a corner; we figured out who we are as a business again, and we've grown. When we were small, I remember trying to act like we were big. We're still small-ish, and I'm comfortable in my company's skin.
There are now a lot more people working here, including my sister, Blythe. If my dad and my grandfather were alive to see the business now, I know they'd be proud (and surprised, especially about hiring my sister). They'd be proud not because of the numbers, because honestly, that never seemed important to them, but by how we do business.
I'm proud of it too.
Brett Haney
President
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