Sankosha Strives to Succeed in Critical Roles for the Cleaning Industry
Wesley Nelson (C), President of the Sankosha U.S.A., and his staff made a huddle to celebrate their 30 years of hard work and motivate themselves for their future success.
The Sankosha U.S.A., a leading company of commercial laundry and dry cleaning press machines, celebrated its 30th anniversary on November 15. At its office building located in the Chicago Northwest suburb of Elk Grove Village, the company had an open house to show its machines. It also invited its customers and supporters to a commemorative dinner at Shaw’s Crabhouse in Schaumburg.
The headquarters of the Sankosha U.S.A., formally called the Sankosha Manufacturing Co., Ltd., is located in Hachioji, Tokyo, Japan, where the Administrative and Manufacturing Departments are housed. The parent company also has manufacturing facilities in Thailand and China.
At the open house, staff of the Sankosha U.S.A. demonstrated how to use their press machines for dress shirts, jackets, and pants by using blowing steam and hot iron panels. Those clothes were finished within minutes by one operator.
▲ Shirt-press machine ▲ Jacket-press machine ▲ Matt Umetani explains machines
Sankosha’s newly developed machine, Press-free Finisher, was set in another room. All you have to do is to hang clothes on a hanger and hook it on a chain conveyor which automatically carries the clothes into a slit of the machine where the clothes are dried and wrinkles are removed. Finished clothes come out of the machine and are ready to go. If you hook clothes in a row, the machine finishes hundreds of clothes in a single hour and provides cleaners opportunities to reduce their cost, increase their profit, and offer affordable prices for casual wear to their customers.
▲ Consecutive movement of the Press-free Finisher
Sankosha Manufacturing was founded in 1977 by Mitsuyuki Uchikoshi who was running a dry cleaner in Tokyo. He understood the heavy work of the family cleaner business so that he could make a press machine that small cleaners wanted to have. With the founders’ good start, the company has continued to develop new machines to strengthen their durability, quality, and stability, and has grown to the top of the finishing machine makers worldwide.
At a commemorative dinner in the Shaw’s Crabhouse, Wesley Nelson, President of the Sankosha U.S.A., and his staff made a huddle to celebrate their 30 years of hard work and motivate themselves for their future success.
Keisuke Uchikoshi, Chairman of the Sankosha U.S.A. and Executive Vice President of the Sankosha Manufacturing
In his greeting remarks, Keisuke (Ken) Uchikoshi, Chairman of the Sankosha U.S.A. and Executive Vice President of the Sankosha Manufacturing, said, “We didn’t get any support from anybody, but we opened our company 30 years ago because Wesley, who had been my father’s English teacher, was here. That’s why we opened Sankosha U.S.A.; otherwise, we didn’t do that. The history of our company actually started with him. In the beginning, we didn’t sell at all and struggled for years, but eventually, we got the position today. Thank you so much for your business with us, that’s why we are here today. So I appreciate your support and am happy to celebrate our 30th anniversary with everybody here this evening. I look forward to having our further success in the future.”
Changes in the Laundry and Dry Cleaning industry
The Role of Sankosha to Help Create a Profitable Business Structure for Dry Cleaners
Keisuke Uchikoshi says, “It is a miracle that the Sankosha Manufacturing and the Sankosha U.S.A. have kept today’s business.” Chicago Shimpo asked him how Sankosha overcame the difficulties during the changes in the laundry and dry cleaning industry and how they responded to the needs in the industry.
According to Keisuke, during the 1970s and 80s in Japan, the number of small dry cleaners increased, and his father, Mitsuyuki Uchikoshi, was one of them in Nakano Town, Tokyo. Mitsuyuki worked on ironing for 10 hours every day without sitting on a chair. It was heavy labor, and people said, “Cleaners would make money, but they would die before they enjoy using that money.”
Amid those days, Mitsuyuki pondered how he could be relieved from the labor and bought a used American-made-press machine. It was really helpful; however, it was too big for a short Japanese man, and Japanese clothes were too small to set in the press machine. He pondered again how he could do with it and decided to make a press machine by himself.
He had a gift of craftsmanship. Every night after dinner, he went to his garage, analyzed every detail of the machine, drew mechanical drawings, and finally made a press machine that fit a small cleaner store. Mitsuyuki’s machine was exactly what small cleaners wanted to have.
Mitsuyuki decided to change his career to produce his press machine to relieve the cleaners from their labor and founded Sankosha Manufacturing in 1977. His machines were well sold, and the company grew bigger.
In 1988, Sankosha Manufacturing brought the press machine for the first time to a cleaning show that was held in Birmingham, the United Kingdom. Keisuke said his father received good responses at the show and made sure that his machines would be sold well in the U.S., too. In Keisuke’s sense, it was too risky to enter the U.S. market without the marketing research and preparations. “The success was really a miracle,” he said.
But Mitsuyuki had an excellent human resource to support his plan to go abroad. After the show in Birmingham, he began to study English and asked an English conversation school to deploy an English instructor to his office. The teacher was Wesley Nelson who is now President of the Sankosha U.S.A.
When he had time, Nelson helped Mitsuyuki to make an English version of the brochure and became interested in the machine business. He entered Sankosha along with Mitsuyuki’s invitation and spent for four years in the factory to study everything related to the machine business. After the learning period, Nelson helped open the Sankosha U.S.A. in 1993.
The Laundry and Dry Cleaning industry in the U.S. has more than a hundred years of history, and the cleaning business came to Japan after WWII. How did the Sankosha U.S.A. pave the way to get into the U.S. market?
According to Keisuke, the peak period of the dry cleaning industry in the U.S. was in the 1960s to 70s. “For example, if you want a million dollar sales, you need 100 labors, if you want three million, you need 300 labors, especially, in the 60s,” he explained. The industry could use many laborers to make profits, but labor costs increased as the civil rights movements became more common in the U.S. Early in the 1980s, there was also a tendency to prefer casual clothing, and the dress code was relaxed as a result. So customers of a dry cleaner brought less volume of clothes, and dry cleaners could make less profit.
So dry cleaners had to respond to the change of the industry, and the mechanization increased to reduce labor costs. Many cleaners looked for a compact machine to help while many others sold their stores when they no longer made good profits, and then Korean immigrants took over the dry cleaning business.
The change started to happen in the early 1990s, and Mitsuyuki’s compact press machine was a perfect fit for the situation.
However, the Sankosha U.S.A. had a hard time at the beginning when it opened in 1993. No large cleaner showed their interest in a compact machine, and no sale was made for six or eight months. Fortunately, the Korean cleaner community recognized Mitsuyuki’s press machine and bought it to set up in their stores. After twists and turns, Sankosha’s efforts made fruit in getting into the U.S. market, and now the company obtained the top share in the market.
Keisuke remembers Nelson’s great efforts and said, “I wonder if Wesley didn’t become an English teacher, probably the U.S. didn’t have the Sankosha U.S.A. He has a strong Japanese mentality more than ordinary Japanese have. He is a punctual, honest, hard worker, always thinking of the company’s sales and profit. He also acts positively while he is thinking of his staff members. Wesley is the power of Sankosha now.”
Keisuke also said, “We have many high-margin products, and that is the number one factor to keep our company strong.” Sankosha has kept the top share not only in Japan and the U.S. but also in European countries, Australia, Israel, and many other countries.
Now Mitsuyuki retired from the company, his first son Yusuke Uchikoshi has overseen the five Divisions under the holding company, and the second son Keisuke has worked for worldwide marketing to connect Sankosha’s customers.
Keisuke Uchikoshi was inspired to create Press-free Finisher after seeing an automatic car washer.
Interestingly, Keisuke said he got the idea to create Press-free Finisher after seeing an automatic car washer. Many cars get into a washer one after another and go through several sections inside of the washer, then cleaned and dried cars come out from the washer to ready to go.
He applied the same process to the flow of clothes so that Press-free Finisher could dry and remove wrinkles from the clothes and make them ready to go. The machine can handle hundreds of clothes per hour and reduce significant labor costs allowing a cleaner to offer affordable prices for casual-shirt washing to attract more customers to bring their clothes.
Keisuke talked with his brother Yusuke about the idea, and the two agreed to develop a new product, and then Press-free Finisher was born several years later. Keisuke said, “Whether a maker has solutions to increase cleaners’ profit or not, that fact influences cleaners’ fate to survive. So I thought this kind of machine would play a critical role in the cleaning industry near in the future.”
On the other hand, dry cleaners, who target high-end customers, increased their profit. Although remote work has become prevalent in recent years, most business people still wear cotton shirts, and washing cotton shirts is a big source of profit for cleaners because customers also bring their suits, spouse’s dresses, and others.
For Sankosha, the shirt-press machine is one of its major products, at the same time the company has developed machines for women’s blouses and dresses. Due to the rich product lineup, Sankosha’s machines could get into the high-end cleaners’ market. Keisuke said, “We have been working on the originality and ingenuity of our machines, and I’m sure that our high-quality machines are the base of our company.”