Dry Cleaners With A Difference
The Steam Room is a unique dry cleaners in London run by husband and wife Tony Chung and Fran Lieu. Their strong sense of purpose mixed with a playful approach at embracing their local creative community has allowed them to thrive. I popped in for a chat with Tony.
“The first 10 years of having the cleaners we were always looking at the other dry cleaners and the successful ones and kind of following in their footsteps. Like what was expected of a dry cleaners. But after the t-shirts started selling we realise that we didn’t have to follow the rules we could do whatever we wanted.”
“One day Fran drew a little picture of me on the sign that shows our opening and closing times. It was literally that face and people would walk past and look at the drawing then through the window and giggle because it’s clearly me. That was really the beginning and we started to do a bunch of t-shirts. The first one was just a plain white t-shirt with the face and we sold out within a month. That really gave us the courage to grow.”
“We set the place up with no experience, just a respect for the clothes and our Chinese values. Every time a garment came in I would really try and look after it like it was my own. It was that ethos that our parents had of wrapping everything in plastic from the remote controls to the TV! Even the carpet was covered in non-slip. It was like, we worked so hard to have these things let’s look after them. It became a default.”
“We always believe in not over washing things. If someone comes to us we’ll try and help them as much as possible to get the best from their garments. It was about giving people honest opinions like actually maybe you should try this product instead of us washing it. So when we had the revamp we thought why not start stocking this stuff? So Fran started curating cleaning stuff like brushes and eco-friendly based things and we started to teach people how to use them. Everything was about being honest and transparent with our customers on what’s best for their garments. “
“We have a lot of people come in the shop or get in touch with us through Instagram. A lot of young designers or artists who want to chat or brainstorm so we constantly meet new people. It makes it so much more interesting and we are constantly having ideas for new projects.”
“We started meeting local makers and creatives who would come in the shop. We like to mix that local community feel with a Chinese or International influence. We live in an international world. With Homework Candles she’s local but her family has a Chinese medicine shop in Manchester. Bai San (one of the candle fragrances) refers to a ritual of burning incense that a lot of families do to honour their ancestors.”
“We’ve started hand washing Denim which is something not a lot of people do. We’re also looking at ways of reducing our use of plastic. In terms of merch we want to set up international shipping for our web store since we have a lot of followers in America that get in touch.”