Helping to Sustain our Customers

Helping to Sustain our Customers

By Ron Benjamin

We in the dry cleaning industry think about sustainability as it relates to the way our businesses impact people, the planet and our companies’ profits. And of course, as we have discussed in many of our other blogs, here at GreenEarth Cleaning we honestly believe that our silicone dry cleaning process is the most sustainable method to provide garment after-care in our industry.

Recently, an article entitled “Dress for Success – and Perhaps Be a Success” appeared in the February 22, 2016 edition of the Wall Street Journal. The article, written by Ray A. Smith, cited several recent studies that suggest there is a direct relationship between dressing up for work and enjoying professional success in the workplace.

One study was conducted by Michael Kraus, an Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Yale School of Management. What his study showed was that in competitive situations, wearing more formal clothing like suits, blazers, and nicer clothing can signal to others “about you being successful and real confident in whatever you are doing.” For those in the study who were more casually dressed in the study tended to back down more easily while those who were more formally dressed became aware of the respect they were receiving and as a result, became more confident and forceful.

Similarly, in another study conducted by Michael L. Stephen, a postdoctoral research scholar and Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia Business School, the study demonstrated that “People who wear more formal clothing feel more powerful”. In addition, dressing more formally “will increase your productivity when you need to think creatively about the bigger picture”.

Given the advantage that wearing more formal clothing seems to convey to its wearers as cited in these studies, perhaps we in the dry cleaning business should be messaging this important benefit to our customers.   Maybe we should be pointing out that not only is our service being performed in the most sustainable way, at the same time it is providing our customers with a real sustainability advantage in their lives. For we are helping them to enjoy a more successful career based upon the psychological advantages provided to them by the more formal clothes we clean on their behalf.

And in the end, maybe it’s our industry that can help turn the tide away from dressing down to dressing for success – because psychologically it really works!