ARMONK, N.Y. — Laundry equipment distributor HK Laundry Equipment Inc. is celebrating its 50th year in business in 2017, the company reports.
“Fifty years in business starts to become a legacy,” says Karl Hinrichs, president of HK Laundry Equipment Inc. “HK was founded on April 1, 1967, by my father, Reed Hinrichs, and our neighbor, Mr. Jim Kerr.”
Karl Hinrichs describes their story as “a typical American dream.”
“My father was an IBM salesman at the time and Mr. Kerr was a manager for Time/Life magazines. Mr. Kerr owned a couple of Laundromats and was looking into the new, modern, front-load Wascator washing machines from Wascomat. The only hitch was that Wascomat wanted him to actually sell the washers, not just purchase them for use in his stores.
“Mr. Kerr took the idea of a new distributorship to my father and asked if he wanted to become partners and form a company together. As my father retells the story, it took him about five seconds to jump at the opportunity to become his own boss. Reed Hinrichs was so committed to this idea that he even asked his mother-in-law to borrow the money to help him form the business.”
Four years later, Kerr retired to focus on operating his own Laundromats.
And so HK has grown from the humble beginnings of just two employees to its current workforce of 20. It has retooled or rebuilt over 600 Laundromats in its relatively small territory serving the Hudson River Valley and the state of Connecticut, the company says.
When Reed Hinrichs retired from the business in 1995, his son, Karl, took over the leadership.
“In looking back, some of the highlights of the company are that HK was a very early adapter of leasing laundry equipment to the on-premise laundry market. HK was also very early in creating an e-commerce website. We were a little ahead of our markets. We had photos of parts online when most of the Laundromat owners did not have high-speed Internet service back then, so the site took a long time to load for many. We probably pissed off more customers than we actually gained back then,” the younger Hinrichs quips.
Throughout the years, HK Laundry Equipment has often won recognition from suppliers like Huebsch, which presented its 2013 Distributor of the Year award to the company.
“At HK Laundry, our sales model is based on consultative sales,” Hinrichs says. “We work hard to help educate our customers so that they are the better-informed consumer. We educate our customers to operate the best Laundromats possible, and our customers recognize the most efficient and durable commercial laundry equipment available.”
HK has strived to create an informative website, featuring technical how-to videos, articles, information about sales and service seminars, and much more.
Have a question or comment? E-mail our editor Bruce Beggs at [email protected].