Together in life and work, the Giannantoni family started from treating duvets for third parties and ended up managing an industrial laundry with twenty employees in Rome over the last 15 years. The company mission has been focusing on quality where higher prices reflect excellence and versatility of the service
From a single van to a company with twenty employees in just fifteen years. From a challenge to learn a new job from scratch to the passion that has turned this discovery into a winning business. From duvets washed for third parties to excellent service provided to great hotels of the capital city.
No matter how we look at it, the story of an industrial laundry Agar Service from Rome talks about a happy and irresistible climbing towards a fully deserved success by the two entrepreneurs who made it. Finding out that Andrea Giannantoni and Roberta Palmieri are a husband and wife reflects the particular power that a man and a woman are able to imprint in a business as a couple.
Their strength has been clearly noticeable ever since the engagement times. With an objective of creating a family, they discovered how to use and integrate their personal talents. He, a bit more inclined to administration, she with an interest in logistics, decided to open and invest their energies in a laundry business. And they were not wrong. “Everything started in the late 90’s in our Casilina neighbourhood – Andrea Giannantoni remebers – when Roberta started to work in the same laundry where I delivered linen by my van. Consequently, it was easy to understand the dynamics and needs of clients. This is how Agar Service was born. In the very beginning it was only a small laboratory with three machines, enough however, to provide outsourced services managed by a laundry, starting
with washing duvets”.
Relations to keep and skills to improve have always been fundamental “missions” that should be carried out simultaneously in order to achieve the goals set time after time. The secret of a success consists of moving on step by step decisively. It is this march that over a decade brought Andrea and Roberta, married in the meantime, parents of Lorenzo and Leonardo, not only to increase the number of machines but also to carefully explore the market where they had decided to work for. “Our first visit to EXPOdetergo International in 2010 was crucial – Andrea Giannantoni remembers – when we could measure our experience at the exhibition that exposed every tendency of a laundry sector. We found the exact answers that confirmed the operational hypothesis already in our minds: developing the ironing line, wet cleaning intensifying, necessities for precise and reliable consultancy for solvents and detergents”.
This is how the big leap forward started for Agar Service making them a part of “competition” and creating the main character in the field of contracts with big hotels in Rome. “We had just one objective – Giannantoni explains – which was aiming at the quality. And we reached it through a series of certificates, top level logistics and a precise tracing system for each garment, from withdrawal to delivery. It is the same for linen, upholstery and work clothes. As a result, we have a company structure with twenty employees today, who manage 1.400 garments a day on average. Our particular recognition goes to those who have been here since the very beginning and who demonstrated that our company mission has become theirs too, and who helped introducing the newcomers communicating this value to them”.
“Going back to the delivery, – the laundry owner, that now has its headquarters in San Cesareo, continues – we take care of it in a particular way. We learned this from great chefs who dedicate their precious time to decorate and embellish dishes to be served. Therefore, also while packing, we love giving back such cleanly shining garments that they seem new. Only in this way, a relation based on total trust, that big hotels require, is born. They naturally and basically rely on us not only about washing treatments of their clients’ garments but also about tailoring services”.
Excellent standards are the base on which Agar Service appears among the supporters of important promotional initiatives such as Albergatore Day. “Such quality has its price – Andrea Giannantoni concludes. – In this case we are in favour of market prices policy and against the non-sense mark-down that has long weakened our sector. Me and Roberta understood this immediately, after we had seen laundries charging 18 euro for a duvet, that later gave us 6.
So, if a shirt washing costs me three eu, I will charge at least 4 for it, logically within the contest of a transparent dialogue with our clients based on quality of work”.
It is a great hotels lesson. Conducted by a great laundry called Agar Service.
by Stefano Ferrio
DETERGO MAGAZINE
MARCH 2016
