When Safi Porat and Guy Friedman got into the dry-cleaning business in the late 1990s, they thought they had a great plan: Instead of opening a few stand-alone shops that clean clothes on site, they’d operate one big cleaning plant to service a larger number of small retail storefronts.

But between the recession and a competitive market, things didn’t work out like they hoped.

“At the top, we had 17 or 18 retail locations, but that meant 17 or 18 rent payments,” Porat said. “Retail real estate had become so expensive, we were not able to make any money.”

So they tried something new. Instead of 18 locations, they now have around 450; instead of 18 rent payments, they have none.

They founded CleanCierge.com, a dry-cleaning company that installs airport-style lockers in high-end residential buildings where customers pick up and drop off their cleaning day or night.

Customers place orders and pay online. CleanCierge drivers pick up clothes and take them to a cleaning plant in South El Monte, then return them when the clothes are clean, about three days later.

The company started three years ago and now has lockers in hundreds of residential buildings, mostly in downtown and West Los Angeles. Last month, it expanded into Orange County, where Porat hopes to add as many as 150 locations in the next few months.

Already, though, he said CleanCierge is profitable even with fewer customers than the 18 retail shops he used to operate. He doesn’t pay landlords to locate lockers in their buildings – some landlords even market CleanCierge as an amenity offered to tenants – and has just six drivers making pickups and deliveries instead of 18 store clerks doing the same.

“We’ve been in the business before so we didn’t have to start all over, but it has worked very well,” Porat said. “And we have a lot of room to grow.”

– James Rufus Koren