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‘Reclaiming’ Grand Avenue through retail
February 17, 2025
EAU CLAIRE – Cousins Amanda Garner and Julie Endvick said they dreamed of starting a business together for “a good 20 years” before throwing the towel in – to wash it that is.
Now, after two decades of ideation, Garner and Endvick are celebrating the recent grand opening of their joint venture, Clean Shirt Co. – a laundromat with a philanthropic slant located at 1117 S. Farwell St. in Eau Claire.
“We would joke at family events and bring up (ideas), like, ‘Hey, we should open this shop, or start this shop,’” Endvick said. “It’d kind of die down, and then at the next family event, I’d lock eyes with her and say, ‘We need to do something’ – that’s kind of how it went for 20 years until this came about.”
Garner said it wasn’t until both she and Endvick quit their jobs to focus on their families – more specifically, their children – that they came up with the idea for Clean Shirt Co.
Family, community effort
“For whatever reason,” Garner said she applied for an LLC for a laundromat “out of the blue” at the end of 2023.
“I wasn’t planning on actually opening one, I just knew it was a good business strategy,” she said. “So, I got an LLC just to have one, (thinking) ‘maybe someday.’”
A couple of months later, Garner said she and Endvick bumped into each other while shopping and struck up a conversion on their plans for the New Year.
“That’s when we both were like, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m going to do something this year – I don’t know what, but I’m going to do something,’” she said. “(Then Julie said), ‘That’s so funny. I just quit my job, because I’m going to do something, too.’”
Following that conversion, Garner said she and Endvick decided to go out to dinner with each other and their husbands to discuss potential business ideas.
“We were brainstorming everything from restaurants to ice machines to everything under the sun,” she said. “I threw out laundromats, and everyone kind of laughed.”
The idea, they thought, was too expensive to start up – but Garner said she and Endvick began exploring the Eau Claire real estate market anyway to see if a space would speak to them and help nail down their business plans.
“I was looking at a couple different properties, and I met with a real estate agent… and she showed me one place in Eau Claire that’s pretty historic,” she said. “It’s really well known. Everybody who lives around the Chippewa Valley knows of the property. She showed it to me, and I looked at it really quickly, but it was out of our price range.”
However, when looking at the property, Garner said she met the owner who – according to a text she received from her real estate agent a month later – loved her and wanted to help support their business ventures.
“While I was there, the owner had asked, ‘What would you do with this building?’” she said. “I just threw out – ‘I don’t know, maybe a laundromat.’ So then, a month later, the real estate agent texted me and said, ‘The owner loves your idea. If you buy this property, he’ll give you a better deal,’ because he wanted a smaller business owner to buy it – he didn’t want any bigger players to purchase it.”
Garner said she quickly texted both her husband and Endvick to inform them of the building owner’s generous offer.
“I was like, ‘You guys, maybe we should revisit it,’” she said. “So, long story short, we put an offer in the very next day on this building that we now own, and it kind of snowballed from there and here we are. That happened in June of last year, and now we’re (open).”
The idea to add a philanthropic slant to a business, Garner said, was always prevalent through the many discussions she and Endvick had over the years – but the cause they wanted to support didn’t reveal itself until they settled on a business idea.
Educators, mothers, business owners
Garner said both she and Endvick are mothers and educators by trade, so after deciding to open a laundromat, they knew the cause they chose to support would somehow involve children.
“For both Julie and I, children are a passion,” she said. “We have nine kids between the two of us, and we both went to school for education of different variations. So, that’s where our heart is.”
Their passion for children and families, Endvick said, was also shared by the building’s previous owner.
“Meeting the owner of this iconic building, he is a huge family man, and he is very sentimental to this building,” she said. “He wanted (it to be) something meaningful to the community.”
However, Garner said they didn’t decide exactly how they wanted to support children and families in the Eau Claire area until after Endvick designed the laundromat’s logo and chose its name – Clean Shirt Co.
“Part of why I got an LLC right away (was because) I had been talking to my mom about laundromats, and we had heard a statistic that one of the main reasons for kids being truant at school is because they don’t have clean clothes…,” she said. “Once we are up and running and (are) successful, we want to give back – to make sure every kid has a clean shirt.”
Endvick, who worked as a teacher for “many years,” said she saw proof of that statistic every day.
“I saw kids coming in, wearing the same shirt day after day after day,” she said. “It’s (one of) those things that grips at you, and you just think, ‘What can I do differently? What can I help with?’”
Garner said this realization and Endvick’s experience led them to consider how they could combat children’s lack of clean clothes through their business.
“(We asked ourselves) ‘How can we partner with schools to do free laundry days, or donate clothing or when there’s coat drives, can we wash all the clothing that’s donated to provide that?’” she said. “We’re brainstorming all these different ways of how we can help give back… and help those kids. They’re in situations they can’t control.”
More than laundry
Garner and Endvick said the area in which Clean Shirt Co. has set up shop is home to a wide range of individuals varying in age, socioeconomic status and ethnicity.
This led the business partners to consider what type of “vibe” they wanted their laundromat to have, and what amenities they wanted to offer the surrounding community.
“We want people to be there and feel comfortable, to feel enjoyment while they’re there,” Garner said. “We want food trucks to come. We want pumpkins there in the fall that you can pick up with your kiddos. We want Christmas trees. We want you to feel comfortable and safe. We want our staff to open the door for you and help you carry your laundry. We want that old-chivalry vibe that you don’t get everywhere anymore.”
Clean Shirt Co.’s laundry machines, which Garner and Endvick said are all brand-new, offer instructions in hundreds of different languages – something the duo said they sought out on purpose so non-English-speaking members of their community felt comfortable using them.
Plus, Garner said the laundromat offers many different ways for their customers to pay – such as the traditional coin payment, credit cards, loyalty cards and even digital payments accepted from a customer’s cell phone – to accommodate its diverse clientele.
“Where we’re located, there’s no laundromat down (here),” she said.
Clean Shirt Co.’s prices, Garner said, are also “not the most expensive in town,” despite providing their customers a fully renovated, clean and welcoming space with brand-new machines.
“We will have Wi-Fi, we’ll have music in there, we have TVs in there, we have a little play area for kids and we have a (high-top table) set up by the window so if you’re (a college student) doing homework, you can (sit and relax),” she said.
One thing Garner said people are excited about is Clean Shirt Co. – which is open from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. – will be staffed the entire time it’s open, something the duo said they haven’t seen at other area laundromats.
Overall, Endvick said she and Garner are not “trying to recreate the wheel” in terms of what a traditional laundromat looks like.
Instead, she said they’re simply trying to bring “a different vibe, offering brand-new machines and a little bit higher quality amenities” to those seeking laundry services in Eau Claire while helping serve the children and families of the community they call home.
To learn more, find Clean Shirt Co. on social media.
