KINGSLEY, Iowa - "I always tell people, 'You wash your sheets once a week. So why not clean your pillow once a year?' If you have a pillow, your pillow gets that cold also. You have germs, and you put your head on that pillow every night, and your pillow's going to get those germs, too," said Vanease Kraft, co-owner with her husband Doug of Kraft Pillow Service of Kingsley.
Home owners routinely clean their sheets and their pillow cases. But how often do they clean their pillows? Not enough, if ever, the experts say. They should be cleaned regularly because a pillow that hasn't been cleaned contains high amounts of sloughed skin, fungus, mold and mildew, dust mites and dust feces. And who wants to sleep on that?
So when it comes to cleaning pillows, you may want to see a professional, like the folks at C & C Pillow Cleaning in Sioux City or Kraft Pillow Service.
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The Krafts have been in the pillow-cleaning business for 26 years. But Doug has been in the cleaning business his whole life, working for his parents at the family's Kraft Kleaners in Kingsley which mom Peggy Kraft is still running after 61 years in business.
Doug noticed that there was a company that came around regularly to clean pillows. His father always used to tell him they were going to get into that business some day, but his father died before that could happen. Doug's dream, however, did not.
Vanease recalled that on her second date with Doug, they talked about pillow cleaning.
Today, they have two pillow-cleaning units in trailers that Doug Kraft and another employee haul around the Midwest, from Casper, Wyo., to Indiana, and from LaCrosse, Wis., to Arkansas and Kansas. Much of their work is done in the Dakotas, Nebraska and Iowa, and they have been limiting their Minnesota travels to the southern part of the state.
But special projects have taken them to Houston, Chicago and even California, where in March they redid all the pillows of a huge motel. Three years ago, they spent much of the winter in Chicago cleaning 8,000 pillows for an upscale hotel. A similar project 10 years ago in Houston gave the Krafts a memorable family Christmas with their two daughters who know the business as wel as their parents.
They roll into communities where arrangements have been made for them to work with either local dry cleaners or some church or civic fund-raising group. And they return to most of these communities annually, some twice a year, as their schedule permits.
"It's a lot of phone calls, a lot of legwork," Vanease Kraft said of her scheduling duties from Kingsley.
She will travel with her husband on the day trips, like a recent fundraiser they did for the Catholic Daughters in Yankton, S.D.
The process
Pillow cleaning costs start at $12 a pillow, including a new tick; and the cleaning takes anywhere from 3 to 8 minutes, depending on the condition of the pillow, the Krafts said. They stressed that the pillows are cleaned one pillow at a time. No mixing of pillow innards is allowed. It is an old myth that many pillow innards are dumped in a community cleaning pot, he said.
So they never take more than one customer's order into the unit at one time.
Occasionally someone will bring in, say, three pillows and want only two fuller pillows back. So the feathers from the lost pillow will be evenly distributed between the other two, Vanease Kraft said. Or maybe five pillows will be converted to four. There is no standard weight for a pillow. It is whatever the customer feels comfortable having.
The Krafts have a special cleaning device in each unit, called a Pill-O-Bar system, which does the cleaning with the help of 10 germicidal lamps inside. They guarantee no heat, no steam and a new tick for every pillow.
"Basically, we'll take a pillow and I'll cut it open. Feathers or foam or whatever is dumped down into there," he said of the top-loading machine. "And this machine will clean, disinfect, deodorize, sanitize what's in there. And when it's done, it takes it and blows it right into the new tick."
The new tick is in an adjacent compartment.
The dust and detritus from the cleaning is deposited in a drawer under the cleaner.
Vanease Kraft then took the newly filled ticking over to a Paff sewing machine, and the pillow was quickly made whole again.
Thumbs up for down
Some regular customers have down or feather pillows that have been in use for 30 years or more. " I mean people will bring in pillows and say, 'Oh, my Grandma gave these to me as a wedding gift 30 years ago or 40 years ago,'" she said. "You get accustomed to your pillow and you don't want it changed."
A nice goose feather will last for years, she said, noting that an all-down pillow is a real treasure.
"Once you buy a down pillow," she said, "you don't ever have to buy a pillow again. The down - there's nothing in there to break down."
And unlike feather pillows, down pillows don't have the quills, what they call the "poke-y part."
"The down's underneath the feathers, like on the breast. You go underneath the feather on a bird and there's the down," Doug Kraft said.
"That's what keeps them warm," Vanease Kraft added.
Because there is so little down on a bird, the cost of a down pillow is naturally higher, but it is much in demand, they said.
The Krafts say they sell a lot of pillows during the winter months, all kinds, but downs are particularly favored.
The mobile units generally hit the road each year in March and they try to wrap things up by Thanksgiving. Then they work on their equipment, sell pillows and plan for the next campaign, with an occasional big hotel project providing some extra income. Winter is the best time for hotels to get their pillows cleaned, they said.
