Business View Magazine
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forming the company to keep up with current trends,
Jenkins gives most of the credit to Ed Jr. “He was really
a very forward-thinking person. He always stayed in-
volved in industry groups and tried to stay up on what
was coming,” she says. For example, early on, Ed saw
the impact that computers would have on business,
but no one was writing software specific to his indus-
try, so he learned to program computers, himself, cre-
ating, developing, and later marketing computer soft-
ware for the industrial linen industry. “If you ever had
the opportunity to talk to him, you always walked away
learning something,” says Jenkins. “He was a great
mentor.” Ed passed away, last year, at age 93.
In the early 1990s, OSHA (the federal Occupational
Safety and Health Administration) came out with its
blood-born pathogen standards, which prohibited
medical personnel from taking their uniforms home,
requiring them to send them out for cleaning. “That’s
really when our medical garments started to grow,”
says Jenkins, “because we were out in the field, talk-
ing to the doctors and facilities we were already servic-
ing for their patient gowns and their towels, and such,
and we found out that a lot of female employees didn’t
want hospital whites and blues and greens. So we of-
fered them a full range of really colorful scrubs and
warm-ups, and our business really took off. And the
manufacturers were manufacturing all of these nice,
colorful garments so we had no problem getting them.
And we still do that today.”
Jenkins continues recounting the company’s prog-
ress: “In 2005, we decided that we really wanted to
get deeper into the ‘retail medical.’ We added 28,000
square feet of space to our current facility and we
started working on remodeling our plant, separating
