After four decades serving the Timmins community from afar, Northern Uniform Service is setting down some permanent roots.
The Sudbury-based uniform rental and cleaning service is celebrating the opening of a brand-new, 5,000-square-foot service depot, which is purpose-built to serve Timmins-area clients.
Chad Laframboise, Northern Uniform’s general manager, said the new building aligns with the company’s commitment to reducing its environmental footprint and operational costs. But it also signals its commitment to the community.
“I think it's an opportunity for us to be more integrated with the city itself,” Laframboise said. “We just want to feel more a part of it instead of just a visitor.”
Underway for more than two years, the build took longer and cost more than expected, he said, but the company is happy with the results.
Located at the west end of the city, the transfer depot is a warehouse-style facility where uniforms are loaded and unloaded before being distributed to their final destination.
Clean uniforms arrive on a tractor-trailer from Sudbury and are loaded onto trucks that take them to client sites. Those trucks return with the soiled uniforms, which are then sent back to Sudbury for laundering and sorting.
There’s an office on site for branch manager Ron St. Onge, along with a small inventory of uniforms that clients’ employees can try on to get the right sizing on their workwear.
Along with St. Onge, one truck driver will be based out of Timmins, along with a handful of staff to load and unload the trucks, but Laframboise said they could hire more as demand grows.
“This is the model that we've used in Bradford for 20 years; we have a depot there and we have a similar depot in Timmins — slightly smaller but similar garage space and layout,” Laframboise said.
“So we learned the good and bad from 20 years of operating out of Bradford and basically just applied that to Timmins.”
Interestingly, Timmins and Bradford are roughly the same distance from Sudbury, where the company has operated its main facility since 1901.
Northern Uniform ran as a laundry service until the 1960s when Jim Bisset, the current owner and the grandson of the company’s founder, took over, introducing uniform rental to the operation.
The Sudbury site currently handles between 200,000 and 300,000 pieces of laundry daily, serving clients across Ontario in industries ranging from mining to foodservice to automotive, and more.
Its Timmins clients are primarily in the mining and mine service industries, and that’s been true for most of the time Northern Uniform has served the city, Laframboise said.
“There's a lot of prospecting and some new mines opening up, and we wanted to be in a position to make it easy for them to work with us,” he said.
Introducing a distribution hub to the mix will reduce the number of trucks going back and forth between Timmins and Sudbury, Laframboise said.
Instead of three tractor-trailer trucks travelling the highway weekly, the trips will be reduced to one, saving money on fuel and maintenance, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Built with growth in mind, the distribution hub has lots of capacity for future expansion, Laframboise said.
And the company has already started in its efforts to integrate more fully into the community, joining the local Chamber of Commerce and working with local leisure groups to enable ATV and snowmobile enthusiasts to access the trails that cross their property.
Laframboise believes it’s the start of a long and mutually beneficial relationship.
“We're not just there to extract dollars out of the community,” he said. “Now we're putting them back in.”
