It is a long way away from sunny Susanville, California, to the industrial heart of northern Moscow, and nobody knows it like Richard Griggs, director of California Cleaners.


That is, now he knows.


When he and a fellow investor first planned to launch American-style dry cleaning services here, he figured it would be no problem. He had done it dozens of times already in the United States.


Two years and thousands of dollars later, Griggs has three words to describe his business plans in those early days: naive, naive, naive.


"We came in with the idea that we could do the plant in one month, like we do in the States," said Griggs, who used to engineer and design dry cleaning plants in his native Susanville. "We came in as novices and did everything wrong."


He and his U.S.-based partner, Chris Cotton, spent close to 18 months preparing for their opening day last summer, and had to invest about 50 percent more than they had bargained for, though Griggs declined to say how much.


But in contrast to many young foreign-launched businesses here, California Cleaners has became profitable just six months after opening its doors, and is already well into its first round of expansion, thanks mostly to pent up demand within the city's foreign business community, he said.


"Our original business plan had called for putting California Cleaners all over the place, in St. Petersburg, in Kiev," he said. "But at this point there is so much business here in Moscow for us."


The dry cleaners started on a pick-up and delivery basis because its plant is far from the center of the city, in an old khimchistka shop in the northern, gray Tushino region of Moscow.


Its three trucks will pick up any order that comes to more than $30, a change from the original limit of $10, and deliver within 48 hours. Griggs changed the limit after he realized that each delivery trip cost him $4 on average.


But prices have remained the same, despite increasing taxes and shipping costs for his chemicals and other supplies. The charge for cleaning a two-piece suit is $12, while skirts, pants, sweaters and blouses cost $5 each, and ties are $4. Griggs said he started with high prices initially to avoid frequent hikes.


At least 70 percent of his clients are foreigners working here, he said, so he has added pick-up sites in places foreigners frequent, one at Sadko Arcade, on the Krasnopresnenskaya Embankment, the other in Park Place, where soon he will have a second, on-site cleaning facility as well.


With the door-to-door service he provides, plus the two-day turnover, Griggs has had little competition for foreigners' business from existing Russian cleaners, which generally require a week to 10 days to return clothes, possibly more, and do not deliver.


Looking back on the year and a half he has spent here building the business, Griggs said he had made some basic mistakes when he started, chief among them trying to do things like find a facility and buy materials on his own. Now he has Russian employees doing the groundwork.


"The minute they find out you're a foreigner they jack the prices right up," he said.


He found space for his plant by calling existing Russian dry cleaners. The one in Tushino that he moved into had shut down because of debts. He paid these off, renovated the interior, made a monthly rental agreement, and hired most of their idle employees, retraining them to work with the American-made equipment and chemicals that he imported.


Although he describes himself as a novice when he first started California Cleaners, Griggs had visited the Soviet Union in 1990 to design dry cleaning plants for two resorts, one in Pitsunda, Georgia, which lies south of Sochi on the Black Sea, and one in Makhach-kala, on the Russian shores of the Caspian Sea. The Pitsunda plant is now in a war zone and has closed down, he said. But the visit made him curious to see and do more, he said.


After the visit he had been, in his words, getting bored in Susanville, organizing dry cleaning plants there, until the phone rang. It was an investor, given his number from an equipment manufacturer, wanting to know if Griggs would consider relocating to Moscow.


"It took me about 10 seconds to say yes," Griggs said. "It's a challenge. Nothing is ever boring here."





California Cleaners can be reached by calling 497-0005 or 497-0011.