G&K Services

G&K Services, Inc. was the Minnetonka, Minnesota company that rented and sold branded work uniforms and facility services to some 170,000 customers across the United States and Canada — laundering, delivering and maintaining the garments that put a company's name on its employees' chests. Founded in 1902 and listed on Nasdaq as GKSR, G&K served industries from automotive and energy to food processing, healthcare and government through rental programmes and its GKDirect sale operation. Cintas Corporation, its larger Cincinnati rival, acquired G&K in a transaction completed on March 21, 2017 for approximately $2.2 billion, and the G&K business now operates inside Cintas.

Company Profile

Uniform rental is a route business disguised as a clothing business: the product is not the shirt but the weekly cycle of collection, laundering, repair and delivery that keeps a workforce presentable, and the contracts are long because switching suppliers means re-kitting every employee. G&K's summaries emphasise exactly that — customer count, industry breadth and the one million people wearing its garments — rather than garment design.

The facility-services half of the programme — mats, towels, restroom and cleaning supplies delivered on the same routes — explains why the industry consolidated: two route networks serving the same buildings are worth far more merged than separate, which is the arithmetic Cintas paid $2.2 billion to complete.

The range behind the name is branded uniform rental and purchase programmes, and facility services including mats, towels and restroom supplies. Its customers are about 170,000 business customers in the United States and Canada (in its independent years). That combination — what is sold, and to whom — is the simplest way to place G&K Services in the industry: it explains the company's costs, its competitors and the kind of news that moved its shares when it had them. A change in either half of the combination, a new product category or a new customer, is usually the first sign that the business described in the older summaries is turning into something different.

Scale should be read from the dated summaries with their dates attached. Store counts, sales descriptions and market positions quoted there were the company's own account of itself in that year, and they are the right basis for comparing G&K Services with the other companies in this section — a component supplier against a retailer, or a catalogue house against a mall chain — as long as each figure is compared with figures from roughly the same period.

For current dealings, the snapshot at the top of this page is the place to start: it gives the company's present status — Acquired — Cintas Corporation completed its acquisition of G&K Services on March 21, 2017, for approximately $2.2 billion; G&K became a wholly owned Cintas subsidiary — and links to the official website, which is where current product ranges, store information and investor or corporate contacts are maintained. Anything in the dated summaries that conflicts with the snapshot should be read as the older position: summaries describe the year they are dated, and the snapshot describes the company as it stands now.

For anyone researching the fashion industry's public-company era, G&K Services is a useful case: a route business in which the garment was the visible part of a laundering contract. The summaries in this section were compiled while the story was still unfolding, which is exactly what makes them worth keeping — they preserve what the company said about itself at the time, before the outcome was known.

History in Brief

The dated summary describes the business at its listed scale: branded uniform and facility-services programmes for approximately 170,000 customers in every size from Fortune 100 companies to small firms, across automotive, warehousing, transportation, energy, manufacturing, food processing, pharmaceutical, retail, restaurants, hospitality, government and healthcare, with about one million people wearing its workwear. Its own account of the service lists what a uniform programme is bought for: corporate identity, employee morale and retention, organisation safety and security, brand awareness and product protection.