THE owner of dry cleaning firm Johnsons is to spend £6m on a business that kits out workers at hotels, building sites and factories.
Johnson Service Group’s Apparelmaster rental division already provides 1.3m people a week with protective overalls, including workers at Ford, Jaguar Land Rover and bread maker Warburtons.
It is set to expand with the takeover of Cannon Textile Care, which is owned by OCS Group and like Apparelmaster rents and cleans workwear, as well as towels, bed sheets, table clothes and industrial mats.
Cannon has depots in Gateshead and Birmingham and laundries in Glasgow, Manchester, Bristol, Newmarket and Balham in south London. If the £6.1m deal is approved by regulators, these will be combined with Johnsons’ 20 sites across the UK.
OCS, which also has a facilities management arm, will continue to run its washroom services businesses under its Cannon Hygiene brand.
Chris Sander, managing director of Apparelmaster, said the business, which employs some 2,500 staff, hopes to find cost savings from the acquisition in 2013 and could not rule out future job cuts.
