Family-Owned Work Uniform Company Celebrates Centennial

Roscoe, a family-owned work uniform company started by two co-workers who tapped into the growing city of Chicago’s demand for professional laundry services, celebrated 100 years in business on Aug. 13, according to a news release.

J.P. “Jack” O’Connell and George C. Buik, who met in 1915 at Maywood’s American Can Co. and bonded over a shared entrepreneurial spirit, entered into a partnership to begin laundering industrial work clothes while still in their 20s.

From their $200 investment in second-hand laundry equipment, the company grew to be an industry leader. Today, it’s run by a third generation of Buik family leadership under President Jim Buik, TRSA’s Immediate Past Chair, whose daughter Julia leads Roscoe’s IT team.

From the Great Depression through the 2020 pandemic, the company has weathered multiple chapters of difficult Chicago and American history from a 100-year-old building on the city’s West Side. Over the decades, the company both struggled and thrived, but never lost its spirit of innovation and connection to the city and the neighborhood, the release noted.

“A century puts a lot of things into perspective,” Jim Buik said. “It is much more difficult to take a short-term view of things when you are standing on the shoulders of people who kept this business going through so much upheaval, from economic collapse to world war.”

The long-term view, along with a corporate culture built around the motto “Take Pride,” has driven a pursuit of innovation that, at times, has left Roscoe’s larger competitors in awe, the release said. Milestones include the development of the industry’s first wastewater treatment system in 1975 and the installation of a state-of-the-art automated sorting system in 2017 that was featured in a Textile Services magazine article.

Along the way, the company also has provided leadership to business development efforts on Chicago’s West Side through the Lawndale Business Renaissance Association, among other efforts. For more information, visit www.eroscoe.com.