Our History
John Jenkins Tipps started working in 1930 at the age of 17 at a cleaners in Levelland Texas. He was offered a job in Lubbock, Texas as a plant manager at Stinsons Cleaners for $15.00 a week. He worked there throughout the 1930’s, during which, bought a half interest in Brays Cleaners. He eventually sold his interests in Brays and bought Stinson’s Cleaners in 1939.
John soon changed the name to Tipps Cleaners and Dyers. In 1942 during the war, Tipps Cleaners was dying clothes all over the U.S. and most of the Reese AFB Cleaning. During the 1940s he started working as a sales representative for Butler manufacturing. He bought used equipment in his travels and stored it at 1919 ave Q in Lubbock. This is how Tipps Equipment everyone knows today, was started by John J. Tipps in 1946.
Don Tipps, his eldest son, at the age of 12, started helping his father rebuilding equipment. The business grew with John J. Tipps’s two other sons, Jack Tipps and John G. Tipps joining in the company later. Tipps Equipment was in Lubbock for 24 years and included territories of West Texas, El Paso, Mexico, New Mexico, Southern Colorado, and Western Oklahoma. After Don Tipps’s untimely death in 1970, the company dissolved.
Soon after Jack Tipps opened Tipps Equipment in New Mexico and John G. Tipps in Amarillo and later in Dallas. Jack Tipps sold his business to his son Tom Tipps and John now has Clean Concepts, in Dallas. I, Dan Tipps, son of Don Tipps, started in the dry cleaning business at the age of 12, helping my father. After my father died I finished high school, then I went into the Military.
After the Military I was in and out of the business for the next ten years. I started working in the early 90’s for Tom Tipps in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I then moved back to Lubbock, to start where my father left off in 1970. I have worked very hard to provide good services and customer satisfaction. I am a distributor for several major brands of laundry and dry cleaning equipment.
