Made in Tarrant: Family-owned vacuum store still cleaning up 88 years after inception

Editor’s note: Made in Tarrant is an occasional Q&A series on small businesses started in Tarrant County. Submit your business here. 

Evans Vacuum owner Jon Evans is aware of speculation that his three Tarrant County vacuum cleaner stores are a front for something more illicit, but he guarantees the stores are exactly what they seem.

“There are a lot of memes about us out there, like, how does a vacuum cleaner store survive?” said Evans. “I’ve never seen anybody at this business, are they really a drug cartel or money launderers, or what are they doing? You know what I mean? But no, we just sell vacuum cleaners.” 

Evans’ family-owned vacuum cleaner business was founded by his grandfather in 1937 and has been in operation in various cities and locations ever since. The stores serve around 400 customers per week on average, said Evans.

“The vacuum business is a very unsexy business,” he said. “Nobody loves the vacuum cleaner.” 

Still, the quality of a vacuum cleaner can make a difference in the cleanliness of one’s home, said Evans. And the family has used unique attention-grabbing techniques to continue to draw in customers over the decades, such as having an employee stand outside in a gorilla costume and hanging giant vacuum cleaners in the windows of the store.

Evans will someday pass along the business to a fourth generation — his son Ethan, a business student at the University of Oklahoma.

He spoke with reporter McKinnon Rice about the past, present and future of his business.

The interview has been edited for clarity and space. 

Contact information: 

Website: https://evansvacuum.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EvansVacCo/

Phone: 817-732-5400

Email: [email protected]

McKinnon Rice: Can you tell me about your business and how it got started?

Jon Evans: It got started in 1937 by my grandfather. He came from New York to Houston to help his brother with a vacuum business in Houston, to learn the business. Then he came to Dallas and started his vacuum business there. When he retired, he left the business to my uncles and my father, who started stores in Dallas, Arlington and then Fort Worth, and my father ran it until I took over in 1997 — and I’m still running it today.

Rice: What drew your grandfather to the vacuum business specifically?

Evans: He was doing door-to-door sales back in New York, so he was always in the vacuum cleaner business up there. When he came down here, he wanted to learn the repair aspect from his brother, who was already in the vacuum business, and then he started his own little branch here in Dallas. 

Rice: Could you tell me a little bit about the different services or products that your stores sell or provide?

Evans: We sell new and used vacuum cleaners. Also, we have a small display of appliances for the home, like washers, dryers, cooktops, coffee makers. We also do repairs. We do free estimates on repairs to give people basically a no obligation choice of whether they should get a new vacuum cleaner or repair their old one. But we sell all kinds of disinfecting cleaners, deodorizers — things like that — and then all the vacuum bags and stuff that you can’t find in big box stores.

We carry the vacuum cleaners that are the real good vacuum cleaners. We do carry some vacuum cleaners that are not long-lasting, but we let people know that they’re not going to last them very long. But we carry the really good machines. It’s where you come when you’re tired of the vacuum cleaners letting you down after a year.

Rice: From what aspect of your business do you draw the most profit?

Evans: Sales of new machines.

Rice: What are some of the challenges that come with owning a business like yours?

Evans: Employment. Finding the right employees to do the right job. 

Rice: I’ve heard there’s a gorilla that sometimes stands outside your store. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Evans: Well, that’s a tradition started by my father back in the ’70s. He just did it as an advertising gimmick, because vacuum cleaners aren’t something (that make) people impulsively say, “Oh, we should go shopping for vacuum cleaners.” But if you have something that draws attention to your store, people will remember where you’re at because of that funny thing on the street.

Rice: And that’s something you still do today?

Evans: Well, it’s harder and harder to find those guys to do that job because of the heat, but yeah, if we found somebody that actually wanted to do the job, we would definitely employ them.

Rice: Can you tell me a little bit about the giant vacuums that are inside the windows of your stores, and how that came about? 

Evans: My dad always wanted to build a giant vacuum because that’s kind of like the big ball of twine or the giant boot. It’s kind of a gimmicky thing, but people see that. It’s a very big attention grabber. And people know exactly what you do when they see something like that.

My dad was wanting to build a giant vacuum, and he kept picking Kirbys and other vacuums that were difficult and required a lot of pieces. So one day I said, “Why don’t we build it like this,” which only required two pieces of vacuum-formed plastic. So, I had a tool made and took it to a vacuum former. They formed the plastic around it, and we started building these 10-foot-tall vacuum cleaners. 

The first store to have them was the Cooper vacuum store in Arlington, which we built in 2003, and that store was actually designed to display them. We wanted to hang them up high because these take up a lot of square footage if you just put them on the floor, so we built this store high and had big windows to put in there, and we put them up so they wouldn’t be in the way. And, yeah, it became an icon. 

Rice: What do you anticipate for the future of your business?

Evans: I think it’s going to survive. We’ve been very responsible, and that’s why we’ve been in business for 88 years. We own all of our locations, and we’re here to serve the public. We have a fourth generation coming up that is going to take over the business, so, we should keep on trucking. We’ll be here.

Rice: Who in your family is going to take it over? 

Evans: I have a son named Ethan who’s going to OU for business, and he’s being groomed to take over as soon as he’s ready.

Rice: Is there anything else I haven’t asked you about that you think is important for people to know about your business?

Evans: Well, the thing about our business is people will seek us out when they’re really ready to have a clean home. We sell the high-performance vacuum cleaners that just get all the dirt out. The biggest thing about vacuum cleaners these days is capturing the dust after you’ve put it in the vacuum. Bagless vacuum cleaners will leak 10% of the dust back into your air, and people will think they have a dusty home, when actually it’s the vacuum cleaner that has put that dust in their home back in the air. We specialize in vacuum cleaners that don’t leak dust that will keep your home cleaner. 

There’s not one vacuum cleaner for everybody. It’s always good to come in and try them out and figure out which one works best for you. That’s the thing: you can’t pick a vacuum cleaner by color or price. You have to make sure you get the vacuum that fulfills your expectations, so that’s what we do. We’re not really salespeople, we’re more like educators and basically like tour guides, so we just show you what’s available and try to help you find the best thing that works for you.

McKinnon Rice is a reporting fellow for the Fort Worth Report. Contact her at [email protected]. At the Fort Worth Report, news decisions are made independently of our board members and financial supporters. Read more about our editorial independence policy here.

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