Hanco Inc. was founded in 1987 by Alan Hansen in Lake Oswego, Oregon, to manufacture Cleret squeegees.[1][2] The company name was later changed to Cleret.
Hansen began designing the Cleret squeegee in 1986.[1][2][3] At the time, he was director of corporate audit at Nike, Inc.,[4] and at Louisiana Pacific Corporation before that.[5] After two years of working on concepts for a more attractive squeegee, Hansen hired Beaverton, Oregon-based Ziba Design, founded by Sohrab Vossoughi in 1984.[4] Hansen invested $10,000 of his own money to pay Ziba to design what would become the Cleret Glass Cleaner.[2][5] The brand name Cleret is derived from "clear-it" and is intended to sound upscale.[6]
The original Cleret squeegee (1989), in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution.
The company generated $14,000 in sales in 1989, and over $1 million in its first year officially on the market, with 80% of sales coming from high-end catalogs such as Hammacher Schlemmer.[2][5] It had annual revenues of $16 million by its second year on the market.[7] In 1990, Hansen moved Hanco out of his home and into an office at the Water Tower in Portland's Johns Landing neighborhood.[5] Around that time, Hansen quit his job at Nike to focus on building Cleret, continuing to manage and design new products for the company.[4] In 1991, Cleret expanded beyond the United States, as it was introduced in Canada, Europe and Japan.[2]
Ziba's designers determined that the traditional T-shape of a squeegee was not the most efficient for a wiping motion in a confined area such as a shower stall.[1] After researching the way window washers and filling-station attendants would put their hands close to the blade and rarely use the handle, Ziba designed a plastic squeegee without a traditional handle; instead, it had a tubular rubber grip running parallel to curved twin blades, which moves across glass or mirrors with a wiping motion to reduce strain to the hand and wrist.[3][9] The dual blades leave a surface cleaner than a single blade squeegee.[9]
The New York Times called the resulting product "a piece of functional art"[1] and "an elegant product" with a "sensual design".[10]The Oregonian wrote that it "looks like no other squeegee in history".[5] Reviewers have lauded it for being easy to hold and for standing on its end for simple storage.[11]
Cleret products are manufactured and assembled entirely in Oregon.[5][12] The company later expanded beyond shower squeegees to manufacture squeegees for windows, kitchens, patio doors and automobiles.
