Milnor Brand Guidelines: The 1947 Pellerin Family Firm Named for Mildred and Norvin

A family business that began with one extractor.

Milnor began in New Orleans in 1947. The company says it was founded by Willis A. Pellerin, his wife Mildred, their son Norvin and a brother-in-law, A.W. “Jack” Walsdorf, and that its first machine was a 20-inch extractor, the spinning drum that wrings water out of washed laundry. The trade name joins the first syllables of two of the founders: MILdred and NORvin. American Coin-Op repeated that account in November 2022, when the company marked its 75th year.

The early work took place in a small factory in the city. The company’s own timeline says open-end washers joined the extractors in 1949, and that by 1954 growth had started a search for a new site. Ground was broken in 1956 on a plant in suburban New Orleans, and the company says that site, in Kenner, remains its manufacturing centre; it gives the total floor space after a 1994 addition as 400,000 square feet.

The family has led the business since. According to the company and American Coin-Op, James “Jim” W. Pellerin succeeded his father, Norvin, as president in 1982, the third generation of Pellerin leadership. American Laundry News described him in January 2025 as chairman of the board, president and CEO. In February 2024 the same paper reported that Brock Pellerin, whom Jim Pellerin called a fourth-generation member of the family, had been promoted to vice president; in May 2026 the Association for Linen Management carried the company’s announcement that he would lead sales and marketing for North America, and described Milnor as family-owned and nearly 80 years old.

From extractors to tunnel washers.

Milnor’s products follow the path of the commercial laundry itself, from single machines to automated lines. Its timeline lists combination washer-extractors from 1957, which washed and spun in one drum; the Miltrol programmer, in wide use by 1958, which let a laundry vary its wash formulas; and the Hydro-Cushion suspension of 1961, which the company says removed the need for pits and heavy concrete foundations. In 1962 it introduced washer-extractors designed to be set into a wall dividing the soiled and clean sides of a laundry, and in 2019 it added a line of side-load barrier washers.

The larger step came in 1979, when Milnor introduced a tunnel washer that it describes as designed and built in the United States, with production starting in 1980. It sells these continuous batch washers under the name CBW, and in 2009 added the PulseFlow design; the company said in 2013 that it had sold its hundredth PulseFlow tunnel. Around the tunnels it builds presses, centrifugal extractors and large dryers, and in 1989 it introduced Mildata, a computer network for managing a laundry or textile plant. The company says it supplied the first tunnel washing system installed on a cruise ship, in 1999.

The current range, as the company describes it, runs from washer-extractors of 25 to 700 pounds (11 to 317 kilograms), including the V-Series of 2000 and the M-Series of 2015, through coin-operated washers and dryers for laundromats, to tunnel systems and the MilRAIL rail system, first installed at a linen service plant in 2019. Its industry pages cover linen supply and uniform rental, hospitals, hotels, prisons, cruise ships and laundromats. The company says in its 2022 anniversary release that it holds 52 U.S. patents.

Milnor sells only through dealers, which shapes how the brand is met. The company says its machinery is available exclusively through an international network of authorised dealers, and it has looked abroad since 1965, when it opened a support office in Belgium. It says the U.S. Department of Commerce gave it “E” and “E Star” awards for exports. American Laundry News reported in September 2023 that the California dealer Western State Design had topped Milnor’s worldwide distributor sales for 2022.

Machines for the clean side and the soiled side.

Commercial laundry equipment is sold to two quite different worlds. At one end are laundromats, hotels and restaurants, where a row of stainless-steel washer-extractors and tumble dryers sits in plain view of customers and staff; at the other are industrial laundries, closed factories that wash for hospitals, hotels, airlines, cruise ships and workwear services. Girbau, for example, divides its business into commercial, self-service and industrial laundries, while Kannegiesser lists healthcare, hospitality and workwear among the uses for its machines.

In the industrial plants the machines become a production line. Soiled linen is sorted, carried on overhead monorails, washed in tunnel washers that move batches from chamber to chamber, then fed into flatwork ironers and folders or, for garments, steamed in tunnel finishers. Kannegiesser presents its range in exactly these terms, as one system from sorting to stacking, and in 2022 added a camera-guided robot that feeds towels into a folding machine.

For smaller customers the brand lives on the machine itself: the stainless front, the porthole door and the control panel. Girbau, for one, also sells a remote monitoring system called Sapphire. Makers speak a shared language of capacity and of water, energy and chemical use, and name their certifications and sustainability programmes prominently; the claims behind them are the makers’ own.

Many of these names remain family firms rooted in particular towns. Girbau grew from a workshop in Vic, in Catalonia, and Kannegiesser from a shed near Vlotho, in East Westphalia; Kannegiesser’s partner Montanari is a family business in Modena, in northern Italy. Several now build close to their customers abroad, as Girbau did when it opened a plant in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, in 2025. This guide sets out what can be checked about each maker — founding, ownership and where it builds — and marks clearly what rests on the company’s own word.

A family name on a factory in Kenner.

The brand presents itself as a family manufacturer first. On its website Milnor calls itself “at its heart” a family company, and says every machine is individually tested and inspected, and signed by an employee, before it leaves the factory. Its 2022 release pointed to the Clean Show in Atlanta, the industry’s North American trade fair, as the place to mark the anniversary.

Milnor shares part of its dealer network with a neighbour in the trade. American Laundry News reported in October 2014 that the Synergy Group, then made up of Pellerin Milnor, Chicago Dryer and American Dryer, held its biennial sales meeting in Nashville, where dealers toured a hotel laundry running Milnor PulseFlow equipment and two Chicago ironers. In October 2025 the paper described the group as Pellerin Milnor and Chicago Dryer, which held a joint dealer meeting in Orlando before the 2025 Clean Show, where Jim Pellerin and Chicago Dryer’s Bruce Johnson presented the awards together.

The Kenner site has also come through the Gulf Coast weather. After Hurricane Ida came ashore in southeast Louisiana on 29 August 2021, American Coin-Op reported that the company described its factory damage as “very minor” and had put its business continuity plan into action the next day.

For a design guide, Milnor shows how a family name can turn into a trade name and then into an industrial brand without leaving the New Orleans area. Compare Chicago Dryer, its partner in the Synergy dealer group, and Speed Queen, another American laundry name. For this guide we use a navy, a brushed steel grey and an amber on linen white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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