I tried washio within the last 2 months for the first time. It was much harder than using a neighborhood laundromat IMO.
I scheduled for it to be picked up and had to wait 2 days, versus the neighborhood folks who do it same day.
I paid $100 to do the laundry (plus a $15 recommended tip). I was expecting it to be cheap since I had a coupon but was blown away. I didn't do the math to estimate the costs going in. My SO and I, I guess, had a ton of laundry.
All in all, it's expensive and not a wonderful/magical experience. It serves a fairly basic need and with the price I paid, after 2-3 trips, it is cheaper for me to buy my own washer and dryer in no time.
I can now use this as a "look I was right" to my SO, because after I got the bill I said "they are going to go out of business with these prices".
> I paid $100 to do the laundry (plus a $15 recommended tip). I was expecting it to be cheap since I had a coupon but was blown away. I didn't do the math to estimate the costs going in. My SO and I, I guess, had a ton of laundry.
That is bonkers expensive. At my old place in Somerville, MA (not exactly a cheap place to live), $100 would be four large hampers full of laundry and my shirts would be pressed.
Of course, it's not a VC-backed startup, just an actual business, so it's not cool.
>>At my old place in Somerville, MA (not exactly a cheap place to live), $100 would be four large hampers full of laundry and my shirts would be pressed.
Was the before, or after the 10% Tufts discount though? If you're below 35, you gotta pretend you forgot your ID, and take that sweet sweet discount. Same for the Sushi place that's right next to the Tufts-discount laundry place.
In other (totally irrelevant) news from current-Somerviller to (past?) Somerviller: area around Davis has gotten almost on par with Harvard Square prices (in terms of rent). Things are crazy around here!
You're thinking of the place in Powder House Square, but they don't do pickup. (Also, Yoshi's was a regular lunch spot when I worked from home.) Teele Square Laundromat does pickup/delivery and was my go-to. I wouldn't have used the discount anyway, though; I don't need ten percent off and they work much harder than I do.
Somerville's prices are disgusting, as is most of the area--I just moved to Malden, where I've got a really nice 2BR that isn't in a falling-apart house for about two-thirds of what I'd have paid in Somerville or Cambridge. And I'm actually a touch closer to downtown Boston for when I want to go out...I thought I'd be sacrificing something I cared about to move here, but nope.
Yeah that's insane. We use a local one here in SF (Sudzee) though it also can take a day or two to pick up and a day or two to return, and on weekends that's a bummer. And it costs $45 each time for over 40lbs of laundry.
I miss my days of $12 wash and fold in Brooklyn :-/
Before I flew back home from NYC (a 24-hour+ odyssey), I had my stuff laundered at some shop local to where I was staying. It was pricey for a backpacker, but definitely worth it - it came back so neatly squared off and pressed that it was basically a small brick of laundry and packing was a breeze :)
While the VC backed services drop like flies, neighborhood businesses continue as if nothing happened. I've lived in the same neighborhood in San Francisco for 20 years. The local dry cleaner is still doing just fine, though a bit older and grayer.
I think the lesson here is that the Uber for X model was predicated on people being so unhappy with the incumbents that they would switch. Pre-Uber taxi services were criminally awful enterprises that deserved to get a beating. Local neighborhood businesses might be a bit low tech, but they know what they are doing (so there isn't much to disrupt).
Yes, plus there's also the size and frequency of the pain point to consider. Uber makes sense; millions and millions of us need to get somewhere at any given point in the day, and many of those millions have that need multiple times a day. An on-demand solution, conveniently at the click of a button on your phone, makes a hell of a lot of sense.
Laundry and dry cleaning? First, that's definitely not a daily need. Debatably a weekly need. Second, it's not really a mobile need, and I don't just mean in terms of the device. It's not an on-the-go problem. Sure, the idea of on-demand pickup and dropoff sounds mildly more convenient than the traditional method -- but not so much more so that it's worth the price premium.
The best part is that previous reporting on this company (discussed on HN contemporaneously here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7817895) indicated that they weren't actually even doing the laundry. All that stuff had been outsourced to another company, called "Wash Then Fold" (WTF, nice touch).
At the time, I wondered if there actually proved to be any money to be made here what would stop Wash Then Fold from just setting up their own app and cutting Washio out of the transaction entirely. Three years later, here we are and lo and behold:
Many times I'd look in my bag to find someone else's clothing. One time I ended up with a young ladies lacy underwear which kinda made me feel like a creep.
During my move from SF to Ann Arbor I made the mistake of outsourcing the washing of pretty much all of my clothing and linens with them. They lost all of it and couldn't find it for about a month.
Let's just say I am very glad I have a washer and a dryer in my home. Certain things just shouldn't be outsourced.
On the other hand, I've used a laundromat's "drop-off" laundry service for about a year, and only once received a piece of clothing that wasn't mine (a top, and a belt) and don't remember ever losing clothing (although it doesn't mean it didn't happen - would I miss a pair of underwear or a plain-colored t-shirt?)
Haha, sure, but the main point is that I don't think it was a catastrophe for the person who lost their clothes, either - at least, not on the level of losing nearly all of your clothes for a month.
Plus, since I knew the laundromat it came from, I could just return it and they could put up a "did you lose this shirt" sign, and have a reasonable chance of finding the owner.
This is just a service I don't get the mass market appeal for. Washing your clothes does not take that much time and dry cleaners are readily available in every city. So these companies don't seem to solve a real problem, rather they're just a luxury. Luxury products are hard to maintain:
Since I moved to a place where the nearest laundromat is 2 blocks uphiilll and pricey ($5/load), I admittedly did take a quick look into Washio, but noticed there was a minimum order of $20. It was a luxury service, or a good for fresh graduates who believe too much in the "your time is money" mantra.
If you want another "wtf, do we need this" service, check out TrashDay.co, saving us the indignity of taking out our own trash.
...saving us the indignity of taking out our own trash.
It seems possible that this inconvenience is mostly caused by municipal garbage monopolies? I can haul my own bins, but contracting for trash service in monopoly areas has consistently been more trouble than doing so out in the countryside.
My laundromat has free pickup and drop-off. It has a minimum order of $20, too...but that's at eighty cents a pound, so it's a lot of laundry. I just bought more clothes and let it build up a little longer.
Yeah, if I could get a couple roommates/neighbors in on it, the $20 minimum can easily be met. I don't remember the price/pound of Washio, but it was probably higher than 80 cents.
Also, I hope you're still washing your clothes semi-frequently, or at least your workout clothes.
It's a lot easier to be "lucky"--and this applies to life, not just a few normally-cheap creature comforts--when you live in places that aren't...how do I put it...gross.
The next competitive advantage for hiring is going to be "doesn't force you to live in the bowels of San Francisco or New York".
If you really don't want to take your trash out, you can pay Recology (who does pickup in SF) to get your cans out (usually from a locked garage). Though that might only be for apartment buildings...
> Washing your clothes does not take that much time
35 minutes to wash, 45 minutes to dry. 10 minutes to get to the laundromat, 5 minutes to move your clothes from washer to dryer, 10 minutes to haul it back, and let's say 20 minutes to fold it.
That's two hours, assuming there is no wait, no other interruptions, etc.
In New York, our local laundromat charged a pretty low cost in comparison to feeding quarters into a machine, so it made complete sense to just drop the laundry off on the way to work, and pick it up on the way back. (I don't remember the exact costs, but I do remember being surprised at just how cheap it was, especially considering the time it would save me.)
This is an American cultural quirk more than anything. Even most tiny New York apartment kitchens would have space for a front-loading washing machine. Maybe you need to knock out a cabinet. It's a fair trade.
And you don't need a dryer. No, really. You just get a drying rack and hang stuff up for 24-48 hours, and it's fine. Use a fan to circulate the air if it's absolutely necessary. It's usually not. This is how 99% of Europe works, from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean.
Thanks for the explanation. German here and I've used a laundromat maybe thrice in my life, for washing stuff that didn't fit in the washing machine at the time. Around here those places are also hard to find because there's effectively no market for them when everyone has a washing machine. (And judging from the prices someone else quoted above I guess a 600 € washing machine that lasts a decade or more isn't a bad investment when you're otherwise paying 100 $ a month for cleaning services.)
In most of Europe it rarely takes that long. 12 hours is usually more than enough. It might be a bit worse in New York but definitely not in California given the dry weather.
Modern front-loading washing machines are designed to use less and less water for eco reasons. I wouldn't be surprised if this regulation is no longer required with the same restrictiveness.
A bigger problem is vibration from spinning. Depending on the structure (e.g. wood frame), that can be felt throughout a multi-story building.
I should've been more specific in my initial post. Yes, it does take time but the price WashIO charges is pretty crazy. Compared with other services you can find in large cities it is much more expensive and the service isn't differentiated. So in your instance you drop it off, and pick it up, at probably a fraction of the price. However, spending 2-3 hours for Laundry doesn't seem to be a large enough irritant for me to spend the $$$ that Wash IO was charging.
I've used drop-off wash and fold services at various times in my life when a laundromat or washer/dryer wasn't especially convenient. (And every now and then I still use one while traveling.)
But, as you say, these services are already commonly available in large (and not-so-large) cities. I'm not sure what a premium-priced startup brings to the table especially given that pick-up and drop-off isn't even clearly a win over taking your clothes down to somewhere local instead.
Yes, I stack this process by buying grocery shopping during the wash cycle, bring the stuff to my apartment, then go back, transfer to dryer, go home and cook something, then return to pick up. Or, like, read a book, whatever.
>On top of that, Washio has seen fierce competition over the past few years from the likes of Flycleaners in NYC, Rinse, and Cleanly, which is already operational in New York and launching in D.C. in the next few weeks.
Curious what makes one service shut down while others continue. Better operational efficiencies? Better unit economics? They raised more funding so it's a matter of time before they all die?
Genuinely curious what makes one die and one thrive.
>They raised more funding so it's a matter of time before they all die?
I know where I'm placing my bet...
edit: Ok, apparently overly snarky given down-votes...
How about this? Dry cleaning is a low-margin, capital-intensive business that already has a huge existing base of experienced competitors. If you live in a major city, your local dry cleaner already has pick-up and drop-off service on-demand. They can already keep your credit card on file. They already reap economies of scale by outsourcing the actual cleaning to huge centralized facilities. How much extra value does a company like Washio think they can really generate by letting you schedule it via app instead of via phone, and how much capital investment are they willing to make to capture that value? This is a tough business, and if any company is going to succeed at consolidating it like Washio et al are trying to do, they will have to spend a lot to get there.
> If you live in a major city, your local dry cleaner already has pick-up and drop-off service on-demand.
if they wanted to be an "Uber for laundry" they should have similarly tapped into underutilized resources - ie. their contractors should have been doing the laundry on personal washer/dryers in homes/garages... We'd see garages in residential neighborhoods full of washers/dryers, without permits, etc... Such an increased efficiency (due to the disruption in particular by cutting off the regulations related and commercial lease expenses) would have generated the required margins like in Uber and AirBNB cases. Of course, whether the world would be a better place for that - that as usually would depend on whether you're the one getting that margin :)
I'm not sure how capital-intensive it is; there's probably a fair bit of (low-cost) labor. But, yes, to all your other points. I'm not sure what about the current services is most places can really be significantly optimized from either an efficiency or a customer experience perspective.
I've never used services that picked up and dropped off at my house/apartment but I'm not sure I'd ever have paid much of a premium for that but the Wash-and-Fold services I've used have always been just fine--if I lacked easy access to a washer/drier myself.
It looks like Washio was operating in a lot of cities. None of the others are operating in more than two markets.
They're all presumably burning cash trying to establish themselves in the market, but Washio was probably burning the fastest due to their rapid expansion. They also raised a little more money than the others, which probably encouraged them to expand faster.
It's just a matter of time before the others run out of cash. They're all hoping that they'll be able reach the scale they need to turn a profit before the money train runs out. With Washio's closure, they must know that fundraising is going to be very hard, so you'll probably not see much more expansion in this space for a little while. Instead, they'll all work on increasing efficiencies and saturating existing markets, then try to leverage that into another round of funding to expand to more markets before the competition.
I haven't used any of these, but I have experience with seeing FlyCleaners operate in Williamsburg, so it could be that Washio drivers were less willing use bike lanes as parking spaces and believe in stop signs, yielding to crosswalks, and speed limits.
Can confirm that Washio was more than willing to be a shitty neighbor in SF; they abused the heck out of their 14th St. site, parking on the sidewalk and double parking all the time, leaving discarded Washio-branded packaging on the street. Good riddance.
Some of them do not realise that the logistics problem (of picking up stuff and delivering them) can't be solved by common routing.
Most of them work mostly on their mobile apps.
Some of them realise that the logistics problem they have is an NP-hard problem and try developing the solution in-house. Most of the time it results in failure (I believe some other firms that fell apart, I believe it was some Google acquired team cleaning services, particularly mentioned they couldn't solve the logistics problem in time and just when they did the funding disappeared).
Some realise that they can outsource their optimisation to services like:
+ open source: optaplanner, OpenVRP, jsprit, mixed integer programming solvers
All designed for different variants with some features that miss in others, available in all or some.
For some business the quality of routed paths isn't that important, for some it's crucial, especially if one wants to bring down the price.
Oh yeah, the problem is called Vehicle Routing Problem (or multiple travelling salesmen), it has variants that include vehicle capacities, pickup and delivery (one location preceding the other), pickup or delivery time windows, lunch breaks that don't have real location and other features.
That stuff is hard to solve if you have to run a business like Washio.
So, washio is like the 3rd laundry service I used in SF that shuts down and makes me go to the next competitor.
I understand fierce competition + low margin + high growth required is needed and profitability is hard to reach, but so, I wonder what it takes (or how many similar failures) for the "market" to balance and finally come up with something sustainable.
By that I mean, ok, we've seen X number of the exact same laundry services failing. If the business model has been proven unsustainable multiple times in a row, why founders continue to try and investors continue to believe?
I'm wondering if at some point some kind of balance can be achieved where founders/investors will only build something that can be sustainable?
Like, ok I'm happy it get cheap and fast laundry service right now, and i don't mind changing provider regularly, but if at some point the offer is a little more expensive and takes a little longer (the sustainable business model) then I guess I wouldn't have a choice and use this one (still better to most people than going to dry cleaning or wash my own stuff at the laundry 2 blocks away)
A laundry service is kind of passé; surely what we'll see next is a laundry-sharing service. Not only does that save money by using washing machines belonging to members of the public - otherwise idle capital assets - but you could extend that to wearing other people's laundry.
A laundry service seems like a labor-intensive business (as in, 99%+ of the work is physical labor). Reality likely is that there just isn't much room for non-laboring founders and investors to collect money off those performing the service of the business.
Its possible investors think the concept it sound but the management and strategy has not been, so if they just trim around the edges a bit they'll hit at the magic formula that works.
Start-ups can be really idiosyncratic and rise and fall based on the talents, failings, and egos of their core founding teams. So it's really easy to tell yourself that the idea is good but th execution was bad.
I think this is one of those ideas that sounds very solid, but might be less so.
Who hasn't said, "I wish my laundry were done and folded by someone else?!" The problem might just be that the problem is so much easier to state than the solution, however.
Maybe the solution isn't related to a service that comes to your house, takes your laundry elsewhere, and brings it back to you. Each of the failed startups (I think? going off the top of my head) did this, in one form or another.
I know of at least three laundromats within a few blocks of my apartment here in SF that offer dropoff wash and fold, at last check at about half the price of the pickup services I looked into (standard pricing, not promotions). I think the market for people willing to pay significantly more for what is honestly not much more convenient (they need access to your building or sometimes apartment, you have less control over the dropoff and pickup times, etc) is quite small.
Investors funding "Uber for X"-style startups generally seem to miss the things that make Uber work so well -- on-demand low-trust service that fully replaces the alternative. Cleaning my house or doing my laundry can't effectively be done on-demand, and done in a scheduled manner involves a trust relationship too extreme to rely on reputation/rating systems.
> Who hasn't said, "I wish my laundry were done and folded by someone else?!" The problem might just be that the problem is so much easier to state than the solution, however
No, I think the problem is that dry cleaners and wash-and-fold operations already exist. Its basically Uber fighting the taxi services -- if the taxi services weren't artificially limited in supply by medallion system and other special regulations that Uber could simply choose to ignore (accepting legal risk in so doing) while building a market and then lobbying for special regulatory accommodation based on the market it developed proving the need.
Following that, Laundry Locker in San Francisco has been in existence in 2005, so they're doing something right. And they have to deal with the cost of renting a physical location.
And businesses have had their uniforms laundered for quite some time, but their orders are more uniform than consumer orders, and damages to items probably are probably a non-issue, whereas consumers will have sentimentality attached to clothing.
Why couldn't busy people just hack this on top of Uber? Call Uber to pick up your clothes and take them to the dry cleaner of your choice and pick them up the next day. Maybe Uber's TOS don't allow for pure cargo, but surely there are courier services that do. Maybe it would be more expensive than Washio, but there are a lot of people in SF with more cash than time.
There is nothing wrong to see actual people. What would you do with your free time gained from not doing "administrative" tasks like seeing the laundry / buy food?
1. Work more (for your boss)
2. Spend money on XYZ so that at the end of the month your account is cleared and you have to work more --> 1.
>That mission began from our kitchen counter, and led us through an incredible journey over the last few years as we became the nation’s largest dry clean and laundry service.
My laundromat recommended me to use Sudzy (http://www.getsudzy.com), they use free pickup/delivery from/to my laundromat, same price and allow me to get notifications about the progress. After using it for 3 times this month, I can tell it's the best solution for New Yorkers.
I scheduled for it to be picked up and had to wait 2 days, versus the neighborhood folks who do it same day.
I paid $100 to do the laundry (plus a $15 recommended tip). I was expecting it to be cheap since I had a coupon but was blown away. I didn't do the math to estimate the costs going in. My SO and I, I guess, had a ton of laundry.
All in all, it's expensive and not a wonderful/magical experience. It serves a fairly basic need and with the price I paid, after 2-3 trips, it is cheaper for me to buy my own washer and dryer in no time.
I can now use this as a "look I was right" to my SO, because after I got the bill I said "they are going to go out of business with these prices".