5 ms·
Silicon Valley's Laundry-App Race (2014)
- rvz 3y agoYears later, most are 'folding'.
- helsinkiandrew 3y agohttps://archive.ph/3LY8v https://archive.ph/3LY8v Washio on-demand laundry service shuts down operations (2016): https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/30/washio-on-demand-laundry-service-shuts-down-operations/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/30/washio-on-demand-laundry-s...
- hef19898 3y agoThat name so, pure gold!
- potatosalad21 3y agoLooks like Rinse was the survivor? The others don't seem to be in business.
- tikkun 3y agoLaundry Buddy is the real winner here.
- no_wizard 3y agoThis reminds me of all the businesses that tried to do fashion as a service, where you’d get a delivery every month and send back your used pieces from the month before. Only one nice survived is Stitch Fix and they have had some financial difficulties as of late
- thiscatis 3y agoStyle Theory still very much in business.
- CPLX 3y agoRent the Runway seems to have some staying power.
- ytdytvhxgydvhh 3y agoAn insane new niche-within-a-niche is renting clothes rather than packing clothes while traveling, ostensibly in the name of carbon reduction: https://www.cntraveler.com/story/japan-airlines-renting-clothes-to-passengers https://www.cntraveler.com/story/japan-airlines-renting-clot...
- AussieWog93 3y agoThat sounds fine until there's some sort of mixup and you're left stranded in a foreign country with no clean clothes.
- xenospn 3y agoI mean you can always go out and buy something. That’s possible in 100% of situations.
- avh02 3y agoI'm a tall and large person, while i don't think that particular service would cater to me anyway, i once spent a day and a half running around hong kong to try to find a store that had anything remotely in the ballpark of my size. If you land in certain countries on a long holiday weekend, might also be difficult to find shops open. I'd go with 99% of situations : - P
- xkekjrktllss 3y agoTrue. If you have no taste or clue how to dress yourself then any old clothes should do just fine.
- xenospn 3y agoYou mean when the alternative is not having any clothes at all? Or are you being intentionally obtuse?
- mslate 3y agoI personally think that's a great service offering, though I haven't had reason to use it yet. The friction of personal checked baggage on airline travel is huge. Easily multibillion dollar per year huge.
- youngtaff 3y ago> Inspired by Silicon Valley guru Paul Graham’s seminal essay to “do things that don’t scale,” If you do something that doesn’t scale how will a VC make money from it?
- fullshark 3y agohttp://paulgraham.com/ds.html http://paulgraham.com/ds.html
- civilitty 3y agoBy dumping it on the public after it IPOs.
- rvz 3y agoThat strategy works with quantitate easing in a near zero interest rate era with cheap money being thrown around. Not this time I'm afraid as that ship has sailed.
- astrange 3y agoBy changing what you do later.
- lamroger 3y agoSelling ads
- zokier 3y agoI have no problem cleaning my clothes, but what I'd really love to have is linens as a service. And not just laundering, but the whole lifecycle; I have no desire to actually own bunch of linens in my closet if I could get them as a service instead. It would be very natural fit for subscription, and by not being someones personal items would allow handling everything in bulk.
- PeterHolzwarth 3y agoOddly enough, such a business (industry, really) exists and has done so for quite a long time: linens service for the restaurant/hospitality sector. They weekly drop off fresh linens (aprons, napkins, etc etc) and pick up the prior week's used linens.
- gcheong 3y agoI wonder why this service doesn't exist in the consumer sector but does for cloth diapers. Could it just be the amount of volume you need to turn over in order for it to be profitable? In other words exchanging a single set of linens from some number of households isn't as cost effective as gathering a large number from a few hotels/restaurants whereas it does make sense to get a number of diapers from a bunch of households (also, hotels and restaurants don't deal in diapers so the commercial market, outside of daycares, doesn't really exist).
- 15457345234 3y agoBecause humans don't like sleeping on plain whites outside of hotels. They like to personalize their spaces, because, you know, human nature. It would probably surprise you to know that a looooot of people get the 'ick' from hotels in general because of the idea that they're sleeping on 'someone else's' sheets. These people, unsurprisingly, tend not to travel much, so you don't hear this complaint widely.
- ghaff 3y agoI sometimes get one of those catalogs for “travelers” in the mail and some of the products make me think that some people are probably better off just staying at home because I assume travel stresses them out in a lot of ways.
- arnaudsm 3y ago2 years later, Washio shut down and sold its assets to competitor Rinse. Which is still operating today https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/06/buying-washios-assets-rinse-cleans-up-part-of-the-on-demand-laundry-market/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/06/buying-washios-assets-rins...
- macNchz 3y agoRinse also bought NYC’s FlyCleaners. I remember seeing the FlyCleaners vans around the city, very shiny and new at first, slowly become rather strikingly decrepit with dents, broken trim and loose bumpers. There are lots of old school laundromats in NYC, basically all of which offer drop-off wash and fold service by the pound, many with free pickup and delivery. FlyCleaners was not at all competitive with the ones in my neighborhood at the time.
- sanp 3y agoRinse and Repeat
- MisterSandman 3y agoI recently moved to SF and my building does not have laundry, so I used the nearby laundromat. Day one, was attacked by a homeless guy who essentially wanted me to leave the laundromat so he could sleep (the laundromat was unstaffed, and this was a Sunday afternoon). Rinse has honestly come in clutch, and they do a really good job at what they do. The only issue is the cost... $40 - $60 for 1 bag of laundry.
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoTumble Laundry (Tumble.to) is doing really well actually so it is possible to do it profitably.
- zerbinxx 3y agoWeird that all of the discourse on this thread revolves around facts and figures about these various startups, and nothing to do about the inherent insanity of the “mundane thing as a service”, which is remains in my eyes as a bubble mid-pop