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“The idea of laundrywala is not to compete with other existing service providers, but to bring the service to the common man with ease of access,” says Divya. In short, her company has its legs firmly planted on the ground.
The Beginning
“Working for a big company, I had not been doing much to satisfy my career ambitions. This is when I discussed the idea of laundry on wheel with my cousin Chetan, one of the co-founders. The fruit of entrepreneur-spirit and passion to do it on my own led to LaundryWala about nine months back. From nurturing the concept to bringing LaundryWala to its current firm footing, we have come a long way — from technology experts to ambitious leaders.
To me, the venturous and learning experience associated with journey of LaundryWala superseded every risk involved and I have succeeded in making LaundryWala a brand across the households in Noida.
Why Laundry?
“According to a KPMG report, Laundry and Dry Cleaning services market is projected to be `200,000cr. The market is highly unorganized. We have narrowed down our focus on a very niche `9,000cr market in top five cities of India for the first two years. In the first leg of our strategy, we aim to establish a strong hold over NCR by the end of 2015 and in the second leg, expand to Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, and Hyderabad by the end of 2016. To achieve this, we are pivoting our model to be a hybrid structure – a combination of marketplace and owned model where our units will serve as strategic investments and marketplace will help us expand at a rapid pace.
Challenges
“We have always looked at our journey in two phases. First is figuring out the right operating model and then raising funds to scale it up. So far, we have been in the first phase where we bootstrapped our way along with a small seed-stage investment. The focus was to uncover the customer pain points and establish a service model that solves them. As we enter the investment phase, the emerging challenges we face relate to demonstrating the scalability of the model and build a differentiated business. We have seen some success in early days with a few investors sharing our vision.
Tech-enabled Service
“Technology plays a critical role for any business to succeed with process automation being the key ingredient to achieve it. To ensure timely delivery, we need system to react in real time to whatever comes its way. At LaundryWala, we have following systems to ensure the timely delivery:
- Monitoring System – Real time system to keep track of an order in its lifecycle from the stage it is being picked and till the time it is delivered. The use of technology in generating information and required manual supervision in the different stages of washing reduces delays.
- Resource Allocation System -We use algorithm to assign orders to pick up agents based on their location and the volume of orders already assigned to them.
Our target markets are the working professionals typically in the agebracket of late 20s and the 30s living in good rented houses in Metros. They earn well, care about personal hygiene and appearance, but don’t have time for laundry.
Our main target segment is B2C & B2B2C and we do not intend to provide services to Industrial and commercial segments. Services include daily needs such as washing, Ironing & Dry cleaning. There are other value added services such as starching, charak, saree polishing and bags cleaning.
Equipment & Detergents
We use Fabcare equipment and Diversey’s detergents. We also have a RO treatment plant in place to treat water.
Market Scenario
On-demand laundry services market is in nascent stage globally. While start-ups strive to figure out the right operating model, one thing is clear – India with high proportion of young professionals presents a huge opportunity. We are very excited about this space.
As told to Suprita Anupam