AUSTIN, Texas — In a growing number of U.S. markets, self-service laundromats are finding new ways to keep their machines spinning — and revenue rising — by teaming up with pickup and delivery services.
One such startup, NoScrubs, is a tech-driven company that acts as a bridge between busy consumers who want to outsource laundry entirely and the laundromats offering the equipment and capacity to handle it efficiently.
“(Our business) is sort of like DoorDash but for laundry,” explains Matt O’Connor, co-founder and CEO of NoScrubs.
His company has built a technology platform to manage everything from customer scheduling to delivery logistics, while its trained “Scrubbers” wash, dry, fold and pack orders at partner laundromats within each service area.
Operating today in Austin, Houston and Dallas/Fort Worth, as well as Miami, NoScrubs is already the single largest customer for many of its Austin-area laundry partners, O’Connor says. Some stores attribute as much as 20–30% of their total revenue to NoScrubs orders, he adds.
As the company expands into new markets — to stretch from Miami to California is O’Connor’s hope — its model continues to demonstrate how third-party delivery services can benefit laundromats.
The company approaches laundromat owners directly, explaining that it can drive incremental revenue and increase utilization with minimal disruption. A NoScrubs team handles all the labor and customer service, while the laundry owner provides access to washers, dryers, and a small amount of space for supplies.
“We try to make it as lightweight for them as possible,” O’Connor says.
He says NoScrubs typically receives a 10–20% discount on cycles based on the volume of business it brings in. For laundromat owners, the potential payoff is straightforward: hundreds of additional cycles per month. In mature markets like Austin, that can translate to thousands of dollars in income monthly, according to O’Connor.
NoScrubs chooses laundromat partners based largely on geographic proximity to customers, acceptance of cashless payments, and the ability to store supplies on-site. Although NoScrubs relies on the local laundromats for processing orders, its own staff performs the work, allowing it to maintain uniform standards and handle customer service directly.
NoScrubs customers know their laundry is processed at local, vetted laundromats, O’Connor says, but its brand identity remains front and center throughout the experience.
The CEO thinks there’s tremendous room for growth in laundry pickup and delivery. While food delivery reaches more than 60% of U.S. consumers, the percentage taking advantage of laundry pickup and delivery remains in the single digits.
“The friction of going to the laundromat, we alleviate that,” he says. “You’re pulling machine cycles from the home into the laundromat.” In his view, the service doesn’t compete with existing laundromats, it broadens their customer base by reaching people it otherwise wouldn’t serve.
The company is actively expanding and welcomes conversations with operators in both major and smaller markets, according to O’Connor.
“Running a laundromat is hard. Running a delivery service is hard. Running a marketing engine is hard. If you layer all these things on, it’s pretty overwhelming for a sole proprietor or individual laundromat,” he says. “We don’t run or operate any facilities, we do everything else that’s mostly software-focused. That’s where I think we can have a great, mutually beneficial structure and it’s working out quite well so far.”
Have a question or comment? E-mail our editor Bruce Beggs at [email protected].
