Doing Laundry In NYC Sucks—Can
FlyCleaners Make It More Seamless?
The company behind this dry cleaning
and laundry service app hopes to clean up in a market ripe for disruption.
If you live in New York City, you
know how to pronounce Houston Street, the very best taxi-nabbing strategies,
and that doing something as simple-seeming as laundry can actually be as
complicated as finding an affordable apartment.
Many buildings don't have washers or
dryers. And in New York's gentrified neighborhoods, it's not uncommon for
coin-operated laundromat machines to be nearly as expensive as a drop-off
laundry option. One new startup, FlyCleaners, is hoping to exploit this quirk in urban economics. They
offer a service that's meant to be as seamless as, well, Seamless for laundry and dry cleaning
Here's how it works: Users file a
service request via app, fill out a bunch of variables--darks in the mix? green
cleaning?--and FlyCleaners' drivers pick the clothing up within 30 minutes and
return it cleaned. Payment is handled inside the app.
FlyCleaners, which launched late last
year, is currently running a test operation only in Brooklyn's Williamsburg,
Greenpoint, and Bushwick neighborhoods, but CEO David Salama says the
company hopes to expand to Manhattan over the next several weeks. An ex-hedge
funder, Salama runs FlyCleaners with Insomnia Cookies
founder Seth Berkowitz. Berkowitz has considerable delivery-by-web experience;
his company, which launched in Philadelphia in the early 2000s, made a name for
itself by delivering cookies to college dorm rooms 24 hours a day. (I attended
Temple University in the early 2000s, where Temple News staffers were
among the early customers.) According to Berkowitz, much of the company's
20-or-so person outfit arrived from places like Seamless and Grubhub and other
companies with backend web-based delivery experience.
FlyCleaners
iOS App
“I'm a lifelong resident of
Brooklyn, and have a really solid feel for the dynamic of people who live in
the area as well," Salama says, explaining the thinking behind launching
in the borough du jour. "I saw firsthand the metamorphosis in North
Brooklyn over the past years from it being a place my parents didn't want me in
as a kid, to becoming a very exciting, innovative, and trendy place
today."
FlyCleaners doesn't actually handle
washing or dry cleaning itself. Instead, the company outsources to a variety of
wholesale facilities. (And due to the popularity of drop-off laundry in New York
City, many mom-and-pop laundromats outsource their drop-off and delivery
washing to wholesale cleaners.)
Salama says that the company uses
commercial partners chosen based on the quality of the cleaning,
responsiveness, attitude, and, perhaps most crucially, comfort with technology.
FlyCleaners' staff currently consists mostly of engineers or drivers; the
company claims to have no sales staff as of yet. Because the company itself
does not process laundry or dry cleaning, it needed only a Laundry Jobber license
through the City of New York to launch operations.
In December FlyCleaners received $2
million in seed funding from Zelkova Ventures and angel investors, many of whom
were previous investors in Insomnia Cookies.
By Neal Ungerleider
http://www.fastcompany.com/3027559/doing-laundry-in-nyc-sucks-can-flycleaners-make-it-more-seamless?partner
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