Wash – Startup Idea
Alphas, zoomers and millennials are used to Yandex Food, Lavka, Wildberries. One problem is still unresolved – laundry and ironing. It’s long and messy. Whites, colors and wool need to be washed separately. Not everyone can press a crease into trousers. And only 30% of zoomers iron their clothes; the rest walk around crumpled.
There is little space in apartments to dry clothes. In a studio, the dryer and ironing board take up all free space. The smell of detergent spreads through the whole apartment. The washing machine constantly hums.
Everyone knows about sending things to the dry cleaner – it’s suitable for jackets and suits, but not for routine washing – it’s expensive and not good for the clothes. We don’t yet know a single company that would handle regular washing and ironing, although the number of studios and people willing to pay for laundry is growing.
Target audience: people with a salary from 166k RUB per month, or 2M per year – this is the average for Moscow. Usually a person does 50 washes a year. Washing one set of clothes can cost 1k RUB, so a person would spend 50k RUB on laundry, which is about 2.5% of the budget. For a family of two workers – that’s 1.25%. There is an opportunity to raise the price to 4k RUB for a full wash and then it would be 5% of the family budget per year. Would you be ready to forget about washing and ironing forever for 5% of your salary? – a cleanliness tax.
Where the idea came from: For the first 3 years in Vienna I lived in a student villa. We had cleaners, cooks and washers. Every Thursday we brought bags to the washing room on the lower floor. 1 bag for any clothes, 1 for colored items and 1 for underwear – it was in a mesh and put into the colored bag. After 3 days we received washed and ironed clothes. They were put into plastic Ikea boxes.
2–3 washers handled the clothes of 16–20 people. On Monday we turned in shirts. So that items wouldn’t get mixed up, we marked the clothes with a special marker on the tag. For shirts, by European tradition, initials were sewn on (D.K. for Daniil Koveh) – by the way, almost every Old Money millionaire will have initials on the left side of the shirt.
I thought, why not take that laundry model and scale and improve it.
It must be convenient. Every bag has its own code. Throw the bag into the container. In the app choose default settings for bags: which detergent, how urgent, whether to iron, deliver to home. Pick up the container with the bag.
Professional equipment. Miele ironing machines iron T‑shirts in 15 seconds. Grandma has been using one for 15 years and loves it. Bed linen is ironed in a minute. The ironing roller irons everything itself, you just need to press the pedal. A dozen socks and underwear are ironed at once. There are also steam units for shirts and irons for trousers and delicate items. That’s exactly how you can save 80% of the time and be profitable.
Ordinary people wash and iron. Every housewife has experience. It’s not hard to figure out the equipment. Housewives find it difficult to find high‑paid jobs because professional skills have been lost. But laundry and ironing skills are excellent. Equipment can be leased. Beginners provide a video showing how they iron shirts, trousers and delicate items. Clients rate the work and leave reviews.
What do you think about the idea? – write to @koveh.
The site was written in React Next.js in 4 hours.
The project is unlikely to be organized by me. I work in Data Engineering for e‑commerce, however, if someone wants to take on the project, I will provide the software and help with the launch for a minor share.
