Wash Cycle Laundry Takes Its Inspiration from Dirty Diapers
Meet the Disruptor: Launder Bike Laundry
The six-year-old visitor with an eco- and employee-witting mission discovered an unfilled niche—and has grown to fill it
Nov. 14, 2016
Brilliant ideas can come from the strangest places. Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook started as an interfacing app for Ivy League kids. Uber came to its creators' minds when they had problem hailing a cab. And Wash Cycle Laundry founder Gabriel Mandujano? He was thinking of muddied diapers when he came upwards with his business organisation plan.
But more on that in a bit.
Wash Cycle, which has been around for six years, puts its ain spin—pun incredibly intended—on industrial washing. They supply some of the standard laundering fair, including linens, sheets, towels, custodial supplies, floor mats, and clean clothes in majority for universities and hospitals. They commit to the ecology fleck, using all-natural detergents and high-efficiency laundry machines. But it'due south the trip that the laundry takes that really sets it apart: Wash Cycle's wares are carted around via bicycle to their local facilities. The company currently has campuses open up in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., and currently employs roughly 50, just about 40 of whom are stationed in Philly. (It also had a short-lived franchise in Austin, Texas.)
"Our piece of work is directly in the metropolis that we serve," says Leigh Goldenberg. "Many of our commercial competitors are sending laundry maybe ninety or 150 miles abroad. Merely we're never more three miles away from our customers."
Commercial laundry isn't the sexiest business to exist in, much less to disrupt. It's non the music manufacture, begging for a Spotify, or the taxi manufacture waiting for Lyft to whisk it abroad and give information technology a mustache. Information technology is, still, an manufacture that is worth nigh $20 billion, per a study completed in 2009, and one that, according to Mandujano, had fallen into something of a heat. Back at the turn of the decade, Mandujano had worked at a pair of nonprofits and was looking to take his next footstep.
"I was ever really interested in grassroots economic enterprises and sustainability. I wanted to beginning a social enterprise," he says. "I wanted to practise something that I could do cleaner and cheaper. I wanted to practice something that would exist institutionally-procured, and the big guys in Philadelphia are hospitals and universities—what practice they purchase?" Mandujano says he also wanted to create career pathways for people who lacked a secondary education.
Mandujano had to do some soul searching earlier he came up with an outfit that met his lofty benchmark. He bought a book on solar panel installation—green energy was all the rage in the early tens—and was exploring moving into the solar energy game. And then a friend who had only had a baby told him that there was no material diaper service in Philadelphia; the nearest one was in Lancaster. Surely, in that location is another universe where Mandujano is a mover and shaker in the diaper disposal game, but it's not this ane.
"The diapers started getting me thinking well-nigh laundry. Pretty soon, I decided that diapers weren't where I wanted to become, simply laundry seemed pretty interesting," he says. "Every fourth dimension you eat at a restaurant or become to a infirmary or stay at a hotel, yous're probably sleeping on something or wiping your oral fissure with something that has been provided by a third-party launderer."
Mandujano realized that there was an opening in this world, but a pocket-size one.
"A lot of times, with the existing commercial laundry providers, their goal is to exist very large. If you're a hospital that'south laundering millions of pounds of standardized linens, yous can normally go to one of these guys and get not bad service. But in that location's stuff that falls in around the cracks, and a type of business size that doesn't go great service," he says.
In other words: The hospital at Penn is probably doing fine, simply a 40-chamber nursing dwelling house is probable to be overlooked by a major commercial launderer. This was Wash Cycle'south entrypoint; the primeval investors included the Untours Foundation and the Patricia Kind Family Foundation. Since then, it has moved from servicing bite-sized businesses, to larger businesses, to hospitals, to universities—the outfit at present has an sectional laundering bargain with Georgetown University, in D.C.
"We try to build brownie at each level, and so try to move onto the next theater," says Mandujano. Now, he says, the company is moving into serving specialized medical service providers, similar long-term intendance and sub-acute behavioral health facilities. He claims that Wash Cycle is squarely comfortable in its niche, but that the business is expanding chop-chop. "Nosotros're eager to go on on growing. I don't know that what we do is exactly what anybody else does, just we've already come across some of the big guys, and I suspect nosotros'll be seeing each other more," he says.
"I was e'er really interested in grassroots economic enterprises and sustainability. I wanted to start a social enterprise," he says. "I wanted to do something that I could do cleaner and cheaper. I wanted to do something that would be institutionally-procured, and the large guys in Philadelphia are hospitals and universities—what do they purchase?"
Only even as concern picks up for Wash Cycle, which Mandujano has said is profitable, he's trying to ensure that his company doesn't slip into the low-wage, long-hour drudgery of your standard commercial launderer.
"At that place are a lot of commercial launderers out in that location who want their employees to exercise every bit little as possible and to make their jobs as uncomplicated as possible," he says. The average commercial laundry employee in the U.S. pulls in effectually $9 an hour. Wash Bicycle, according to Mandujano, starts employees in Philadelphia at $11 an hour and grew its average weekly paycheck size past 46 pct from March 2022 to October 2016, allotting more responsibilities to employees, including some that he says would ordinarily handled by "more than senior-level managers:" Employees tin can be involved in the hiring process, managing a small facility and fifty-fifty drafting profit and loss statements.
"There's a lot of messiness that comes with that approach," says Mandujano. "But at the aforementioned time, we've found that our turn a profit margins and our wages increase together."
And what nigh the bikes? Laundry handled by Wash Cycle is carted effectually the city on bicycles with little trailers attached to the back; the advantages of this not-conventional delivery method are plentiful. "If yous recollect almost gas, and tolls, and wear and tear on the vehicle, and parking tickets, and insurance and paying someone to sit in the auto the whole fourth dimension, it'due south kind of a no-brainer," Goldenberg says.
But the question remains: who will disrupt the Philly diaper disposal old baby-sit?
Stay tuned.
Photo header courtesy of Wash Cycle Laundry 
Source: https://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/wash-cycle-laundry-gabriel-mandujano/
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