Should you offer dry cleaning at your laundromat? Thinking about offering dry cleaning for pickup and delivery for your wash and fold service? Learn about the benefits. Already offering dry cleaning with your laundry service? It may be time to reevaluate the service you are being provided with. The work your dry cleaner does will reflect upon your laundromat’s reputation.
Welcome to the State of the Laundry Industry with Laundry ‘Matt’
Episode Four, Offering Dry Cleaning at Your Laundromat
Welcome to Curbside Laundries, State of the Laundry Industry with ‘Laundry Matt’. This is Episode Four, offering dry cleaning at your laundromat. There are two parts to this episode. Number one, should you offer dry cleaning at your laundromat? And number two, it may be time to check to see how your current dry cleaner is doing. So first off, should you offer dry cleaning out your laundromat? There’s some good reasons to do it. Number one, I would only offer dry cleaning out your laundromat, if you do pick up and delivery. The reason being is if you’re just counting on people, bringing in dry cleaning to your store, they might just bring in one piece and then you now have to make a trek all the way to the dry cleaner. And is it really worth it at the end of the day? You may be losing money on every order you bring in.
The beauty of pickup and delivery is now there’s an order minimum. So your order minimum may be $35. And so now you’re guaranteed to make money by offering dry cleaning. In addition, the second reason to offer dry cleaning with pickup and delivery, a big part of it is that you want to be that one-stop shop. You want them placing the order with you, and they may very well have wash and fold on top of the dry cleaning. And if you’re not the one-stop shop, they may go to your competition and get it done somewhere else. So let’s go ahead and take a look at the numbers at our laundromat at Super Suds. And you could see in 10 days from September 1st to September 10th, we brought in 50 new wash and fold customers. Out of those 50 new wash and fold customers, five of them did dry cleaning.
80% of the guys who did dry cleaning also did wash and fold. So you could see now each one of these customers is worth about 500 some dollars per year. So as a result of offering wash and fold, and dry cleaning, we’re making a lot more money than if we just did wash and fold by itself. So dry cleaning is an important part. About 10% of our new customers are doing dry cleaning, and that’s why we offer it. And that’s why we encourage you to offer dry cleaning too. If you’re doing pickup and delivery. That being said, you need to be working with a reputable, dry cleaner that does a good job. I’d rather not offer dry cleaning at all. If you’re partnered up with a bad business partner. So I would only offer dry cleaning if you have a good business partner. And that brings us to the next point.
Have you checked up recently to see how your dry cleaner is doing? Cause I’ll tell you a lot of places went out of business, a lot of dry cleaners went out of business as a result of COVID. So it’s very unfortunate. People are just wearing their suits and ties from the pants up or shirt and up because they’re just doing zoom meetings. And so, and less people are dressing up for work. So there’s less business out there and now people are dressing up more casually or just zooming into work. So there’s less business in dry cleaning. As a result, a lot of places went out of business and the ones that stayed in business, they may not be doing dry cleaning six days a week like they used to, or five days a week, they may only turn on their boilers three days out of the week.
It may not even be cost effective to ramp it up. So they might only be processing three days a week or less. And then they might’ve gone from only processing three days a week or less, which affects your turnaround times. And it’s takes longer to deliver the clothes. And now many of them are outsourcing. They even stopped production altogether and they’re outsourcing their dry cleaning or your dry cleaning to another plant. So you’re outsourcing to somebody who’s outsourcing. And as a result, the quality may not be the same as it used to be. So I would just take a look because you might not have, you know, taken a look at it, how the dry cleaning is. You might think, oh, I’ve got a great partner, but are they doing the same job that they used to? And I would take a look at the quality, the turnaround times.
It’s better that you find out yourself that they’re not doing the same job they used to, and you want to find it out yourself before a customer alerts you. Or if a customer alerted you, you want to see, is this an isolated problem or is this a widespread problem? And you got to pay attention to it because your reputation is on the line. They don’t care who you’re outsourcing to when they go to Yelp and they leave a review, they know they’re doing business with you. So the dry cleaning reflects the job that your dry cleaner does ultimately reflects the quality that your laundromat does. We’ve got a video for Curbside Laundry clients over on Curbside file camp. So if you’re a Curbside client, we’ve got a video specifically on how to find a good dry cleaner, how to create a healthy relationship with one, how to negotiate the best pricing with them as well.
So, make sure you take a look at that before approaching a dry cleaner, it’s a great resource. And for everybody else, just make sure your dry cleaner is doing a good job. And, if you’re not doing dry cleaning, I look to get into it. If you’re doing pickup and delivery. And finally, it may be a good idea to make sure you have a backup dry cleaner, just in case something happens with your dry cleaner, that you don’t have to start from scratch. So if you have somebody on the bench ready to go, that’s the ultimate protection to protect your laundromats reputation. At Curbside Laundries, we made our wash and fold point of sale specifically for laundromats. So not only does it handle the wash and fold in store and the pickup and delivery, even the dry cleaning is made specifically for laundromats. So it keeps track of which orders are at the laundromat, which dry cleaning orders need to go to the dry cleaner, which orders need to come back from the dry cleaner. And it handles all the billing. It lets you know, how much you owe the dry cleaner. It does everything specifically from the laundromats point of view. And we designed it that way on purpose because we’re a laundromat owners too. So if you are looking for a wash and fold solution that handles in store point of sale and pick up and delivery, and you’re thinking about doing dry cleaning, you ought to take a look at our software.
