Silicon Valley's Laundry-App Race (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Silicon Valley's Laundry-App Race (2014)

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2 years later, Washio shut down and sold its assets to competitor Rinse. Which is still operating today

https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/06/buying-washios-assets-rins...

Rinse also bought NYC’s FlyCleaners.

I remember seeing the FlyCleaners vans around the city, very shiny and new at first, slowly become rather strikingly decrepit with dents, broken trim and loose bumpers.

There are lots of old school laundromats in NYC, basically all of which offer drop-off wash and fold service by the pound, many with free pickup and delivery. FlyCleaners was not at all competitive with the ones in my neighborhood at the time.

Rinse and Repeat

I recently moved to SF and my building does not have laundry, so I used the nearby laundromat. Day one, was attacked by a homeless guy who essentially wanted me to leave the laundromat so he could sleep (the laundromat was unstaffed, and this was a Sunday afternoon).

Rinse has honestly come in clutch, and they do a really good job at what they do. The only issue is the cost... $40 - $60 for 1 bag of laundry.

This reminds me of all the businesses that tried to do fashion as a service, where you’d get a delivery every month and send back your used pieces from the month before. Only one nice survived is Stitch Fix and they have had some financial difficulties as of late

Rent the Runway seems to have some staying power.

An insane new niche-within-a-niche is renting clothes rather than packing clothes while traveling, ostensibly in the name of carbon reduction: https://www.cntraveler.com/story/japan-airlines-renting-clot...

That sounds fine until there's some sort of mixup and you're left stranded in a foreign country with no clean clothes.

I mean you can always go out and buy something. That’s possible in 100% of situations.

I'm a tall and large person, while i don't think that particular service would cater to me anyway, i once spent a day and a half running around hong kong to try to find a store that had anything remotely in the ballpark of my size. If you land in certain countries on a long holiday weekend, might also be difficult to find shops open. I'd go with 99% of situations : - P

True. If you have no taste or clue how to dress yourself then any old clothes should do just fine.

You mean when the alternative is not having any clothes at all? Or are you being intentionally obtuse?

I personally think that's a great service offering, though I haven't had reason to use it yet.

The friction of personal checked baggage on airline travel is huge. Easily multibillion dollar per year huge.

In general the best strategy is probably to just avoid checking baggage if at all possible.

I have no idea why people say this. Airline baggage handling is incredibly robust and, if for whatever reason your baggage doesn't pop out of the carousel when you arrive, they deliver it to your hotel or office or wherever ASAP, usually the next day. Airport backends aren't dark warrens full of hiding places, they're well lit spaces. Suitcases don't just 'disappear' any more.

I've flown on at least 300 two-hop flights and never had a baggage issue in either the US hubs, the ME hubs or HK/SG hubs.

It’s better than it used to be but I have routinely had luggage miss connections or had checked luggage be an issue when rebooking flights because of weather etc.

This is such a weird take.

Your luggage often shows up 3 or 5 days later, not the next day. Which can do a lot to ruin your vacation, especially since you might be traveling on immediately from the city you flew into, whether by car or train or boat or whatever.

And suitcases absolutely still do disappear. Happened to a family member last month. All it takes is for the label to be torn off, or somebody at baggage claim to accidentally take your bag while you're still going through immigration.

Or it just gets put somewhere and forgotten about. Another family member's suitcase got returned... five months later. Apparently it got locked in some room that they never access.

I'm happy you've been so lucky, but don't assume everyone is.

I don't think your experience is common, at least not post COVID.

Just this year, flying direct to Hawaii, checked a bag because of baby gear. United cancelled the flight and due to staffing, would not/could not return checked bags (so I could fly Alaska) for almost 24 hours.

The bags has not left SFO. They literally took a day to move them from the back to the front.

I only made my new flight by finding the right person who was willing to task someone to go pull my bag early.

I rarely check luggage and delayed luggage for various reasons—or no apparent reason at all—is not at all an unusual occurrence in my experience. And there’s no guarantee your luggage will be able to just catch up with you at some random location in a day or two.

Style Theory still very much in business.

https://archive.ph/3LY8v

Washio on-demand laundry service shuts down operations (2016): https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/30/washio-on-demand-laundry-s...

That name so, pure gold!

I have no problem cleaning my clothes, but what I'd really love to have is linens as a service. And not just laundering, but the whole lifecycle; I have no desire to actually own bunch of linens in my closet if I could get them as a service instead. It would be very natural fit for subscription, and by not being someones personal items would allow handling everything in bulk.

Oddly enough, such a business (industry, really) exists and has done so for quite a long time: linens service for the restaurant/hospitality sector. They weekly drop off fresh linens (aprons, napkins, etc etc) and pick up the prior week's used linens.

I wonder why this service doesn't exist in the consumer sector but does for cloth diapers. Could it just be the amount of volume you need to turn over in order for it to be profitable? In other words exchanging a single set of linens from some number of households isn't as cost effective as gathering a large number from a few hotels/restaurants whereas it does make sense to get a number of diapers from a bunch of households (also, hotels and restaurants don't deal in diapers so the commercial market, outside of daycares, doesn't really exist).

Because humans don't like sleeping on plain whites outside of hotels. They like to personalize their spaces, because, you know, human nature.

It would probably surprise you to know that a looooot of people get the 'ick' from hotels in general because of the idea that they're sleeping on 'someone else's' sheets.

These people, unsurprisingly, tend not to travel much, so you don't hear this complaint widely.

I sometimes get one of those catalogs for “travelers” in the mail and some of the products make me think that some people are probably better off just staying at home because I assume travel stresses them out in a lot of ways.

Yeah there's definitely a bunch of people who'd have a breakdown over forgetting their toothbrush because then they might have to go into an unfamiliar drugstore in a foreign country and buy a toothbrush that's not exactly identical to the one they have at home with money they don't understand.

I kinda sympathise, I guess.

I generically sympathize while still believing adaptability is a pretty basic life skill.

Interestingly, this exists for cloth baby diapers, and it made using cloth diapers a no-brainer. You don't need to own the diapers, you don't need to wash them.

Looks like Rinse was the survivor? The others don't seem to be in business.

Years later, most are 'folding'.

Laundry Buddy is the real winner here.

Weird that all of the discourse on this thread revolves around facts and figures about these various startups, and nothing to do about the inherent insanity of the “mundane thing as a service”, which is remains in my eyes as a bubble mid-pop

> Inspired by Silicon Valley guru Paul Graham’s seminal essay to “do things that don’t scale,”

If you do something that doesn’t scale how will a VC make money from it?

http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

By dumping it on the public after it IPOs.

That strategy works with quantitate easing in a near zero interest rate era with cheap money being thrown around.

Not this time I'm afraid as that ship has sailed.

By changing what you do later.

Selling ads

Tumble Laundry (Tumble.to) is doing really well actually so it is possible to do it profitably.

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