Originally posted – Oct 27, 2014
Louisiana laundry owner Christopher Chin likes to tell the story of how the father of a Tulane University student eventually came to sign up his son for Chin’s college laundry service.
During the previous semester, the student had inadvertently bleached – and ruined – an entire load of his clothing.
“I wish I had known about this service sooner,” Chin recalled the exasperated dad telling him.
Chin, who owns Cleanerama laundromat in Metairie, La., has been running NOLA Laundry Services for 11 years and currently serves students at Tulane, Tulane Medical School and Loyola University.
He estimated that college laundry represents about 40 percent of his overall business.
“We have three tiers of service – ‘Basic,’ ‘Deluxe’ and ‘Premium’ semester-long and year-long plans,” Chin explained. “With our Basic and Deluxe plans, the students drop off and pick up their laundry at our store on campus.”
Cleanerama has a 24-hour drop chute for students, who will receive a text within two days when their laundry is ready to be picked up.
“With our Premium plan, we actually pick up the laundry at the student’s residence halls and deliver it back there,” he said. “Not every residence hall has a front lobby area, so for those, we will literally go to their doors to pick up their loads and drop it off right to their doors.”
NOLA Laundry Services picks up at some of the dorms on Tuesdays and others on Wednesdays.
“We don’t want 100 bags of laundry all at once,” Chin said. “We space it out, and we get it back within two days or less.
NOLA’s year-long Basic plan includes 15 pounds of laundry per week for 32 weeks for $524.95. The Deluxe plan is $724.95 and allows students 25 pounds per week for 32 weeks; however, this plan also includes hand washing and air drying. And the Premium plan, which includes free pickup and delivery, is $924.95 and includes 35 pounds per week for the academic year, as well as hand washing and air drying.
In Bourbonnais, Ill., Ryan Magruder, who owns SmartWash Laundry Center, began offering trimester-long laundry plans this fall for students at local Olivet Nazarene University.
“We allow them to purchase one of three plans: a 10-pound plan, a 15-pound plan and a 20-pound plan,” Magruder said. “I’ve had laundry bags with ID tags made according to each of those weights. And, when they sign up for a plan, we will ask if they have any allergies or specific things they need done with their clothing, and we have that on file.”
SmartWash has six designated areas on campus where students can drop off their clothes and then pick them up the next day.
“The campus is literally two blocks from my store,” said Magruder, who estimated that his college laundry service currently makes up less than 5 percent of his overall laundry business. “We’ll pick up laundry at two of the designated areas on Monday, and drop it back off on Tuesday; then pick up at two more drop spots on Wednesday and so on.”
Access is Key
With 2,870 four-year colleges and universities in the United States, according to the most recent figures available from the National Center for Education Statistics, there no doubt are ample opportunities for laundry owners across the country to build their businesses by establishing college laundry services.
However, access to the students is the key.
“The biggest challenge with college-based laundry is access,” explained Minnesota laundry owner Jeff Gardner, who regularly explores drop-off laundry topics in his “The Laundry Doctor” column. “The last thing most colleges want to do in this day and age is give you access to their students, primarily because of all the issues with students being taken advantage of, stalked and so on. They just want to keep them protected in their dorms.”
Chin agreed that, with security issues becoming more prevalent these days, it’s more difficult than ever to get access to the dorms or residence halls.
“We have a slight advantage because we’re located on the campus,” he explained. “We have a store on the campus. Plus, we have good relationships with the housing department, so we’re able to do things that a lot of college laundry services can’t.
“I’m a Tulane graduate. I worked on campus for four years, so I know all of the players – I have relationships with all of the directors and vice presidents. In these ways, I have a different situation than a lot of people. So, the school has been very accommodating to me.”
But, whether you have delivery vans scheduled to be at certain places on campus at certain times or you have a location where students can drop off their laundry, the trick is to make the transfer of laundry back and forth as convenient as possible.
“Students hate to have to plan their week around their laundry.” Gardner noted.
Beyond physical access to the students, a college laundry service also is tasked with sparking the interest of the school’s students. After all, most colleges have laundry facilities that are either free or paid for through tuition. Students no longer need to bring quarters down to the laundry room in the dorm anymore.
How do you, essentially, compete with “free?”
“Typically, the person buying this product is the parent,” Gardner said. “And the best and only way to market it is to motivate the parents. The last thing they want is their son or daughter showing up at home on the weekends with a pile of laundry that they have to do. You also want to market your service based on that fact that the parents don’t want their kids staying up until 3:00 a.m. when they should be sleeping or studying, because they’re waiting for the limited number of free washers and dryers in the dorm – and they also don’t want them not doing their clothes or bedding because it’s such a hassle.”
The Challenges of College Laundry
For the most part, processing college laundry isn’t different than any other drop-off laundry, except for the fact that most of the loads will be relatively small.
While your typical wash-dry-fold family loads are 50- to 60-pound orders, the normal student load likely will be in the eight- to 15-pound range, and definitely no more than 20 pounds.
If your laundry is equipped with a lot of large equipment, as many of today’s stores are, you need to decide whether or not to bag each load in mesh bags and then co-mingle them with other loads, according to Gardner.
Of course, this tactic features an additional level of labor and also carries the risk of mixing up the students’ laundry.
“The ideal scenario is to have a lot of small machines,” Gardner explained. “Then you can do one load per one washer. It makes the process a lot quicker, and the risk of mixing up loads is decreased. Of course, it might not be as efficient and, space-wise, it might not work as well; but, overall, the chances are better that you’re going to deliver a consistent, quality product.”
As your college laundry service grows, another challenge is keep track of it all – monitoring it and billing it. After all, you’ve got a bunch of laundry bags that all look the same and are all going to the same place. If you get this organizational piece of the puzzle wrong, your college business is over before it ever really gets off the ground. This is where having a good POS system is a necessity.
“I know laundry owners who are doing $40,000 or more a month in student laundry business at $1 a pound,” Gardner said. “That’s a lot of laundry to keep track of.”
For Magruder, his biggest anticipated challenge is simply college kids being college kids.
“Let’s say this service grows to 200 students, which would represent less than 10 percent of the entire college,” he said. “They’re paying for a semester, so they’re going to want to get washed each week. However, the challenge is that maybe 10 percent of them every week won’t have their stuff on their designated drop-off days – perhaps they slept in or for some reason they just didn’t have their bags ready. I feel we’re obligated to still serve those students because they paid for the semester, even though they missed their drop-offs. And this could potentially create some burden, running back and forth – where this would never be an issue with my normal wash-dry-fold business.”
Chin agreed that college students can become slightly high-maintenance customers.
“With students, many of them are uninformed as to how laundry happens,” he explained. “Mom or Dad has always done their laundry for them. Plus, students today are very distracted. For instance, they’ll buy a brand new pair of jeans and put it in with a white and gray shirt. And, when those jeans bleed out into the load, it can cause problems. Or, they often don’t check their pockets, so we’ll find the occasional ink pen or tube of lipstick.
“Part of it is the education of the students – letting them know our procedures, letting them know how best we can serve them and finding out their expectations. Ninety-nine percent of the time the issue is rectified because it’s just a lack of understanding.”
Marketing to a College Audience
Basically, you have about a one-month window in August to really sell your college laundry service to students and their parents, according to Gardner.
“Hopefully, you’ve already built a relationship with the school, and they’re going to allow you to put your sales literature into their student mailers,” he explained. “Of course, you also have to participate in student welcoming events at the school and be there when they’re moving in. You have to be at the school with a sales team; it’s best to hire students to help you sell your service.”
In some cases, the college or university may not be as helpful as you would like, Magruder pointed out.
“Colleges get into these long-term contracts with laundry equipment providers for their laundry rooms,” he explained. “At Olivet Nazarene, they’re currently two years into a 10-year contract; so for another eight years, the school can’t actively promote my laundry service on campus. And, unfortunately, almost every college has something like this in place, so you have to figure out how to navigate around that.”
To promote SmartWash’s laundry service on campus, Magruder has taken out prominent ads in the student newspaper, as well as creating brochures that outline the different laundry plans available and their advantages to the students.
“When students coming into my store, I’ll given them a discount or a free wash if they agree to pass out my brochures to their friends,” Magruder said. “I even had a professor come in, raving about our drop-off service – so I handed him a bunch of brochures. You’ve got to build relationships and network in this business.”
Chin said that most of his customers have signed up for NOLA Laundry Service online.
“It’s critical to make the process simple for them,” he stated. “You’ve got all of these wide-eyed freshmen on campus, and laundry is the last thing on their minds. They’re worried about buying books and getting their ID cards, not doing laundry.”
Although Chin admitted to trying social media to market to this audience, he added that just being visible and putting his business in front of these potential customers is what works best.
Therefore, he makes sure his laundry service is well represented during the beginning of each semester when students are moving in, as well as over the summer during orientation events.
“Talking face-to-face with the parents is most effective,” Chin said. “Letting them know who we are and what value we provide puts them at ease.
“You’ll have 500 students in one dorm that has only five washing machines. So, I tell them our service will save time, without damaged clothes or having to wait in line, without having to do laundry at 2 a.m., and without having your clothes thrown on the ground or lost.
“We eliminate that, and we communicate that to the parents, because they are the decision-makers.”
The Pros and Cons of College Laundry
Two of the most obvious disadvantages of college laundry are its seasonality – with long summer and winter breaks – and “some of the extra chasing and accommodations you’re going to have to make when you start working with a larger customer base in the college arena.” Magruder said.
“This student wants his jeans air-dried, and that one wants her yoga pants hand-washed and pretreated,” Chin concurred. “You have to be very focused on customer service. If you’re not training your staff, you can ruin and lose a lot of things.”
And not being able to deliver what you advertise is a huge no-no in the college market.
“With everyone on social media, if you get a bad review, it’s downhill,” Chin said. “They don’t just tell their friends, they put it up on their Facebook or Twitter accounts.”
To protect his business from students misplacing garments and then thinking they had sent them to him, Magruder explained that his facility has eight cameras.
“If you have to replace clothing, there goes your profitability on that account for the semester,” he said.
“I’ve heard from several laundry owners about students at the end of semesters, when they’re running low on money,” Gardner said. “They will accuse the laundry service of misplacing a $200 pair of jeans, thinking that’s how they’ll fund their beer money for the final few weeks of the semester.”
To safeguard his laundry service, Chin – like Magruder – also has a video surveillance system.
“We record the processing of laundry for about a month,” he said. “And we use a simple notebook to write down who did which load, when and on what machines. Then, I can go back to my camera footage and follow a load through the entire process. So, if Mom or Dad calls, I can say, ‘Hold on, I’ve got video proof.’ It’s not he said, she said.”
By contrast, the biggest advantages of a thriving college laundry service are that it can provide consistent business that will keep your machines turning on a regular basis and your staff busy. And, if you offer year-long plans, you can expect a sizeable upfront payday at the beginning of each semester.
What’s more, the type of laundry will be consistent and relatively easy to process – basically, everything will be about the same size.
“It’s not like doing baby clothes,” Gardner said. “Your employee can crank it out quickly, and they will get very efficient with it. At my store, I’ve noticed that when my employees are doing smaller loads they can knock out almost 30 percent more work if they’re doing small loads, as opposed to one big load. They build momentum and receive that instant gratification of finishing load after load.”
To get started, do your research. It’s important to know what you’re doing, to know what your competition looks like, to know the challenges you’re going to face and to know what the college you’re targeting is currently doing with regard to student laundry.
“I polled a ton of students before stepping into any of this, to find out how laundry was being done – and not one of them said it was good,” Magruder said. “Preparation is key. You’ve got to have a strategic action plan laid out, because you can’t present this to a college or to students, if it’s not clear how the process works.”
“Clearly communicate what you offer and the value you can provide,” Chin agreed. “At the end of the day, you could have the best service on the planet, but if the customer doesn’t understand what you provide, it really doesn’t matter.”
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