Are Lockers the Answer to Building a Profitable, Round-the-Clock WDF Operation?
I’ve recently had a number of store owners approach me about the use of lockers for their laundry operations.
At The Laundry Doctor, we’ve been utilizing lockers to help facilitate the pickup and delivery of laundry and drycleaning since 2014. I first investigated lockers as a solution for handling college laundry.
The big challenge with the college market has always been the interaction with the students for picking up and delivering their laundry, as well as getting access to the campus in order to make those pickups and deliveries in a convenient and timely manner.
Lockers solve those problems, thanks to their 24/7 accessibility. They make the transaction much more convenient for the students, who don’t have to juggle their schedules to be available for a laundry exchange at a specific time and location.
No doubt, the same advantages lockers provide college students can be enjoyed by any laundry customer. It’s all about providing convenience – whomever the customer may be, and whether it’s wash-dry-fold laundry or drycleaning.
Whether you place your lockers in an apartment building to cater to the tenants or in some convenient public space, lockers are a great way to make that 24/7 connection with customers.
That was the original concept behind lockers for laundry.
However, in recent years, some laundromat owners also have placed lockers within their own facilities. The primary reason for this was so that an unattended or partially attended laundromat could offer the convenience of round-the-clock wash-dry-fold services without needing to have an employee on duty.
Typically, wash-dry-fold customers are busy people with tight schedules. Installing wash-dry-fold lockers in your store might be a great solution for offering 24/7 or off-hour accessibility for your busy customers who want to drop off and pick up their laundry when it’s most convenient for them.
Clearly, the advantage of lockers is the ability to interact with customers on their time schedules, while still meeting your time scheduling and labor needs.
Considering Lockers?
Most of the large laundry and drycleaning business management platforms have integrated locker plug-ins into their software – so laundry operators can make pickups and deliveries at lockers, and those transactions are included in the software’s automated format.
Of course, you can keep your locker system as basic and as old school as you like. Install whatever type of lockers work best for your operation – and the transaction can be as simple as getting a customer’s phone number on a form when he or she drops off the laundry, then texting the code required to open the locker when it’s time to pick up the finished items.
Here’s what you need to consider if you’re going to add lockers to your laundromat:
- You’ll need notification of orders being placed in your lockers, as well as a system for keeping the orders organized. Again, you can have customers fill out a form and leave it in the locker with their laundry. The form can ask how they’d like their garments cleaned – cold water, hot water, bleach, fabric softener, etc.
- The form also must include contact and payment information. Obviously, it’s important that the transaction goes through smoothly before you contact the customer with access to retrieve the laundered items. You can reach out to customers by calling, texting, emailing or whatever method is preferable.
- Another key to a successful locker business are quality digital locks. Think of the locks on hotel room safes. They can be reprogrammed with a different code each time. You want the customer to be able to retrieve their clothes in the locker, and you want to have a master combination to unlock it – but you need to be able to reprogram the locker codes at will.
- When choosing lockers, look at the configuration of the locker to ensure that its design is conducive to what you need it to hold. In addition, think about how you’re going to package your finished products. Be sure the lockers you have installed will accept your form of packaging. Make sure it fits. For example, some laundry bags on the market are too big for some lockers.
I’ve seen laundry owners successfully build special locker areas within their stores, which could be accessed 24 hours a day, even when the rest of the business was closed and secure. At the end of the day, the whole point is to find a way to make your laundromat a safe, convenient and 24/7-accessible wash-dry-fold location – and, for many, lockers have been the answer.
