[HN Gopher] Silicon Valley's Laundry-App Race (2014)
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Silicon Valley's Laundry-App Race (2014)
Author : helsinkiandrew
Score : 31 points
Date : 2023-11-22 12:18 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (nymag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (nymag.com)
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| https://archive.ph/3LY8v
|
| Washio on-demand laundry service shuts down operations (2016):
| https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/30/washio-on-demand-laundry-s...
| hef19898 wrote:
| That name so, pure gold!
| potatosalad21 wrote:
| Looks like Rinse was the survivor? The others don't seem to be in
| business.
| tikkun wrote:
| Laundry Buddy is the real winner here.
| no_wizard wrote:
| 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
| CPLX wrote:
| Rent the Runway seems to have some staying power.
| ytdytvhxgydvhh wrote:
| 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...
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| That sounds fine until there's some sort of mixup and you're
| left stranded in a foreign country with no clean clothes.
| xenospn wrote:
| I mean you can always go out and buy something. That's
| possible in 100% of situations.
| avh02 wrote:
| 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
| mslate wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| In general the best strategy is probably to just avoid
| checking baggage if at all possible.
| youngtaff wrote:
| > 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?
| fullshark wrote:
| http://paulgraham.com/ds.html
| civilitty wrote:
| By dumping it on the public after it IPOs.
| rvz wrote:
| 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.
| zokier wrote:
| 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.
| PeterHolzwarth wrote:
| 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.
| gcheong wrote:
| 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).
| thwarted wrote:
| 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.
| arnaudsm wrote:
| 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...
| macNchz wrote:
| 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.
| rvz wrote:
| Years later, most are 'folding'.
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