A Sunset Park company is making doing laundry as simple as a few taps on your phone.
WashClub has transformed from a traditional laundromat to an online service in the last five years, and now does 95 percent of its business online through a website and a mobile app. The owner said his transition from coin-operated to e-commerce made perfect sense.
“Everyone needs to do laundry and dry-cleaning,” said Rick Rome, a former stock trader. “What I did was tie an antiquated system to technology.”
The WashClub app, available for Android and iPhone, allows users to schedule pickups and drop-offs, track their orders, and make changes. The laundry is so closely monitored that users can track a delivery truck as it moves to drop off their orders. The service also sends text-message and e-mail alerts if the customer asks for them.
Rome said it is all about the ease of use.
“I’m offering a very convenient service for a mundane task,” he said.
Rome, who lives in Williamsburg, said he left his finance job to get into the washing business because he was having trouble with his own dry-cleaner.
“I got into this business because my dry-cleaner kept breaking my buttons and blaming it on me,” he said.
He started the traditional laundromat five years ago, and soon captured most of the business in his immediate area. Then he had to come up with a way to keep his business growing.
“Once you reach a certain point, there’s a plateau,” he said. “By going online, I’ve extended my storefront 30 miles in every direction.”
WashClub currently serves most of Brooklyn, from Greenpoint to Coney Island and as far towards Queens as the edge of East New York. It will soon expand across Newtown Creek, and Rome hopes to sell his software to other businesses looking to go digital. The back end gives proprietors an easy way of managing logistics by making incoming orders and a production queue available on a phone.
Rome said his service has garnered 10,000 online customers since making the digital leap three years ago, and that now almost all of his business is from the web.
“We’ve moved away from the self-service model,” Rome said, though the laundry does still take walk-in customers.
WashClub is competing with other online operations, and with Delivery.com, which allows customers to place orders with participating laundromats through its website. But Rome is happy with what he has been able to achieve so far. He said that three years ago his Honda was the only delivery vehicle he used. Now he said he has 12 trucks and 25 employees.
As a way of giving back, Rome works with Sunset Park High School to provide students with clerical internships, and provides free washing for donated prom dresses through a group called Project Glam.
“We’re proud of what we offer, and proud to be in Brooklyn,” Rome said.
Techno Files
The Brooklyn Public Library won a Knight Foundation award to help it with a digitization project called “Culture in Transit,” a collaboration with the city’s other library systems to make digitization equipment and expertise available to libraries and community groups. The project is supposed to help neighborhoods document their histories. The Knight News Challenge asked applicants to use libraries as a platform to build more knowledgeable communities. The library won a second award for “BklynShare,” a program to connect Brooklynites to experts in various fields.
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The Downtown Brooklyn Partnership launched the Downtown Brooklyn Higher Education Consortium this week. The city’s Economic Development Corporation is chipping in $200,000 for the project, which is supposed to start by creating a pipeline for borough college students to land jobs at local tech companies, and to develop extracurricular activities. The consortium consists of Berkeley College, Brooklyn Law School, Long Island University, New York City College of Technology, New York University Polytechnic School of Engineering, Saint Francis College, Pratt Institute, and Saint Joseph’s College.
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The Downtown partnership also released the details of the second annual Brooklyn Tech Triangle U conference, which will take place March 4 to 8. The event is set to include panel discussions, a job fair, and a hack-athon. The main event is a “Tech All-Stars” panel featuring Scott Cohen, co-founder of New Lab, Heather Fleming of Gilt, Choire Sicha co-founder of The Awl, and Laura Smith from Amplify. It will moderated by WNYC’s Manoush Zomorodi.
