Mobile delivery services are popping up everywhere in Chicago these days. If it's food or booze, are are at least half a dozen companies who are willing to bring it to your door. But there is one company taking that concept to the dry cleaning industry so you never have to step foot inside a laundromat again.
Launched in December of 2013, DRYV will pick up your laundry within an hour of using its mobile app or website, and it will delivery it to your house the next day at a time of your choosing. Operating from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. seven days a week, the company is changing the way people clean their clothes in Chicago.
"We talked to storefront cleaners, and from a logistics perspective, it's tough because most cleaners don’t have delivery teams. They don’t have a delivery staff," said co-founder Dan Parsons. "We realized there is no delivery infrastructure out there."
Seeing a chance to disrupt a decades old industry, Parsons and his team set out to make dry cleaning your clothes as easy as possible. Users sign up for the service and link their credit cards to their account. Laundry is $17.50 for the first 10 pounds, and dry cleaning costs anywhere from $4 for a shirt to $30 for a comforter. A text message is sent to you when it's ready and a receipt is sent to your inbox. Delivery costs are built into the pricing and there are no tips.
DRYV currently has an iOS app and will be launching an Android app later this month, Parsons said.
DRYV works with a primary partner that cleans all of the clothes, which is not unlike most dry cleaners that are essentially drop shops, he said. And while there are a select number of dry cleaners in Chicago who will pick up and deliver your laundry, there is no one in Chicago with DRYV's mobile platform, Parsons said.
"We're putting this whole solution together where it's just super convenient," he said. "We leverage mobile apps. Our drivers have mobile apps in the cars. You could have it picked up from work and dropped off at the office 24 hrs later. No one else is really doing this play in Chicago."
DRYV, which has 11 drivers and four full-time staffers, was self-funded until early this spring when it began raising a small angel round, Parsons said. In seven months the company has already taken "thousands" of orders in Chicago, and DRYV hopes to eventually expand into other markets.
"We just feel like we’ve gotten our operations model figured out," Parsons said. "We've really gotten the quality of service to a good point."
Image via DRYV
