Laundry and college students go together like oil and water.
Across all college campuses and dormitories, sky high piles of laundry are a common sight, even at the service academies.
As a first-year student at the U.S. Air Force Academy, Ryan McKenna saw an opportunity through the mountains of dirty clothes.
“Freshman year at the Academy I had a lot going on and couldn’t leave. I really felt like I was not being productive with my time and wanted to make some side money,” he said.
After chatting with a senior that was heading out for a snowboard trip, McKenna noticed a pile of dirty laundry on his floor and asked him, ‘who is going to wash that?’
McKenna offered to wash it for $10 and the idea behind U-Wash was born. Despite stumbling on the idea during his first year on campus, it took till McKenna’s senior year to act on it.
During a venture class this semester, McKenna and a team of his fellow classmates have developed U-Wash, a peer-to-peer platform that enables college students to make money doing their classmates' laundry.
To use U-Wash, customers purchase a load of laundry in the company’s app and are sent a code that corresponds with a smart locker in their dorm. They load the dirty laundry into the locker and 24-hours later the laundry is clean and folded in the same place they dropped it off.
U-Wash offers a $10 basic wash and $12 premium package that includes higher quality detergent and drying materials.
On the washer side, U-Wash alerts them when a load is available and placed in a locker. They are given a code and instructed to wash, dry, fold and return the laundry within 24 hours. Washers make 50 percent of the total cost of the laundry.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ka-4Gjr-cZU
The locker system, much like Amazon’s locker delivery systems, allow safety and anonymity for U-Wash’s service.
“We played around with launching a beta door-to-door, but our best business model was to keep it anonymous and safe,” CMO Sean McGinty said.
The company garnered an impressive accolade this spring, placing fifth and winning $10,000 at the Schulze Entrepreneurship Challenge, one of the largest undergraduate competitions in the U.S.
The Schulze Entrepreneurship Challenge, which is run by the University of St. Thomas, had more than 100 entries this year and U-Wash was one of 25 finalists invited to Minneapolis. Georgia State feminine hygiene startup DelivHer took home the grand prize of $75,000.
Coming off that victory, McGinty said U-Wash continues to build out its platform and hopes to hire a development team to assist with the launch. U-Wash is not yet available to the public, but the team hopes to launch soon and change the way college students do laundry.
While there are a number of on-demand laundry services active, including San Francisco-based Rinse, which has raised $23 million in venture funding, and Cleanly, which is backed by famed accelerator Y Combinator, U-Wash hopes to thrive by focusing on its niche customer segment.
“We’re the first peer-to-peer app for laundry across campuses,” McKenna said, adding that traditional laundry services are usually much slower and more expensive. “We can offer a 24-hour turnaround because your laundry never leaves the dorm.”
