Innovating in a traditional sector

Spotting an opportunity
We set out to fix a problem in the market, which was a poor balance between the user’s needs and the offerings available on the market. Dry-cleaners on the market today do not offer adequate services. People basically all share the same point of view, and that is a lack of time in their daily lives. So our aim was to fix that problem. Then we looked to see which tools or levers, technological or not, could bring added value to those users. Then we incorporated it all into an all-in-one solution.

Innovation methods
There are three points. There’s the digitization portion. Beyond the efficiency of time saved, there’s the digitization aspect, being able to place your order directly online, choosing your time-slot, not needing to leave home, and having a delivery system. Digitization is all along the value chain, for invoicing for example, receipts are emailed. Payment is done digitally and as for us internally, the tracking of items is done digitally too. We dropped the age-old tags stapled to shirt collars that people don’t like. The second point is the ecological aspect. How could we correct or improve the processes of an industry that’s often singled out. Dry-cleaning doesn’t necessarily have a great reputation. And the last point is the service aspect. So making house calls, and especially managing to… compress the wait-time between picking up the laundry and delivering it within 48 hours.

Making your innovation profitable
It was hard starting out. Our first few months, our revenues were under 1000 euro or 1000 euro in revenues, with expenditures around 20 to 25,000 euro per month. How did we make it profitable? Today, it just keeps getting easier, because we have more and more users. So when our drivers go out on a run, it’s a run with a full truck. They come back with a truck-full of laundry. We got to this by securing customer loyalty, their satisfaction, and the fact that we make house calls impels them to give us more and more laundry. Which makes a bigger average load. And our profitability increases with it. And we’ve developed other markets in parallel. B2B2C How to access B2C via the employers? And B2B, in the industrial market restaurants, for example, or other companies that have work uniforms, with much larger volumes.

Does it really work?
On the whole, we have a company that will achieve a revenue of roughly 1 million euros this year thanks to shirts.