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The Laundry Industry’s Future in 3 Words
Data, closets, and experiential are the keys to a successful future
Dear Friends & Subscribers.
In a recent interview, Bob Nieman, editor of Plant Laundry magazine, asked me a deep question:
What is the future of the garment care industry in 3 words?
My response: data, closets, and experiential.
Don’t get me wrong — the future of our industry depends on quite a few factors, but these three stand out as the most important to me.
Let’s explore why.
Data
Data plays a huge role in our lives.
If you look at everything you do, someone (or some entity) is analyzing your actions and interactions, from ordering food, buying food, shopping, the apps, and games you interact with, and even the ads you click on online.
We are creatures of habit and our behavior patterns are repeated — meaning companies can use this data to predict what we’ll do next.
Think about it this way: if you’re shopping for a new laptop, you’re likely researching options online, which then trigger the ads you see later on.
These companies predict what we might do next, and serve ads to us, all for us to engage with and increase profitability.
Why can’t we do the same in our industry?
We should be using the data in our POS system (or business management systems) to determine the behaviors of our clients.
Let’s think about it at the most basic level.
Here’s just some of the information you can gather:
How many clothes the client sent to you (or how many pounds)
Whether they are laundry, dry cleaning, sneakers
How many bags do they send
Frequency of their orders
If you took a year’s worth of data over the next year for one client, you could determine when they order more frequently. It could be during the summer, back to school, during the winter, or when they come back from vacation.
Knowing that data, you could create ads to market to them.
Closets
We’re all focused on the clothes in our client’s closets, but we need to get a deeper penetration into those clients.
Doing so will allow us to maximize the revenue we can produce from one client, which turns into immediate growth.
This is why we got into dry cleaning. Our clients mentioned that they were dropping clothes off with us and then going to another business to drop off their dry cleaning. Offering both in one place? That saved our clients time and made us more money.
Launching our sneaker cleaning offer got us even more penetration into the closet, meaning we can serve our clients from head to toe.
The more we make it into our clients’ closets by providing additional services under one roof, the more we improve their lifestyle and increase their loyalty to us. They don’t have to run to multiple vendors at multiple locations. It’s streamlined to make life easier and allows us to build a deeper connection with the client.
Experiential
The last key is to think about the experience you provide.
This is where we can get creative and provide those WOW moments that delight clients and get them coming back.
Whether it’s a self-service store, drop off, or pick up and delivery, the more we can customize the experience, the stronger the bond we create with the client.
More and more laundromats are getting creative in the experiences they provide, including:
Reading section for children
Literacy and Laundry
Extravagant play areas for children
Wi-Fi
Multiple TV screens throughout the store
While these examples are great, you can see them in a lot of places. You need to think through what you can do to make yours stand out. Be different!
All of these enhance the experience the client has with our services.
In order to continue to draw clients and keep them connected and coming back, we must constantly think about how we can WOW them.
As the saying goes: people don’t remember what you say or do, but they remember how you made them feel.
Provide a great experience and they’ll remember that feeling.
—---
TL;DR:
The future of garment care is data, closet, and experiential
We should be using data to better market to our clients
Gain a deeper penetration into the closet for more revenue
Create WOW moments for clients to attract and keep them
Til next week.Waleed 🏴☠️
I would love to hear your thoughts on this week’s topic– let me know in this issue’s survey below.
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