Super Green Clean - The monetization

Making this idea take off will require an intense focus on waste, especially human effort.  Super Green Clean is really designed for city dwellers who probably don’t have a washer and dryer in their apartment or condo.  This means that the potential customer will either have access to a bank of washers and dryers in their building or use a public laundromat. In either case, they will probably pay about two to three dollars a load and need to do about two loads a week or about fifteen pounds of clothing. In the Bay Area people can use Purple Tie, which costs $1.69/lb or about $25 per week. This is a little more expensive than most people are willing to pay for laundry. Super Green Clean (SGC) will need to aim for $1/lb. The warm fuzzy feeling of knowing that you are saving energy and water won’t be enough for everyone to want to use this service.

If a week’s worth of laundry is two loads or 15 pounds, then SGC’s costs for a week’s worth of laundry should be about ten or twelve dollars.  SGC uses very little water and electricity, and probably less than 25 cents worth of detergent per week’s worth of laundry. The dominant cost is labor. Minimum wage in San Francisco is $10.55/hour this year plus employer payroll taxes, which adds at least 7%. So the minimum cost for hourly labor would be around $15 per hour. So, from getting the clothing from the customer drop off location (more on that later) to SGC and back to the drop off location, there must be less than one hour of labor per week’s worth of clothing.

The cost of collection can be reduced by having a small number, four or five, drop off spots within a half mile of the SGC location. The drop off spots would work sort-of like Amazon’s Lockers. Customers would drop off their laundry in a SGC bag, which will have a QR code for billing at the scheduled drop off location. A SGC employee would then go to each of the drop off spots and return to the SGC location with all of the QR-coded bags. If the locations are chosen intelligently, and there are on average at least 10 bags per drop off location, then the transport of the clothing could cost as little as  0.05 hours (or half an hour per trip). I’m assuming that the drive to the drop off location would be used to return clean clothing as well.

Once the clothing reaches the SGC location, then the clothing needs to be sorted and put into the washing machines, transferred to the dryer, and finally folded.  The first step should take only about a minute. Moving clothing to the dryers will take more time as it requires putting clothing on the wire forms. This could take five or ten minutes. The last step, folding, will also be fairly time consuming. It will be important to improve the time it takes to fold by making mechanical tools (like those used to fold t-shirts in retail stores) or simple human-aided robotic solutions.

If the employees are hourly, then other cost saving techniques can be used. Hourly workers need a steady rate of work to do. Otherwise, they just sit idle and waste money. Moving dryered clothing to a holding area waiting to be folded would free up the dryer space and allow the workers to get the clothing when they have a break.

Another way to manage worker load is to have three cleaning plans: same day, next day, and two day. If a customer has time flexibility, then they will pay less per pound.