While travelling in New York with her family, Sasha opt to send her laundry out to a third party laundry service instead of using the hotel’s. She placed an order online, and dropped off her laundry with the concierge. The next day, their laundry was returned to them fresh and clean.
After she returned to Malaysia, Sasha stayed in a hotel for 2 weeks because her house was being repaired and the process took much longer than expected. “I searched for a laundry on-demand service, similar to that in New York here but there were none that were operational at that time and resorted to doing the laundry myself via the self-service machines provided by the hotel,” said the founder of Fresh Press, Sasha Prakash.
A summer trip in New York City turned into an experience of inspiration. Sasha added, “Over folding the laundry at 1am in the morning, I decided that we really had to start an on-demand laundry service here.”
Introducing Fresh Press
Earlier in June this year, Sasha Prakash founded the on-demand laundry and dry cleaning pick-up and delivery service. At the moment, there are four of them in the team—Sasha, who focuses on securing laundry partners; Alagess Deraraj, who is in charge of the technicalities, and two valets.
To place an order, visit their website, and fill in the required information such as collection date and time, services, delivery date and time. Other than that, you can put in your request via SMS or phone call.
The Fresh Press valet will collect your laundry from you as scheduled. Then they will send it to contracted independent laundry shops. “For the time being, we’ve got 3 laundry partners in our system. The key is the capacity at which they are able to operate. The average laundromat is capable of handling up to 100kg of laundry per day. Our partners are able to handle up to 10x that.”
Fresh Press’ Weapon
Currently team is in the midst of developing an app to provide better user experience. Sasha described, “The key feature on the app would be the ‘1-click’ ordering system for customers.” Apart from that they are also building another app to help their logistics team to manage real-time orders dynamically based on their valet’s location, time and proximity.
You may be thinking, what makes them different?
To gives it more of a competitive edge, their 24 hours turnaround has been their best selling point, followed by free pickup and delivery, as well as no minimum order required.
“The central location of our offices makes it really simple to get to our customers. We are currently able to get to any location in our coverage area in less than 15 minutes. The quick turnaround provided by our laundry partners also makes this possible and we’ve been able to deliver our wash and fold orders within 24 hours 100% of the time.”
With such technology, it was quite surprising to hear that the startup is currently self-funded. According to Sasha, they are focusing on their customers, but once they have perfected the formula, they will look for external funding.
The team at Fresh Press confidently assured that they will be able to disrupt and replace the traditional brick and mortar laundry shops. Sasha explained, “We’re aiming to help ‘take a load off their mind’. And given the location of regular laundromats and how difficult they are to get to because of traffic and the limited parking in the area, we feel that Fresh Press is a great alternative.”
Fresh Press would appeal to busy urbanites who are too tired or has zero patience to do laundry, especially in KL city. Living in the era when everything is so fast paced, most urbanites and entrepreneurs simply don’t have time to wash their clothes or go the dry cleaner.
Therefore outsourcing household chores might be the wise choice to ease the burden on this never-ending chore. And this is when Fresh Press comes into the picture. Besides their 24 hours turnaround, their operating hour starts from 7am to 10pm daily. Hence you can still request them to do your laundry after your office hours.
Speaking from a business standpoint, their future challenge would probably be maintaining their USP—to ensure laundry are cleaned and returned within 24 hours. The traffic jams in KL are notorious. Would they be able to handle larger orders in the future and still settle them within the time frame? Seeing as there is a growing number of on-demand delivery and logistics services, hopefully they’ll be able to do just that.
