How startup UClean is making money by washing your dirty laundry (2024)

The pile of laundry had been growing bigger for several days. And, finally, Arunabh Sinha’s wife lost her cool. “The daily haggling with the house help over laundry finally got to her,” says 34-year-old Sinha. But the incident prompted him to find a solution for a household’s laundry worries. “Mine was not an isolated case, so I decided to look for solutions, and researched on laundry and laundromat concepts,” says Sinha. He was particularly impressed by the growth of laundromats in South-East Asia— Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines. Having found that the laundry business had flourished in South-East Asia in the brick-and-mortar format, he decided to base his own business on a similar model. “After detailed research, I decided to opt for ‘offline first, online second’ model,” says Sinha. He launched his laundromat business, UClean, in January 2017.

Based out of Delhi NCR, UClean has set up brick and mortar stores, equipped with the laundromat machines and ironing setup, which cater to the laundry needs of customers in the store’s neighbourhood. “We are now India’s largest chain of laundromats. Since we are still very young in our business lifecycle, we are rapidly evolving as a brand, based on customer feedback,” says Sinha.

UClean, which has scaled its presence to 15 cities via 50-plus franchises, had a tough time finding business partners. “Since we had limited funds, we were looking for partners willing to work on the FICO (franchise invested, company operated) model. But, this was easier said than done,” says Sinha. Since UClean did not have any operational stores and, Sinha, an engineer from IIT Bombay, did not have any experience in the laundry business, it was difficult to bring partners on board. “For close to two months, I met around 30 investors (franchise prospects) but could not get a breakthrough,” recalls Sinha.

Since investors were wary of backing a concept which was relatively new and investing in a brand which was unheard of, Sinha changed his approach. He decided to reach out to the existing dry cleaners in the Delhi NCR region. “The idea was that dry cleaners would better appreciate a laundry concept and push it across to their existing customers, giving us some quick traction,” says Sinha.

This move paid off when a Gurugrambased dry cleaner decided to try out UClean’s pilot project. “Once we had the proof of concept, it became easier to get new franchises on board,” says Sinha. Franchise India, which also helped seed UClean, has been instrumental in building the startup’s franchise model.

The company, which was recognised as Small Business of the Year 2017 by SME Association of India and Fastest Growing Franchise Brand 2017 by The Franchise World, is looking to close 2017-18 with a revenue of Rs 8 crore. “As more and more franchises are coming on board, we are expecting revenue to grow at 30-35% per annum,” says Sinha, winner of the 35 Under 35 Award, 2018, by Entrepreneur magazine.

UClean is targeting to set up 300 stores across 30 cities by 2020 and is looking to enter the business-to-business (B2B) segment as well. “While all our stores right now focus on retail laundry, we are also in the process of experimenting with larger setups to cater to institutional clients like hotels and hospitals,” says Sinha. The company will be starting stores for B2B clients in Delhi and Pune by June 2018.

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