We’re excited to formally launch Rinse for Business as the most convenient dry cleaning and laundry benefit available for your employees. We soft-launched with select partners in the Bay Area in 2019 and have received a very positive response from their teams (and significant inbound interest from new partners at the same time). We’re now ready to officially launch Rinse for Business in all of our markets — SF / Bay Area, Los Angeles, Washington DC, Chicago, and Boston. It will also be a core part of our offering as we expand nationally.

DRY CLEANING AS AN OFFICE PERK … BEFORE RINSE

Clothing care has always been full of friction and the experience hasn’t changed over the decades. Most customers simply go to the nearest cleaner and are held hostage to proximity. Since there are no trusted brands out there (and the space is incredibly fragmented), customers can’t really assess quality until after their clothes come back. In addition, there is little to no investment in transparency, customer service, and technology.

The biggest point of friction, though, is that cleaners are only open from 9am to 5pm, which means that customers have to either be late to work or leave early to get to the cleaners, and they have to do this twice since they have to drop off and pick up their clothes.

At Rinse, we refer to all of these pain points in dry cleaning as “death by a thousand cuts.”

Dry-cleaning-as-a-perk was born in response to the last pain point — if so much productivity is lost because our employees are going to the dry cleaner during the workday, what if we brought the dry cleaner to them? This incremental innovation led to companies partnering with a local dry cleaner to pick up from and deliver directly to the office. This benefit has been most prevalent in markets like San Francisco, where the war for talent (and subsequently, the availability of benefits) is a bit of an arms race.

While the intentions of the incremental innovation of bringing the dry cleaner to the office were good, there were still issues with the customer experience. Not only were the “death by a thousand cuts” (or maybe 999 now?) still there, but it’s not necessarily a positive customer experience for your employee. For some it certainly can be, but it creates extra friction for employees who need to bring their clothes to work via public transportation, a company bus, a bike, walking, or any other way that is not conducive to carrying a laundry bag or clothes on a hanger. In addition, not all employees are comfortable literally showing their peers and managers their dirty laundry.

THE ORIGINS OF RINSE FOR BUSINESS

Rinse was founded in 2013 with the explicit focus of systematically removing the death by a thousand cuts in dry cleaning and laundry and creating a seamless customer experience from start to finish. We started with a sole focus on serving our customers at their homes and in the evening between 8pm to 10pm (we call our approach “smart scheduling”). We felt the evening schedule was a better approach to addressing the biggest point of friction noted above, and allowed our customer’s to deal with their dirty laundry in private and where it’s piled up — at home.

As we scaled Rinse from three zip codes in San Francisco to much of the SF / Bay Area (including all of SF, Oakland, and San Jose), Los Angeles, DC, Chicago, and Boston, we received a constant stream of inbound demand from companies that wanted to do something special for their teams and offer dry cleaning and laundry as a potential benefit. For six years straight, we politely turned down that inbound interest, maintaining our focus on delivering and scaling an amazing customer experience between 8pm and 10pm.

In 2019, we were approached by one of the most prominent Tech companies in the Bay Area and asked if we would work with them to provide dry cleaning and laundry to their team. They already had a cleaner who was coming on-site to pick up and deliver, but they were most intrigued by our evening schedule and the ability for employees to use Rinse at home outside of work.

We had developed a very strong operational and technological infrastructure to serve our customers between 8pm to 10pm at the time, and had already started testing a few “B2B” type relationships, so the timing of this conversation was perfect for us. We decided to jump into the partnership and provide service both at home and on-site at the office.

The initial feedback from this partner’s employees was amazing, and the data showed that 70% of the employees were choosing to use Rinse at home instead of at work, indicating we were providing a more convenient experience for these employees than what they had in the past.

In addition to providing our core service and adding an additional service window for on-site employees, we also used this opportunity to develop product features that help make Rinse for Business the obvious perk to bring to your team, including custom landing pages, a dedicated sign-up funnel for your team, and an administrative dashboard for your HR / Benefits team to track usage and understand if your employees are taking advantage.

RINSE FOR BUSINESS IS LIVE!

In 2019, we developed and refined Rinse for Business to make sure it was ready for prime time. Rinse is already active at dozens of leading companies in the Bay Area and Los Angeles, including leading tech companies, public companies, media companies, some of the largest consulting firms in the world, fast-growing startups (unicorns and aspiring unicorns), and more.

Rinse is solving a universal need — regardless of what your employees do, they all need to take care of their dry cleaning and laundry, and they all would love to save three hours a week at the same time — so it’s not surprising that we’ve been able to partner with a wide variety of companies at different stages and in different industries.

The standard offering for Rinse for Business is as follows:

• Rinse for Business @HOME is free for your company and it instantly gives the benefit of Rinse to all your employees at their home. @HOME is available 7 days per week, including Sundays, with door-to-door pickup and delivery between 8pm and 10pm. Rinse’s services include Dry Cleaning, Launder & Press, Wash & Fold (priced per pound), and Rinse Repeat (a subscription service for Wash & Fold).
• For organizations that want to bring Rinse for Business on-site @WORK, we offer fully-customized solutions at an additional cost. (Note — we have found Rinse for Business @WORK works best for companies of 500+ employees, but it is an option for all companies).

Benefits to employees include Rinse credit, special promotions, and ongoing service discounts, plus the same high-quality service they’ve come to expect from Rinse.

Rinse for Business has been available for select organizations to date, but today we are making the benefit accessible across all of Rinse’s service areas, including San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington DC, and Boston.

We are very excited to bring Rinse for Business to more companies across our markets (and soon enough, across the entire US) and would love to hear from you if you think your company would benefit from Rinse for Business as an employee perk.

If you are interested in learning more, please reach out to [email protected].