Reinventing Laundry

How can we innovate on the everyday experiences we take for granted? Industries like laundry are ripe for innovation, based on the relative acceptance and commoditization of something so basic. Here, we examined the laundromat experience and imagined new futures for this predictable retail experience and in the process managed to make an old industry fresh again.

Research

The first thing we did in our effort to reinvent something as basic as laundromats, was to go to the source and understand the experience of people that did their laundry weekly in laundromats. We both personally experienced the journey, created journey maps and set constraints for our research subjects. Within these constraints, we did a card sort to understand their ideal experience and pain points along the journey.

Storyboarding

Once we understood the journey and consequent pain points, we set to developing hypotheses about what might make this experience more interesting or fun for our users. We explored multiple versions of the laundromat of the future, from hair salon, to meditation center, to gamification and community around getting laundry done.

Validation

With multiple storyboards developed, we worked with another round of research subjects, once again sourced from laundromats in our areas, to validate various aspects of our storyboards, in order to learn what was working, and what was not. Using these insights, we next developed a scale model of what the experience could be.

Scale model

Research taught us a few things. First, people don’t really want to socialize while they are doing their laundry. Despite the fact that laundry is a chore, most users reported a feeling of calm and accomplishment when doing laundry, specifically during the wait time of changing their clothes from wash to dry. Most users didn’t stay to fold, they did this at home instead. They also uniformly responded well to treats, the concept of me time, and plants. From this we derived that our experience should be one of calm, cleanliness, and natural, organic objects, and envisioned Mom’s Laundromat as place where one might be able to come and do their laundry, have some ice cream, and cultivate their “me time”, at a place that felt like home away from home.

This concept fit what we thought worked for the user, but the “Mom’s” brand wasn’t quite there yet. In subsequent critiques and user testing, we found that while we resonated with the concept, our users and others did not. We went back to the drawing board on our brand, but retained most of the elements pictured here in the final product.

Micropilot

We then set to work on building a micro-pilot of the space using insights and analysis from the research above. We shifted the brand to “Rinse and Relax” and curated package options for the user’s wait time. We built upon our scale model concept and moved from a relaxing lounge to a single room one could rent to do their laundry. We also developed an app through which participants could book a room in our micro-pilot. We chose to test users willingness to pay and general desirability in this pilot, and designed a participant guide by which to do our testing.