Lessons From Our Clients For All Dry Cleaners Worldwide

COVID has been a new experience for most of us young drycleaners. Never have all scales of business faced a non cyclical and existential threat like this in past 100 years.

Dry cleaners and Laundry owners across the world together have come across a new problem and a new opportunity unlike ever presented before.

We all know the usual problems of running a business like a dryclean (making sure the clothes are tagged correctly, picked up/delivered on time, machine uptime, breakage etc.) but no one ever predicted a scenario where everything would be shut down.

NO work meetings, no real estate calls, no office parties, no school, no events, every thing was under LOCKDOWN, and all over the world.

Then after the first wave of lockdowns across the world came the selective opening. In many countries like USA, after some efforts and lobbying by our colleagues at DLI, in USA Dry cleaning and Laundry was announced as an Essential service. In places like Canada, Australia, United Kingdom the governments also called upon drycleaner and laundry business to be decleared essential. In India, though this was not the case, as dry cleaners were exempted in unlock 3 for the country.

Because now we are in 2021, all of us have learnt to co exist with the virus and the new business playfield it presents.

We have collected some of the top advice we could from our colleagues in different countries for tackling COVID 19.

“Tell your existing customers that you are open as soon as possible, call them, mail them or even shout it out”

- Navin (India | Washhoz)

Most of the people are at home and scared. Many of your customers cant visit you anyhow, or if they can they would like to know if you are open  and if you could serve them. This is one of the biggest information gap in mind of customers for their laundry or dry clean. Is my dry cleaners open and when, and when can they deliver it to me.
Bring out your customer book and I personally called over 500 customers of mine for last 3 years, to remind them that we are there for them and when are we open. I also use Turns, and they helped me create a website and also send SMS to all my existing customers at once about my store.
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“If your customer can’t come to your store reach them out in their homes”

- Alex (Singapore | Fly clean)
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In Australia, we saw an immediate decline in our store sales by upto 80-90%. Almost all of the business dissapeared.
But we were lucky as we were using Turns apps for our customers and even employees. We started home pick and delivery for our customers at once and also started a small coupon for our first few orders. Using Turns driver app, it is easy to allocate bookings to our field agents, who easily pickup an order and even ask for payments online from the customer.
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“Be patient, loyal customers of yours will come back, ask them to bring friends”

- Chatri (Indonesia | Shams laundry)

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Our loyal customers kept us going through this lockdown period. Usinf Turns, we also launched a referral scheme, where we sent every customer a simple referral code, and whenever a new customer used their promo code, we gifted a free service to our loyal customer and their referrer

Dry clean is a people’s business, and keeping our customers delighted is what will save us, more such cool tricks are available with Turns.