Category Archives: About us

And we continue growing!

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We’ve been working very hard during the last few months and we’re starting to see the fruits of our efforts.

We’ve started serving nearly 1,500 more apartments – developments in Clapham, Battersea, Highbury, Farringdon, Stratford, Canary Wharf and Woolwich are now part of our laundry revolution! And since July, we’ve added five new LR team members, who have been helping us to raise standards even higher.

We’ve stepped up our social media presence and now have Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn profiles! It’s a great way to keep our customers up to date with our news, the latest promotions and discount codes, stain removal tips and the occasional funny stories from the world of dry cleaning and laundry.

Talking about promotions: LR is now serving gyms, allowing our customers to combine their trip to the fitness club with a visit to the dry cleaners. If you would like us to start serving your gym, get in touch! We’ll even give you the equivalent of a month’s gym membership in credit as a thank you when we start serving it.

Also this week, we’ve launched a new discount voucher – 10% off your second order when you use the voucher code at the bottom of your receipt. This allows recent joiners to continue to try the LR experience for less! Check your receipt for terms and details.

And to finish, we’re always grateful to our customers for their clothes recycling donations on behalf of Scope. We have helped them to donate 1,500 kg so far this year, raising more than £7,000 (and counting) to support Scope’s projects for disabled people!

LaundryRepublic, one of the winners of this year’s Smarta 100!

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LaundryRepublic has been chosen as one of the Smarta 100! This is an annual prize to recognise the most resourceful, original, exciting and disruptive small businesses in the UK. We now have the chance to go one step further and grab the £10,000 first prize ‘Smarta 100, together with O2’ Business of the Year title. Voting runs until Friday 2nd of November, so help us climb into first place by voting us at: http://www.smarta.com/smarta100/2012/laundryrepublic

If you were trying to think of the most innovative sectors in the UK today, dry cleaning probably would’t come that high on your list. However, LaundryRepublic has been nominated for and won several other awards to be one of the most innovative small businesses since it started in 2008. The business won Best Business for Innovation at the South London Business Awards in 2010 and The Innovation Award at the Lambeth Business Awards in the same year. The business was also runner up in the Best Micro Business category at the Green Business Innovators Awards in 2010 and was finalist at the News On The Block Property Management Awards 2011-2012 in the category of Contractor of the Year.

Chose our experience team to clean your wedding dress!

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David, Co-Founder of LaundryRepublic, tied the knot last Friday at a lovely wedding in Islington. So I thought it would be good to remind you that here at LR we take special care of your wedding dress. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime treasure requiring maximum attention handling with the greatest care.

After the special day, your wedding dress can end up really soiled: wine stains, make-up… you name it. Your dress will probably be made of delicate fabrics such as silk, rayon or acetate. Our dry cleaning team has over 30 years of experience, and use the most advanced cleaning processes in the industry. They work very carefully on each stain before cleaning, and use the best solvents for degreasing. Always in a gentle and non-damaging manner, our professionals protect feature accessories, such as sequins or beads, and preserve the quality of the fabric. They ensure any repair needed is done, and then hand finish every part of the dress before hanging or boxing it ready for delivery!

Inside a dry cleaning machine

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A dry cleaning machine is best described as a mixture of a large domestic washing machine and a tumble dryer. The core of the machine is a perforated drum, commonly known as the ‘basket’, which has a capacity of 20-80lb and rotates within a shell. The clothes are loaded in the basket, while the shell holds the solvent.

During the wash cycle, the chamber is filled one third with solvent whilst rotating the clothing inside. The temperature used is slightly cooler than a common washing machine and a typical cycle lasts between 8-15 minutes, depending on fabric type and level of cleaning required.

When the cycle finishes, the solvent is drained out and sent to a distillation unit to separate any water from the solvent and remove impurities that may have been transferred by the garments. The garments are then rinsed with the distilled solvent to prevent discolouration.

After the rinse cycle,  the machine starts the drying cycle, where the garments are tumbled in warm air and the last traces of solvent are removed. Finally, the garments pass through a deodorising cycle which allows the circulation of cool outside air to leave them fresh and ready for pressing and finishing.

Why do women’s shirts & blouses cost more than men’s shirts?

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Customers sometimes ask why women’s shirts and blouses are priced differently to men’s shirts. The simple reason is that blouses are significantly more difficult and time-consuming to press. Shirt pressing equipment has been designed to fit a standard men’s shirt – made of cotton and broadly the same shape.

However, women’s shirts are typically smaller and more fitted, designed to hang on a female body. Women’s shirts are often made using other materials, such as rayon, and feature accessories, such as sequins or lace, which mayrequire more attention. For this reason, women’s shirts have to be pressed entirely by hand, taking more time and effort and resulting in a moreexpensive process.

We would prefer to charge a standard price across both men’s and women’s shirts – it would be easier for us to administer, and easier for our customers to understand. At the moment, the machinery and processes aren’t quite there to allow us to do this, but we are working on it!

What customer satisfaction means to LR

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Having once worked in the City and, when it came to dry cleaners, experiencing only frustration at poor customer service and restricted opening hours, the founders of LaundryRepublic decided something needed to change! They set up a dry cleaning company which operates 24/7 in your own home and is focused on providing excellent customer service.

And here we are, three years later, caring passionately about the quality of the services we offer and our customers’ satisfaction. We like keeping our customers fully informed at every stage of the process and recognise their long term value. Our customers receive a text and an email as soon as we have processed their clothes with an inventory of their order, the cost and the estimated delivery date. They receive another when their order is all clean and ready to be collected from the locker or their concierge.

Our customer satisfaction guarantee means if a customer isn’t happy with the cleaning or pressing of any item, we’ll do everything we can to resolve the issue immediately. Our customers’ feedback help us to improve our service so we regularly ask them to rate their experience out of 5. We average between 4.6 and 4.8 on all measures, from hundreds of responses – that’s a lot of happy customers!

“I’ve found the whole service experience from placing the order to collecting my items hassle free. I was also very impressed with the level of communication throughout the cleaning process, it was very refreshing to receive updates rather than the customer having to chase up his own order (which has been known to happen before).” Stewart B, NW1

If you want to know more about what our lovely customers say, you can see more on our website (here: http://laundryrepublic.com/what-our-customers-say.html)

Working hard to be environmentally friendly!

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Inevitably, dry cleaning and laundry consumes some energy and involves the use of some chemicals. However, we make every possible effort to minimise our impact on our environment. To provide an environmentally friendly dry cleaning service, LaundryRepublic has developed a environmental policy alongside the Ecovate Team at the University of Middlesex. Our key objectives are:

– Minimising waste by encouraging reuse and recycling – within our business activities and amongst our suppliers and clients: we provide all customers with a re-usable laundry bag which helps us to reduce plastic packaging. We also aim to recycle all of our hangers.

– Minimising CO2 emmissions: we use dual-fuel LPG vans, reducing our carbon footprint and producing zero particulate emissions to keep London’s air clean

– Modern machinery and super-efficient filters mean we minimize the energy, water and chemicals

At LaundryRepublic we are committed to continually improving our environmental performance, periodically reviewing our environmental policy and setting targets for ongoing improvements. In the near future, we aim to be a carbon neutral dry cleaner, using an accredited program to offset the greenhouse gas emissions generated by our activities.

LaundryRepublic behind the scenes

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Since I started working at LaundryRepublic I’ve spoken to a lot of people who aren’t sure what the process behind dry cleaning actually involves. So here’s a little information on what goes on behind the scenes here at LaundryRepublic:

Our drivers collect all the orders from lockers or concierges and bring them back to LaundryRepublic HQ . Our team is then ready to get to work! Each garment of clothing goes through these steps whilst it’s with us :

Clothes processing – our team go through every order and count the items, and log them in the system (e.g. blouse, shirts) and examine the garments for stains or anything that may need repair. Each item is then tagged with an order number. All the clothes processing is video recorded.

Stain pre-treatment –  we pre-treat tough stains with special cleaning agents before washing/dry cleaning to try our best to make sure they are removed

Laundry and dry cleaning –Next step is to wash and dry clean the clothes according to the manufacturer’s care label or customer’s instruction. For wash laundry loads, our laundry team take great care to wash colours and whites separately to avoid colours running. Some delicate fabrics need dry cleaning, which means that the cleaning process is made using a liquid chemical solvent instead of water.  The clothes are loaded into a machine which looks a lot like a normal domestic machine but usually washes at a temperature slightly cooler

than a wash at home.

Post Spotting – Our dry cleaning team will examine the clothes, if any stains remain our team tries to remove them with special equipment and chemicals using steam, water, vacuum and air. This process will clean the majority of soil and spots, however some stains may sometimes prove to be very persistent.

Finishing – The final phase of the process includes finishing, pressing, steaming, ironing, and making any necessary repairs.

Quality check and orders assembly – After the clothing has been washed or dry cleaned, every garment goes through quality control to ensure a high quality finish for our customers every time. The orders are then re-assembled and packaged with our personalised LaundryRepublic bags.

The orders are now ready to be delivered by our drivers back to our customers. And that’s it, simple really!

Our clothes recycling scheme collects over 1,000kg so far in 2012 for Scope!

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Dry cleaning in the UK has a bad reputation when it comes to environmental and social responsibility, with some justification. At LR, we’ve been working with the Ecovate Team at the University of Middlesex to change this, and a core part of our programme is the clothes recycling service we offer on behalf of Scope, the UK’s leading disability charity for children and adults. We provide all of our customers with Scope’s clothes recycling bags, and collect any clothes they want to donate with their next order.

In 2012 alone we’ve already collected over 1,000 kg of donated clothing, keeping a huge volume of clothing out of landfill and raising thousands of pounds for Scope. Thanks to everyone for their generosity!

Scope supports disabled people and their families, providing residential care, supported independent living schemes, short breaks, and employment and training. And Scope’s award-winning venture philanthropy projects set them apart from other charities – instead of spending all funds raised directly on charitable projects, they invest some donations and donor loans in new Scope shops, which can then generate even greater sums for their good work with disabled people. The donations from our customers help to stock these shops!

You can find out more about Scope’s brilliant work here: www.scope.org.uk, and about their venture philanthropy project here: https://www.scope.org.uk/how-you-can-help/donate-scope/philanthropy/scope-venture-philanthropy-fund

All change at LaundryRepublic!

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We know it’s been a while since we updated the LR blog – we’ve been busy changing the way London does its laundry!

We started out in 2009 with just two of us and a little van, delivering clothes to our first customers from a small unit in SE1. 

After a lot of hard work, we are now serving 8,500 apartments across more than a hundred buildings. We’ve not done this on our own – we’re now a team of 13 excellent people, covering operations, sales and marketing, and customer service. 

We’ve also added more vans to enable us to expand our service area throughout London – so from Wandsworth to Woolwich, and from Clapham to Camden, you can find buildings free from the stress of laundry and dry cleaning!

But we’re not stopping there – we’re always looking to serve new apartment blocks, offices and gyms, so if you know of a building that would benefit from LR’s laundry revolution, let us know!