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Ever had someone hear about your laundry service and look in utter disbelief when you explain to them that you will wash, dry, fold their laundry for them or Pick it up, and deliver it back to them?
I have heard some version of it more times than I can count from other owners/operators. The service offering isn't new. We have been doing it across this industry for decades. But to quite a few it lands like somebody just invented it yesterday.
What stays with me is this huge gap. The service is offered everywhere. We just call it something different in every market, so it never adds up in people's minds to one thing they recognize and know to ask for market wide.
We never sat down and agreed on what to call it
Walk down a street or visit another area and the same service, washing, drying, and folding a client's clothes, goes by a different name on every window. One store calls it wash and fold, another fluff and fold, the next wash dry fold, then drop-off, then full service laundry, then full service wash, then service wash, and if the place has been there long enough, a bachelor bundle. It's the same work, just a different word in every market.
All that's before anyone offers to come get it. The version where we handle the trip carries its own set of names, laundry pickup and delivery, on-demand laundry, mobile laundry service, doorstep laundry, laundry delivery. Those are only the ones we went looking for. In some town we have never heard of, there's probably a sign with a word for this that none of us would recognize.
A category grows when the public shares one word for it. One word they can search, one word they can ask for at the counter, one word they can use when they tell a neighbor. When everyone who offers the service uses a different word, no single word ever builds up in people's minds. So each of us ends up teaching our own corner of the market, over and over, that the service exists at all. The awareness never stacks. It resets at every store.
We are not competing to be the best known name for the service. We are each starting from zero on explaining what the service even is.
The value we quote ourselves
Our industry says it’s a $5 billion business. The CLA puts it at roughly 29,500 coin laundries generating nearly $5 billion in gross revenue a year.¹ That figure is the whole business under the roof, the self-service, the drop-off, the pickup and delivery, the vending, the soap, all of it rolled into one line.
Here is something I noticed about that number. Nobody breaks out the wash and fold or the PUD piece of it on its own. You can find the industry's total, but you cannot find a clean, agreed figure for the service we keep calling the growth frontier. I don't think that is an oversight. We have never agreed on one name for the service, so it has no single number. You can't measure a category we describe a dozen different ways.
And if the service is that under named, then some of the demand for it is sitting out there unactivated. People who would use it if they knew what it was and knew what to ask for. That $5 billion isn't only a measure of how big the market is. It is partly a measure of how much of the market we have bothered to name.
A name is a strange kind of lever
I started pulling on this and found the same story in one industry after another. Someone takes a thing people already sell, changes what it's called, and demand grows.
Start with the Patagonian toothfish. For years almost nobody ordered it, and the reason was the name.