Washio

» see washio.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

on-demand laundry was a very american, very venture-funded answer to a problem i solved with a machine in the kitchen. washio was one of a dozen startups in the early 2010s promising to send a stranger to your door for a chore you used to do yourself. none of it reached turkey, and it would have made little sense if it had. the labor that made washio possible was cheap enough in american cities to look like magic and expensive enough to bankrupt the company.

washio launched in los angeles in 2013 and spread into san francisco and several other cities on seventeen million dollars of venture money. the pitch was speed: a pickup within an hour, and clean clothes back inside a day. laundry became a tap on a phone, the same trick uber had pulled with the black car.

the trouble was underneath the app the whole time. a delivery fee of a few dollars and a charge by the pound could not pay for the drivers and vans, let alone the dry cleaners doing the actual work. the specialty on-demand model was burning money across the board in 2016, and investors stopped covering the gap. on 30 august 2016 washio told its customers it was closing effective immediately. its assets went to rinse, a competitor that had priced the same service more carefully.

~ the case file ~

~ how it actually ended ~

there was no wind-down, no last month of service. washio posted a note thanking its customers and its team, then shut the doors the same day. the founders wrote the usual line about startups venturing into uncharted territory, sometimes you make it and sometimes you don't. behind the line was a simpler fact. they had generated millions in revenue and still could not make a dollar of laundry profitable at that price.

~ what got buried with it ~

washio died at the front of a wave. the on-demand everything boom of the early 2010s promised a driver for every errand, and most of those companies learned the same lesson washio did. a chore is only worth outsourcing if someone will pay more than it costs to send a person, and for laundry that number rarely worked. rinse, which bought the pieces, survived by charging what the service actually cost.

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