ZipJet is a London-based company offering an on-demand laundry service that collects, washes and delivers clothes. Currently active in London & Berlin and will launch in other markets in the near future. The company is supported by Berlin’s Rocket Internet which is famous for having built many successful Internet companies around the world.
The service convenient, professional and fast, accepting orders via its smartphone app and website. Users are asked to select a convenient pickup time and place such as their home or office. A ZipJet driver then picks up the laundry or dry cleaning and takes this to one of ZipJet’s local facilities, where the items are processed. These are then returned to the user at a time of the customer’s choosing.
Today they announce that three solutions: Lite, Plus, and recently launched Express same-day service are now available to Parisians.
Bonjour, la France! It's official. ZipJet is now live in #Paris! pic.twitter.com/RW2IipUHcp
— Zipjet UK (@ZipjetUK) May 26, 2016
“We’re very pleased to launch ZipJet in Paris today, bringing unprecedented convenience to thousands of busy Parisians who would rather spend their time elsewhere than at the launderette or dry cleaner,” say Florian Färber and Lorenzo Franzi, ZipJet Co-Founders. “ZipJet aspires to make the process of dealing with laundry as easy as ordering a pizza, by bringing the process online. Paris is one of Europe’s most prominent business hubs, and therefore numbers among the cities with the highest per capita demand for dry cleaning in Europe.”
The issue that ZipJet is resolving is that, like most citizens of big cities, Parisians don’t have either a wash-machine at home nor free time to do the laundry themselves. There is a local competitor in France called Cleanio, signaling the definite emergence of a market for on-demand dry cleaning in Paris and France. The French do over 230 laundry loads each second, using 40 kilograms of detergent per capita per year, for a total of 7,3 billion loads across the country each year. According to ZipJet, the laundry and dry cleaning market in France represents a yearly turnover of between 575 and 628 millions euros.
“On-demand location-based solutions are one of the fastest growing trends in consumer technology, with end consumers tending to outsource more services in more areas of their lives, from food to personal services to transportation,” says Alexander Kudlich, Group Managing Director at Rocket Internet. “According to several estimates, the laundry and dry cleaning market in France represents a yearly turnover of between 575 and 628 millions euros and the French market is largely underserved and offline. ZipJet is in a great position to become the leader in this space, revolutionizing the way the dry cleaning and laundry industry is done and perceived.”
This is yet another example of the emergence of on-demand services in France in the last 12 to 18 months, from Deliveroo, Foodora, and Take Eat Easy, to on-demand cleaners Helpling. ZipJet’s user base is currently growing 30% month on month in Berlin and London. Paris comes as ZipJet’s third market and major city launch, and is set to significantly boost the company’s activities.