Oxwash Business Model: Why is this laundry start-up so rich?

As per a report in Tech Crunch, Oxwash, a U.K. based startup recently trousered $12 million in Series A funding to expand its nationwide footprint.

Tech Crunch says, “Oxwash bagged a £1.4 million seed back in 2020 — and has now pulled in a total of £15.7 million since being founded back in 2017, including from a public equity crowdfunder last year (which netted it £500,000 from around 320 Crowdcube investors); and via a £2.08 million seed top-up.”

Oxwash is a start-up in commercial laundry and cleaning services that claims to shrink environmental costs through various high tech processes.

And the brand boasts of a very interesting beginning too.

It was created in 2017 by an Oxford engineer and an ex-NASA scientist, while they were students.

Tom de Wilton and Dr. Kyle Grant were studying at the Oxford University when an idea struck them.

Kyle Grant was frustrated with the frequent breakdown of washing machines they had on the university campus.

He decided to join forces with Tom and the two of them came up with a stunning technology to wash clothes.

This effort quickly snowballed and they could see growing interest among their peers.

Gradually, it became one of England’s fastest-growing laundry businesses, that too, with a difference.

Here’s how.

Oxwash Business Model: How are they different?

The Oxwash business model is built on the premise of green cleaning. Or you can say eco-friendly cleaning.

The company’s CEO let out the secret that they knew that being yet another laundry app was never going to make an impact.

So, they developed a hyper-local model which is tech-enabled and carbon-neutral. And reverses the adverse impact of laundry cleaning on the environment.

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They make money by providing an on-demand laundry service. Customers place their orders online, select a collection and a drop-off time with their location.

Oxwash collects the clothes, washes and delivers them back and it is also done in an eco-friendly manner.

The alternative spin to dry-cleaning

Oxwash uses a lot of high tech processes to serve their clients. They use the microfibre filtration technology which removes as much as 95% of the fibres that are shed at the time of washing.

It prevents plastic pollution from reaching the natural waters and also keeps the drinking water safe.

The alternative spin by Oxwash is a gentle and wet cleaning technique to replace the dry cleaning one.

This technique involves the use of biodegradable detergents instead of harsh solvents.

They also claim less water consumption as it takes 4 litres less water for every kg of clothing.

In addition to that, they use ozone as the disinfecting agent for sterlising and deoderizing the fabrics at low temperatures.

Oxwash Lagoons and Water Consumption

Oxwash is now one of the leading on-demand laundry businesses in England. They have a continually growing team and infrastructure which they call as lagoons.

Lagoons are their washing facilities currently operational in Oxford, Cambridge, and London. They are mobile containers located at places close to the customers.

While using the Oxford lagoon, Oxwash utilises water reclamation for reusing the water from the earlier rinse cycle for their next washing cycle.

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This leads to a saving of 60% in water consumption compared to the usual commercial washing machine and 70% savings on domestic washing machines.

The Cambridge and London lagoons used by Oxwash use a second-generation weighing technology to remove the need of using recycled water as less amount of it is used for the process.

The quantity of water used for this is minimised to the item weight and depends on the amount of stains they have.

Oxwash funding

It is expected that the global green cleaning market will reach $11.6 billion by 2029.

Oxwash had raised close to $2.7 million from a range of investors such as Founders Factory, Reckitt, TrueSight Ventures, and Biz Stone, the founder of Twitter by May 2020.

It boasts of more than 8000 independent consumers together with some corporate giants such as Hurr Collective, NHS, and Marriott Hotel Group.

It has a goal of achieving zero carbon emissions for its laundry services and is excited about growing in new countries.

The company is backed by venture capitalists and they are quickly iterating their technology together with their exceptional partners.

They are developing a rapidly scalable and modular model that can be deployed in newer cities all across England and other countries.

They have a goal of eradicating the negative impact of washing on the world’s ecosystem.

Oxwash is also restructuring its business operations for finding out the washing hubs in different city centres where the clientele is situated.

This will allow them to use electric bikes for moving all the laundry around and permitting a next-day service.

It will also allow for 30 minutes collection and delivery window.

Conclusion

Oxwash is leading the way for green cleaning and has definitely a long way to go. This is a perfect example of how technology combined with a great idea can bring such a long lasting change.

If you have an idea too, you can contact Jungleworks for any kind of assistance in technology.

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