Sea­soned ecom­merce ana­lysts may be aware of sev­er­al ecom­merce star­tups claim­ing to be “Über laun­dry ser­vices”. But while New York-based start­up Fly­Clean­ers might not be the only laun­dry pick-up ser­vice of its kind, it may be the most flex­i­ble and user friend­ly. And it’s just bagged $2 mil­lion in seed fund­ing, which sug­gests that investors think so too.

Putting the cus­tomer first

Cur­rent­ly only avail­able in North Brook­lyn, Fly­Clean­ers was found­ed ear­li­er this year by Seth Berkowitz and David Sala­ma. Asked by TechCrunch jour­nal­ist Antony Ha recent­ly about what makes it stand out from the crowd, Sala­ma said:

“More than any­one else, we start­ed with the ques­tion of what would be the ide­al cus­tomer expe­ri­ence and then filled in the rest of the details from there. We didn’t want to pro­vide just a sat­is­fac­to­ry expe­ri­ence that hap­pened to be a lit­tle more con­ve­nient. We aim to “wow” each cus­tomer with all ele­ments of our service.

“This lead us to focus on a hand­ful of key fea­tures, includ­ing true on-demand ser­vice, sim­plic­i­ty, trans­paren­cy, extend­ed hours, and most impor­tant­ly, com­pet­i­tive prices and supe­ri­or cus­tomer service.”

Any skep­ti­cal e‑commerce ana­lysts may feel a lit­tle more con­vinced by Ha’s own per­son­al tes­ti­mo­ny. He gave the fol­low­ing ver­dict: “I have to admit that the ser­vice was great.”

Basi­cal­ly, users just sign up and down­load an iPhone or Android app, where­upon they enter a few pref­er­ences for how they want their clothes cleaned and order a pick­up. Ha found that his door­bell rang with­in min­utes of order­ing. Once the clothes have ben laun­dered the app alerts the user that they’re ready and asks for a con­ve­nient deliv­ery time. Usu­al­ly they’re avail­able by the next day and deliv­ery, like pick-up, occurs with­in min­utes of using the app to set a time.

Expan­sion plans 

The trick, Sala­ma says, lies in what hap­pens behind the scenes. Fly­Clean­ers has cul­ti­vat­ed good work­ing rela­tions with local laun­dro­mats and dryclean­ers, who hit the ground run­ning when the company’s “Fly Guys” drop the clothes off for clean­ing. Expan­sion plans are in the off­ing, too. Sala­ma wants the ser­vice to expand to oth­er Brook­lyn neigh­bor­hoods and to Manhattan

With prices not much high­er than laun­dro­mat and dry-clean­ing ser­vices, and with vast­ly greater con­ve­nience, ecom­merce ana­lysts might agree that this lit­tle start­up is going places.