Students can say goodbye to hours of folding laundry with a new app that does all the work instead.
UF masters graduate Kyle Lampkin created Laundr with an alumnus from the University of Central Florida. The app provides laundry services in Gainesville and Orlando.
A customer can order laundry to be picked up by a driver with a company’s laundry bag to take the user’s clothes and wash them, said Lampkin, a 24-year-old UF international business student. The clothes are returned cleaned, dried and folded within four hours or less.
Laundr has three options for subscription plans: minimalist, active and socialite. The minimalist pays $10 a week for 40 pounds of laundry a month. An activist pays $15 a week for 60 pounds and a socialite pays $20 a week for 80 pounds.
If a user doesn’t have a membership, costs are determined by the laundry’s weight. The service costs around 80 cents per pound, Lampkin said. Specific delivery fees are determined by how far away the pickup is for the driver.
Drivers wash the clothes at a partnered laundromat or by using their own laundry machine. Tips can be paid through the app.
Users can submit specific requests for their laundry, such as hanging shirts, separating colors, using hypoallergenic detergent, adding long-lasting scents and using personalized laundry bags. The most common requests are to not dry bras or bathing suits, said Michael Behfar, a 24-year-old UCF alumnus and Lampkin’s business partner.
The communal laundry machines in Enes Grahovac’s apartment, The Wynwood, are unreliable or filled with pet hair, he said.
“I found myself spending five hours dedicated to waiting for laundry, so I tried Laundr to see if they would take that process off my schedule, and they do a great job at it,” said Grahovac, a 22-year-old UF physics junior.
Since September, the company has nine paid employees in their office at Infinity Hall. Laundr expanded to Orlando Jan. 12.
“In the beginning, things were done completely haphazardly,” Behfar said, “Now, we are already through our first round of capital and already in our second location.”
Lampkin said he is happy to have seen the growth of the app from when he helped start it to where it is now.
“Although the idea may seem strange to people at first, we were encouraged by this and I think it really paid off for us,” Lampkin said.
