Inspiration
Because of the COVID-19 pandemic and widespread lockdowns, people lost access to many essential services. While hygienic care and clothing care are two of the most important things that help to reduce the virus spread, a big chunk of the population lost access to the laundry services that they used to outsource to laundry stores. Now, lacking off cleaning equipment at home puts them at risk.
On-demand clothing care service also has huge demand at regular times. There are over one hundred thousand professionals in Munich and millions in Germany who are required to follow a dress code at work. Their clothes must always be fresh and clean. And with the average time spent on cleaning duties going up to 10 to 12 hours per month, most of the people simply do not have enough time.
What it does
We offer a digital contactless on-demand service for laundry, dry cleaning and shoe care. The service allows people to clean their clothes without leaving their homes. With our web and mobile apps, customers can request a courier to pick up their clothes and return them fresh and clean at the most convenient time.
Customers can make an order by selecting services of their interest and the most suitable delivery addresses and time slots. We then provide our customers with a collection bag, into which they can put their clothes. After our courier arrives to collect them, we clean the clothes at partner laundries and deliver them back to the doorstep of the customer. The preferred payment is digital - by credit cards. This process completely eliminates the physical person-to-person contact and makes sure the customer stays safe.
How I built it
We had this idea before the hackathon. However, the pandemic urged us to speed up and develop the concept faster & further, especially the contactless part.
During the hackathon we polished our website and made it available to the public, at the same time, configuring the internal operations, testing hypotheses and concepts.
Challenges I ran into
One of the biggest challenges for us was to build the product and internal infrastructure fast. We have brainstormed multiple concepts and came up with the best optimal process. Another challenge was to build and polish the logistics and route-planning algorithm that we successfully did.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Facing the urgent need, we were able to rethink our processes and concepts to come up with the new design.
What I learned
Logistics and route-planning is a big problem that lies in the core of on-demand services. Luckily, we were able to build a powerful solution. However, at these tough times, we need a courier fleet with brave people who are ready to serve our clients.
What's next for 033_lebensnotwendigedienstleistungen_reinio
We plan to run our services in the next weeks, providing accessible clothing care services to the people in the Munich area. We hope to scale and grow, especially in a number of couriers, to cover most of the area and as many orders as possible.
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