Mr. Arunabh Sinha, Founder of UClean, India’s Largest Laundry & Dry Cleaning Chain

Interview with Mr. Arunabh Sinha, Founder of UClean, India’s Largest Laundry & Dry Cleaning Chain

Starting UClean was Arunabh’s brainchild who left his high-paying job at Treebo and co-founded UClean with his wife Gunjan Taneja, for an initial investment of just 20 lakhs. 

The first of its kind and largest laundry and dry-cleaning chain in India, UClean, was founded in 2016. UClean represents the story of a business concept where an IITian from Mumbai made a 100 Crores company just by washing the dirty linen.

Despite all odds, ifs and buts, Arunabh & Gunjan successfully introduced the concept of laundromats in India and today, laundromat is an industry with a whopping market size of USD15 Bn+ in India.

Currently UClean is having presence with 323 franchisees in India and planning to expand its wings in Madhya Pradesh market. 

A couple with the mission of building an ecosystem of eco-friendly methods in Laundry & Dry cleaning services and a vision of providing all cleaning solutions on a click and to become India’s most preferred brand of cleaning services with unquestionable transparency in their services.

Can you tell us about your background and what led you to start a laundry and dry cleaning chain?

Arunabh Sinha: I am basically from Bihar where I did all my schooling. Post schooling, I joined IIT Bombay to complete my engineering degree in Metallurgy and Materials Science.

After graduating I worked for a couple of years in the consulting space where I had the opportunity to advice a few brands on India market entry and sourcing from the Indian market.

This became my inspiration behind starting my first venture, FranGlobal, which was a boutique market entry firm.

We specialized in helping international brands understand the Indian market and then further handhold them in their entry into the market.

While building FranGlobal, I invested a lot of time traveling to Southeast Asia to analyze the market in that region.

It was during these visits I got my first exposure to the concept of laundromats and how they were causing huge disruption in countries like Indonesia, Philippines, and Malaysia.

In 2015, I took an exit from FranGlobal to join Treebo Hotels as their North India business head. Treebo which is in the business of aggregating and standardizing budget hotels. There I realized that poor quality laundry is a problem plaguing every budget hotel in India.

The disruption happening in Southeast Asia combined with insights from the India market became my inspiration behind starting UClean.

Kindly brief us about  UClean, its specialization, and the services that it offers

Arunabh Sinha: UClean is your friendly, neighbourhood laundry and dry-cleaning chain. Through our franchise partners, we setup our outlets in the neighbourhoods of different cities and towns of the country.

These outlets are fully equipped with laundry machines, steam iron table and dry-cleaning setup. A fully trained team operates and manages the store on day-to-day basis.

We offer cleaning services like laundry by kg, dry-cleaning, shoe cleaning, bags cleaning, soft toys cleaning.

Customers can avail pick-up and delivery from home or they can also visit the store to drop off their stuff.

The biggest Challenge when conceiving any new business is the idea and its acceptance in the industry. India is a very large but a very complex market where the potential for any given business changes from one pin code to another.

India also faces the problem of social stigma when it comes to businesses like laundry and dry-cleaning.

​Amidst all this, UClean represents the story of a business concept where an IITian from Mumbai made a 100Crores+ company just by washing the dirty linen.

Despite all odds, ifs and buts, he singlehandedly introduced the concept of laundromats in India and today, laundromat is an industry with a whopping market size of USD15 Bn+ in India

Unlike other IITians, Arunabh took the road less traveled. He did not set up an IT, Software or SAAS business.

Instead, he focused on doing what he loves the most – leveraging the power of networking and franchising.

He set up the UClean as a purely franchise-led brandtowards the end of 2016. Starting UClean was Arunabh’s brainchild, who left his high-paying job at Treebo and co-founded UClean with his wife, Gunjan Taneja, for an initial investment of just 20 lakhs.

Arunabh was amazed by the explosion of laundromat businesses in Southeast Asia and had seen his hotel partners at Treebo struggle with laundry every day. These 2 moments became his biggest inspiration when he launched UClean.

With the help of neighbourhood dry cleaners, Arunabh launched a trial in Delhi-NCR and sowed the seeds for the first couple of UClean stores.

In just over six years, UClean has scaled rapidly to include 323 franchisees in 93 cities, with an annual gross merchandise value (GMV) of more than 100Crores. The business has also established a foothold internationally, with a presence in Bangladesh, and Nepal.

UClean currently provides door-step laundry service where customers can place their order using a smartphone app, or by dialing up the UClean call center number, via the UClean whatsapp bot or by just dropping off and picking up their laundry at stores.

Users of UClean can also do their own laundry in a few stores, like the DIY (Do It Yourself) format which is prevalent in US and Europe.

UClean is quickly growing across cities and providing its services by utilising cutting-edge technologies and professional teams.

Interestingly, there isn’t a single company-run location; instead, everything is franchise-owned and operated.

The entire business of UClean is controlled through its suite of software, which it has developed in-house and named CleanOps.

The hyperlocal model of UClean ensures that customers are within a 2–3 km radius of their nearest UClean store.

“Your friendly, neighbourhood, transparent laundry store,” is how the company describes itself. Almost all of the major brands at Delhi’s DLF Emporio Mall, the largest luxury shopping centre in India, have collaborated with the brand for their dry-cleaning and laundry requirements.

UClean assists microentrepreneurs in starting their UClean store by handholding them, training them, imparting the knowhow, and then helping them become discoverable to the customers in the vicinity.

You can find UClean franchises across the length and breadth of the country, including micro settlements like Ziro or Nirjuli in Arunachal Pradesh; Kokrajhar or Dhuliajan in Assam; Bettiahor Siwan in Bihar; Leh and Kargil in Jammu and Kashmir and Bidar in Karnataka.

With a focus on quality, UClean has developed its own chemicals, and every franchise employs UClean-branded solutions for laundry tasks appropriate for various terrains because the mineral composition of water changes every 400 km.

The laundry and dry-cleaning chain also prioritizes hygiene at every stage, from initial sanitization to final packaging.

The business is equally sensitive to the environment because every load that UClean processes results in a water savings of roughly 60%; in 2022 alone, the franchises of UCleancollectively saved ~34 million Litres of water which would have been wasted during the home washing process.

Additionally, by the end of March 2023, all stores will be plastic-free. Packaging has moved to corn-based packaging, and plastic baskets have been replaced by metal baskets.

Arunabh’s entrepreneurial acumen has helped UClean recently secure the exclusive development rights and pan-India master franchise for Chem Dry.

This alliance will assist UClean in realising its goal of becoming a one-stop shop for all cleaning needs within a household.

UClean and its team have also garnered recognitions, including the ITC “Changemaker of India” awards, the NDTV “Icons of Bharat” awards, the Top 100 Franchise Leaders in India, and the First Indian Brand to Win a Global Franchise Award in 2019 in the “Best Emerging Brand” category.

UClean has received three rounds of funding from multiple angel investors. Also, celebrities like Soha Ali and Kunal Khemu have previously served as the brand’s strategic partners.

The laundry and dry-cleaning chain in India also seeks to expand to the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region and South East Asia by the end of 2023 and has a goal of having 1500 centers in India by 2025.

To serve the MENA region, significant investments are being made in technology and digitization of the brand.

Additionally, UClean is presently concentrating on D2C services but will shortly begin offering D2C cleaning supplies. By 2025, they hope to have a GMV of 500 Crores+

Can you walk us through the process of how your chain handles laundry and dry cleaning orders?

Arunabh Sinha: Customers intending to use our cleaning services can request a pick-up and delivery from their homes or they can also visit the nearest outlet.

For those looking to avail the pick-up and delivery service, they can place a request from the UClean website, UClean apps or calling up the centralized call center number of UClean.

Additionally, we have also enabled order placement through a centralized whatsapp number of UClean.

When order is placed online, the nearest store sends the delivery boy to the customer’s place. The delivery boy picks up the dirty clothes and hands out a challan for the same.

The dirty clothes are then brought back to the store where they are washed, dried, ironed and packaged in UClean branded packaging. 24 Hours later, the cleaned clothes are delivered back to the customer’s place and payment collected.

How do you ensure the quality of your services, especially when dealing with delicate fabrics or special requests?

Arunabh Sinha: Our clothes’ cleaning service fall into 2 categories: Laundry & Dry-cleaning (Soft Wash). Soft Wash, as the name suggests, is a specialized way of cleaning that we have developed for the more expensive and delicate garments like Pashmina shawls, Kanjeevarams, Taant Silk and several other variants that we find from city to city.

These clothes cannot be cleaned as part of the regular wash & dry cycle since they would be damaged.For such delicate garments, we have developed the soft wash process where we use water-based solvents and solutions in highly calibrated amount to clean the clothes.

We also control the tumbling action of the machines and reduce it significantly to almost a cradling action (low RPM).

These clothes are then further treated with special cleaning agents that we have developed for such delicate clothes. Elaborate and detailed steam ironing process is thereafter used for the final finish.

Our store managers and delivery boys are trained as garment consultants who advise customers at the time of collection if certain clothes should be treated as part of the soft wash process.

How has your chain adapted to the changing landscape of the laundry and dry cleaning industry, such as the rise of on-demand services and sustainability concerns?

Arunabh Sinha: Sustainability has been at the core of UClean from day 1 when sustainability was not even a buzzword. We have consciously shied away from using alkaline based detergent are cheaper but do not decompose easily causing long term environmental damage by remaining in the water and sewers.

All our formulations and cleaning agents are enzyme based which means that they decompose very quickly and do not remain behind in the water or the drainage.

While these are significantly more expensive than alkaline detergent, we have a mandate across all our stores that only our enzyme-based formulations can be used.

For packaging material as well, we strictly follow government norms and use corn-starch-based packaging or food grade packing for our cloth which is biodegradable and does not stay behind in the environment.

Can you discuss any challenges or obstacles your chain has faced, and how you overcame them?

Arunabh Sinha: As a brand, we have faced multiple challenges as we have grown. The nature of challenge has also changed with the growth of the brand.

One of the more recent but potentially the biggest challenge that we have faced is in terms of manpower for our franchised outlets.

We have grown very fast in the last 12 months and were suddenly confronted with the challenge of not being able to source manpower for such stores. Without manpower, the store becomes absolutely crippled and work come to a standstill.

To overcome this, we have started a new initiative called the “UClean Paathshala”. We have in parallel started an outreach program where we reaching out to young boys and girls living in the rural areas are bringing them to our head office in Faridabad.

These boys and girls are provided free accommodation and food and undergo a well-designed training on laundry and dry-cleaning skills.

These trained people are then placed across our stores pan India. While it’s still early days for our “UClean Paathshala” initiative, it has shown some initial promise and the trained staff is performing well at our franchised stores.

What was the inspiration behind turning an entrepreneur?

Arunabh Sinha: The massive laundry market size (~USD 35 Bn+) combined with the extent of inorganization (~99%) inspired me to start UClean.

I have always been tempted by the idea of building something which impacts the masses and helps make their lives easier. Laundry in that sense was an easy choice for me.

What are your plans for the future of your chain, such as expanding to new locations or introducing new services?

Arunabh Sinha: I strongly believe that the super high population density of India means that every neighbourhood of India can profitably sustain a UClean outlet.

I would love to have a UClean in every neighbourhood of India which means that there is a potential to open 6-7K outlets of UClean in India alone.

Parallelly, I have also looked at international markets very closely and strongly believe that North Africa is absolutely setup for disruption.

The laundry industry in the North Africa region is exactly where India was 7 years back. Absolutely ripe for disruption. We would want to establish a solid footprint in the region in the next 3 years.

How does your chain prioritize sustainability and environmentally-friendly practices in its operations?

Arunabh Sinha: The business is equally sensitive to the environment because every load that UClean processes result in a water savings of roughly 60%; in 2022 alone, the franchises of UClean collectively saved ~34 million Liters of water which would have been wasted during the home washing process.

Additionally, by the end of March 2023, all stores will be plastic-free. Packaging has moved to corn-based packaging, and plastic baskets have been replaced by metal baskets.

What is your success tips for young and aspiring entrepreneurs?

Arunabh Sinha: My only advice to young and aspiring entrepreneurs is to fully evaluate before they take the leap. Entrepreneurship is glamourous.

But once you scratch the surface, the reality might not be as pleasing. There are potentially more lows than highs, more downs than ups.

So, become an entrepreneur only once you are fully convinced about the idea and are prepared to GO ALL IN. There’s only ONE PLAN. No plan Bs as an entrepreneur.

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