For the coming period, we will present you week by week, the most outstanding PTC showcases that were officially nominated for The Global Best Practices Awards Program 2018. The profiles of these companies are also present in the WOPCOM platform, which you can access here.
Persil Service – Stichweh AG (Germany)
A reference company for online laundry services in Germany
Stichweh’s Persil Service is an online cleaning and textile care service, the first one to cover the whole of Germany as a matter of fact. Thanks to this service, customers all across Germany can manage their laundry online. They can place an order online, after which the laundry is picked up for cleaning and then delivered back to an address the customer has specified. The Stichweh Persil Service can be ordered from home, work, or even a rented apartment or hotel room, which means its customers can literally manage their laundry anytime, anywhere.
The reason Stichweh is able to operate at a country-wide level is that company collaborates with a few key partners. Among those is the DHL, a division of the German logistics company Deutsche Post DHL and one of the world’s leading providers of international courier, parcel, and express mail services. Thanks to DHL’s extensive network, expertise, and knowledge, all orders that are placed with Stichweg Persil Service are picked up, cleaned, and delivered back to the customer within three days, anywhere in Germany. This further adds to the convenience of this service.
Since the founding of the company in 1853, Stichweh has always made efforts to respond as quickly as possible to new market development and played a role in shaping them whenever possible. This requires a innovative spirit and a good sense for what’s needed by the environment in which the company operates. Stichweh was, for example, the first laundry services provider in Germany to introduce a customer card at the beginning of the 1990’s. In terms of corporate social responsibility, the company is continuously looking for ways to increase its overall efficiency and to decrease waste.
An efficient and convenient collaboration
Given the fact that Stichweh as a company has already existed for more than 160 years, the organisation has been building up an impressive amount of expertise and industry-specific knowledge. In other words, in more than a century and a half of activities, Stichweh has become a specialist in the laundry services industry. With the exponential growth and potential of internet-based sales, the company concluded that it would be wise to concentrate on what it does best, namely textile care, and that it would be best to outsource the complete logistics side of the operation to a specialist in that particular field: DHL.
The way in which the collaboration between Stichweh Persil Service and DHL works, aims at taking advantage of the attributes of each partner. Customers start with registering with the service online, at www.geschikt-gereinigt.de in order to start using it. They then indicate the services they need and where the load should be picked up, after which DHL comes by to take the laundry to Stichweh’s regional partner for cleaning. Within three days, the laundry is cleaned and packed in special boxes before DHL delivers it back to the customer. These boxes can be reused and already come with the necessary labelling in case the customer wants to use the service again.
The result – excellent quality
Leading the way through innovation
It’s practically impossible for a company to survive for more than 160 years in a competitive market without cultivating a corporate culture in which innovation and a willingness to lead are key factors. Whether it concerns technical, technological, or environmental innovations, Stichweh was, and still is, usually a (very) early adopter, if not the principal instigator. The company has always been able to look further than just its own results at the end of the month, which is how it grew into a reference for (online) laundry services in Germany.
A very simple, yet clear example of Stechweh’s willingness to innovate and improve its services for its clients, is the CleanCard. At the beginning of the 1990’s, the company was the first laundry services provider in Germany to come up with a customer card. The basic idea behind the CleanCard was to encourage customers to keep coming back to Stichweh and to reward frequent usage of its services. Nowadays, more than 25 years later, the Stichweh Persil Services CleanCard still exists and continues to be a hit among new and existing customers.
In terms of protection of the environment, Stichweh wants to play a part as well. Of course, the company didn’t just choose DHL as a logistics partner. The company participates in the DHL environmental program GoGreen, which ensures that all cartons are transported CO2- neutrally. On top of that, all cartons in which the laundry is delivered can be stored and used again by the customer for his or her next order. All packaging material is 100% recyclable and plastic-free, while all returnable cartons are made of recycled cardboard and returned to the recycling system at the end of the process. These are examples of some of the measures Stichweh Persil Service is taking to make its use of resources more efficient and to reduce the negative effects of its operations on the environment.