Can you please share your current position and organization profile?

I am the Co-founder of Quick Dry Cleaning Software — QDC — a B2B SaaS platform built exclusively for the professional textile care industry. QDC today serves over 2,500+ businesses across India, the Gulf, and Africa. We help dry cleaners, laundries, and garment care businesses run smarter operations — from order management and customer communication to analytics and payments. We are bootstrapped, profitable, and growing at 40% year on year. Our mission is simple: to bring modern technology to every PTC business, regardless of its size or geography.

2. In which countries and market sectors did you work and gain experience?

Through our work with operators, we have gained experience across India, the Gulf region, and several African markets, and we are currently expanding our focus toward European and North American markets. Our primary exposure is in retail textile care, particularly businesses operating multi-store networks, franchise models, and centralized processing operations. This cross-market exposure provides valuable insight into how PTC markets evolve as they mature, particularly around digital adoption, logistics models, and operational scalability.

3. What are the most important characteristics and trends of current PTC markets?

Three things stand out clearly.

First, the customer has moved online. Whether in Mumbai, Dubai, or Nairobi — customers expect to book, track, and pay for their laundry the same way they order food or a cab. Businesses that cannot meet this expectation are losing customers silently.

Second, convenience is the new quality. Pickup and delivery services are no longer a premium offering — they are becoming the baseline expectation, even in price-sensitive markets.

Third, data is being ignored. Most PTC businesses are sitting on a goldmine of customer behaviour data and not using it. Repeat purchase patterns, seasonal demand, garment preferences — all of this is available but underutilised. The businesses that learn to use their data will outperform the rest significantly.

4. What are the most important success factors for today’s PTC companies?

Three factors, non-negotiable:

Operational efficiency — you must control costs tightly while delivering consistent quality. Manual processes are expensive and error-prone.

Customer retention — acquiring a new customer costs five times more than retaining one. Loyalty, communication, and service reliability are everything.

Technology adoption — not as a luxury, but as infrastructure. The PTC businesses growing fastest today are the ones that have digitised their core operations and built a direct digital relationship with their customers.

5. What are your organisation’s objectives and how do you define success?

Our objective is to become the operating system for the global PTC industry — the platform that powers how textile care businesses manage their work, their customers, and their growth.

We will consider ourselves successful when a dry cleaner in Accra has the same quality of business tools as one in Amsterdam. Technology should not be a privilege of large or well-funded operations. Success for us is measured in customer outcomes — are our clients growing? Are they retaining more customers? Are they spending less time on paperwork and more time on their craft?

6. What are the most important future demands of clients in PTC markets?

Clients — meaning the end consumers — will demand three things:

Sustainability: Increasingly, especially among younger consumers, they want assurance that their clothes are being cleaned in an environmentally responsible way. This is no longer a niche concern — it is becoming a mainstream expectation.

Garment longevity: As awareness of textile waste grows, consumers are beginning to think differently about their wardrobes. Fast fashion is facing a cultural backlash. People are buying less and expecting more from what they own. In this environment, professional textile care has a powerful story to tell — we extend the life of garments, preserve fabric quality, and reduce the need for premature replacement. PTC is, fundamentally, a sustainability service. The industry must own that narrative loudly and confidently.

Personalisation: They want to be remembered. Their preferences, their garments, their schedules — they expect the service to know them.

The convergence of sustainability consciousness and garment care is one of the most significant opportunities the PTC industry has seen in decades. The businesses that position themselves as partners in responsible ownership — not just cleaning services — will build a deeply loyal and growing customer base.

7. What are the key issues for PTC companies to fulfil future client demands?

The gap is almost always capability and mindset, not intention.

Most PTC business owners understand what their customers want. The challenge is they lack the tools, the trained staff, and sometimes the confidence to transform their operations. Key issues are:

> Fragmented, manual workflows that cannot scale

> Low digital literacy among staff and sometimes owners

> Absence of customer data management systems

> Difficulty accessing affordable, industry-specific technology

8. How important is sustainability for your current business and what are you doing about it?

Sustainability is central to how we design QDC. We help our clients reduce paper consumption entirely through digital order management. We enable route optimisation for pickup and delivery, which directly reduces fuel consumption and carbon emissions.

More importantly, we give PTC businesses the data to make sustainability measurable — and what gets measured, gets improved. For an industry that handles millions of garments every day, even marginal improvements in resource efficiency at scale have a significant environmental impact.

9. Do you see sustainability as a business driver or a cost-saving factor?

Both — but I would argue it is increasingly a customer acquisition and retention tool.

In our Gulf markets, we see luxury dry cleaners winning premium clients specifically because they can demonstrate eco-friendly processes. In India, younger urban consumers are actively choosing services that align with their values. Sustainability is moving from a nice-to-have to a brand differentiator.

Cost savings come naturally — less water, less energy, optimised logistics. But the real opportunity is in positioning sustainability as a quality signal. Customers who care about the environment also tend to care about the quality of care their garments receive. These are your most valuable clients.

10. Is technical innovation a key factor for business performance? What technologies are essential?

Absolutely essential. Technology is the single biggest lever available to PTC businesses today.

The technologies that matter most right now are:

Cloud-Based Management Platforms: Provide real-time visibility and control over stores, plants, and operations from a centralized system.

Digital Customer Engagement: Enable online booking, order tracking, and communication to improve convenience and customer loyalty.

Route Optimisation Tools: Plan efficient pickup and delivery routes to reduce travel time and operational costs.

AI-Driven Demand Forecasting: Predict demand patterns to better plan staffing, capacity, and resources.

Automated Customer Communication: Send reminders, updates, feedback requests, and loyalty offers automatically.

Logistics Management Systems: Coordinate drivers, pickups, and deliveries for smoother and more reliable service.

Operational Data Analytics: Convert operational data into insights that help improve efficiency and decision-making.

11. What are the most important innovations of the near future and how will they change the industry?

I see three transformative shifts coming:

AI-powered garment intelligence — imagine software that can identify a garment, recommend the correct cleaning process, flag potential damage risks, and update the customer — all automatically. This is not far away.

Predictive operations — AI that can forecast demand by day, by garment type, by location, enabling PTC businesses to staff and stock with precision rather than guesswork.

Sustainability tracking at garment level — the ability to tell a customer exactly how much water and energy was used to clean their specific order. This will become a compliance requirement in many markets within the decade.

These innovations will shift the PTC industry from being reactive to being genuinely intelligent.

12. How should PTC businesses adapt to becoming more customer and IT driven?

The transformation must start with a leadership mindset. Technology will not fix a business where the owner does not believe in data-driven decisions.

Practically, I advise businesses to start small and specific — digitise one process completely before moving to the next. Master customer communication through WhatsApp or SMS before building a full app. Get your order data clean before attempting analytics.

13. Is there still opportunity for smaller PTC companies in an industry scaling up?

Absolutely — and I hold this view strongly.

Large chains win on scale and brand. Small businesses win on relationship, trust, and community. A neighbourhood dry cleaner who knows his customers by name, who remembers that Mrs. Sharma’s sarees need extra care, who calls personally when something looks unusual — that human connection cannot be replicated by a chain operation.

What small businesses need is to be operationally competitive. With the right technology, a single-store operator can offer the same digital conveniences as a large chain — online booking, pickup, tracking, loyalty programmes. Level the operational playing field, and the small business wins on relationships every time.

14. How can PTC take more market share from domestic washing?

This is the biggest strategic question facing the industry.

The honest answer is that PTC has done a poor job of communicating its superiority. Professional cleaning extends garment life, maintains fabric integrity, and uses significantly less water per garment than domestic washing at scale. These are powerful arguments — but most consumers have never heard them.

The industry needs a coordinated consumer education campaign that makes these benefits visible and credible. When consumers can trust us to be convenient, affordable, and demonstrably better for their clothes and the environment, the market share will follow.

15. What are the major long-term opportunities for the PTC industry?

Several exciting ones:

Subscription Service Models: Monthly garment care plans create predictable revenue, increase customer loyalty, and reduce acquisition costs.

Expansion of Pickup & Delivery Services: Convenient doorstep service is becoming a key growth driver in urban textile care markets.

Repair, Restoration & Resale Preparation: Adding services that extend garment life and support the growing circular textile economy.

Technology-Driven Operational Efficiency: Using digital tools and automation to improve workflow control, productivity, and service consistency.

16. What are the major threats facing the PTC industry?

I will be direct about these two:

Complacency — too many PTC businesses are still operating exactly as they did twenty years ago. The market will not wait for them to catch up.

Workforce challenges — attracting and retaining skilled workers is becoming harder across all our markets. The industry must invest in making itself a desirable career choice.

17. What should national and international associations do to support the PTC industry?

Associations need to move from being information publishers to being active business enablers.

Concretely, this means: facilitating technology access for small operators, running consumer awareness campaigns that benefit the entire industry, creating global standards for sustainability and quality that give PTC businesses credible certifications to market, and building genuine bridges between markets so that innovations in one country rapidly reach operators in another.

The CINET Global PTC Strategy Study is exactly the right kind of initiative. Data-driven, global in scope, and built to inform real decisions. More of this, please.

18. What is your vision for the future of the PTC industry?

I see a future where professional textile care is recognised not as an old-fashioned trade but as a sophisticated, technology-enabled service industry — one that contributes meaningfully to sustainability goals, supports circular fashion, and delivers genuine value that domestic washing simply cannot match.

The PTC industry of 2050 will be data-driven, customer-obsessed, environmentally accountable, and globally connected. The businesses that begin building toward that future today — regardless of their current size — will be the ones that thrive.

19. What is your key message to your PTC colleagues worldwide?

The future belongs to those who modernise without losing their humanity.

Embrace technology — it will free you from paperwork and give you time to focus on what actually matters: caring for your customers and their garments with genuine expertise and pride.

Do not wait for the perfect moment to change. The market is moving. Your customers are already expecting more. And the tools to meet those expectations have never been more accessible.

We are at a defining moment for this industry. Those who act now will shape what PTC looks like for the next generation — let us build that future together.

Vivek Saini, Co-founder, Quick Dry Cleaning Software (QDC)