Retail laundry

A Retail Laundry offers textile cleaning services to the general public. At CINET we’ve defined this industry as the Professional Textile Cleaning (TC) industry. Retail laundries might be dry cleaners, wet cleaners or laundromats and in many cases they offer tailoring services as well. A retail laundry might address various needs of consumers. In many cases, people visit commercial laundries because they have clothes that can only be dry cleaned or need special treatment, not available at home. They might also need professional services because of persistent stains. Of course, commercial laundries are also a solution for consumers who for various reasons (space, cost of equipment, temporary residence) don’t have a washing machine at home.

 

Types of retail laundries

In general, we can identify three types of commercial laundries:

  • Staffed laundries: they might be dry cleaners and wet cleaners that offer various textile care services. Those include cleaning, drying, finishing and even tailoring.
  • Laundromats (or self-service laundry, coin laundry or simply coin-ops): consumers operate the washing machines themselves.
  • Laundry on demand: modern laundry services that include pick up, cleaning, finishing and home drop off.