Washlava Out to Revolutionize Laundromats
We all know that laundromats are fertile ground for the mobile payments concept, and with good reason.
Not only are the machines themselves a great place to introduce the streamlining capability of mobile payments, but the ancillary machines designed to make a better, more pleasant experience often come with similar capacity.
So Washlava has stepped into this market as well, with a patent-pending platform that can work through smartphones, at least in certain situations.
Washlava’s platform is geared to work with LG devices, and allows users to not only reserve machines at a laundromat, but also pay for the time the machines are in use, all from simple tap-based interfaces within the app proper. It’s designed particularly for the self-service laundry, and is actively working to bring its capabilities to as many different breeds of machine as possible.
So far, Washlava is proving well-received, with a beta test at the University of Florida revealing that users preferred Washlava by seven to one over credit cards, and by a healthy 12 to one over quarters.
The good news here, of course, is that the market is clearly responding to conditions on the ground. Customers must want this, and the fact that Washlava is so far ahead of many other common payment system in the laundromat space is good news.
The downside, however, is that Washlava already has at least one competitor in our recently-discovered PayRange system, which is designed to work on both Speed Queen and Maytag systems, systems more likely to be in place than LG washers.
Both companies are lacking in overall coverage, however, so shoring that point up will likely be job one for both firms as each looks to seize a portion of the apparently substantial laundromat market. Washlava has a good position going forward, but it needs to improve in short order. There’s a substantial lag between it and PayRange, and the more Washlava—or PayRange, or anyone else—can do to cover that lag the better.
There’s a clear demand here, so now it’s all about exploiting that demand and bringing mobile payments to laundromats as the user base so clearly wants.