5 Vended Laundry Themes and Specials to Entice Customers

Watching clothes spin inside washers and dryers is about as fun and exciting as it sounds – unless it’s your first time, but even then the excitement wears off fast. Face it, vended laundries will never be sexy or exciting but you can do several things to make your vended laundry memorable, welcoming and comfortable for customers. In addition to incentivizing customers with happy hour pricing you can give your store a personality or theme by creating a fun environment. Here are five ideas to get you started on the right track.

Create a Vended Laundry Theme

The theme in your vended laundry can capture a number of different styles like displaying your unique tastes, featuring antique laundry equipment or modeled after the demographics of your neighborhood. For example:

• College/young professional neighborhoods: Keeping this age group happy will do wonders for your business because they share everything online and with their friends in the area. One of the first ways to attract this group to your store is offering free Wi-Fi allowing them to stay connected and use smartphones or laptops with ease. Instead of leaving the TV on the Price is Right, local news or another rerun of Golden Girls turn on sporting events or find out what your clientele likes by putting a questionnaire by the change machine. This way you can cater the entertainment to their likes. Another fun idea is creating space for classic rec games like ping-pong, foosball or air hockey – this will definitely keep the young people coming back in groups.
• Family neighborhoods: If you operate in a neighborhood with a lot of families and notice the majority of your clients are bringing their kids to your store it’s smart to create a kid-friendly atmosphere. Do so by building a play area with a nice carpeted floor and fun games for kids like puzzles, toy trains, blocks, etc. and spice it up with fun wall graphics of the most popular cartoon characters.

Vended Laundry Special Offers

• Time of Day or Day of Week Specials: This is a commonly used tactic by vended laundry owners, because it works. Determine the slowest part of the day by monitoring traffic or if you have new smart washers and dryers you can see this info from your desktop or smartphone to decide when you’ll offer a quarter off or half-off wash specials. You can also create happy hour pricing during the week or choose one of your slower days to offer a day of the week specials on washers or dryers.
• Loyalty Program: This is a great way to keep customers coming back happy. You can smoothly integrate a loyalty card program with current digital card payment systems on your machines making it extremely convenient for customers and automatically adjust special pricing based on your offers. You can also incorporate an attendant-free value-add kiosk where customers can add more money to their loyalty cards – this a great time to offer a big deposit bonus giving customers $2 for every $20 they add onto their card.

Building your vended laundry business is a challenge but can be very fun and exciting. At BDS Laundry Systems we specialize in equipping your store with the best machines and assist in creating the most desirable environment for your customers. Learn more about how we can help you enter the vended laundry business by calling us at 1-800-688-0020 or contacting us online to start a conversation today.