Whether we like it or not, Austin isn’t the “small town city” it once was. With a current population of nearly a million, Austin is now considered the 10th largest city in the country, and with that distinction comes certain big-city amenities: meals delivered on demand, groceries dropped at your front door, and now laundry delivered within a few hours.
NoScrubs is a new platform that offers easy laundry delivery and pickup within just two hours. It is the brainchild of the folks who brought Austin Instacart — "launchers" Matt O’Connor, Matt Goff, and Sudhanshu Gautam — and offers a similar simple convenience.
Here’s how it works: You’ll either get online or use the app to schedule your laundry pickup time, any day of the week. Then a NoScrubs delivery person will pick up your laundry at the scheduled time. If you’re not home, you can simply leave it someplace accessible. Once they’ve picked up your laundry, they get to work immediately, washing, drying, and folding your clothes to be delivered back to you in a few hours. You’ll get a message from them with the precise return time and can either grab it from them in-person or have them drop it off.
The “scrubbers,” (i.e. the people doing your laundry) will already be close to your home in an idle laundry room. “We use idle laundry machines that are close to the customers,” says NoScrubs co-founder and CEO Matt O’Connor. “This means laundry rooms in multi-family housing facilities.” This “slashing of the last mile” is meant to cut job time as well as costs in the NoScrubs approach.
Users can leave their laundry outside if they won't be around to hand it off.Photo courtesy of NoScrubs
O’Connor says the team chose Austin as the perfect place to launch this new approach to laundry due to the city’s rapid growth, reputation as a technology hub, and leadership of robotics technology. Regarding that last one (robots??), he says that while robots are “not a core piece of what we’re doing just yet, at some point in the future they’re going to be an efficient way to pick up and deliver things — in this case, laundry.”
He adds that the app has had some surprising results since its soft launch at the beginning of May. The founders thought early adopters would be mostly young, urban types — the people who are already using apps like Uber and Instacart. But many of the customers are senior folks, or people who are physically impaired or dealing with an injury. So, rather than appealing solely to people who can’t stand doing their laundry, it seems to be helping people who really can’t do their laundry.
This time around, the NoScrubs team seems to be focused on improving their business model after some hard lessons with Instacart.
By and large, this grocery delivery service has been a success since its beginnings in 2012, expanding to over 1,400 retailers nationwide and going public in 2023. Of course it hasn’t been without bumps in the road. In 2020 some Instacart personal shoppers went on strike due to “unlivable wages” and health concerns during the early stages of the pandemic. At that time, the company responded by giving some shoppers a bonus and providing them with disinfecting supplies.
However, as Instacart grew, and in 2023 went public, the people who were out there doing the shopping weren’t able to reap the rewards of the business’s success.
O’Connor says this is because Instacart shoppers (as well as most rideshare drivers and delivery people for other apps) work as independent contractors. While independent contractors can have equity in a company, this is typically not done for these types of “gig workers.” NoScrubs is trying something a little different.
“This time we’re allowing the people doing the laundry to become part-time or full-time employees,” says O’Connor. “That way if the company succeeds, everyone who has a part in it can benefit.”
Right now NoScrubs is only available here in Austin. Subscriptions start at $59.99 per month, which includes two pickups of up to 20 pounds each. There is also an “XL” subscription ($129) for more laundry, or a single pickup option ($35). New customers can promo code “CULTUREMAP” to get 50 percent off for their first two months. More information, including a list of ZIP Codes where laundry deliveries are possible, is available at noscrubs.io.
NoScrubs' service area.Service map courtesy of NoScrubs
