Baltimore-based SudShare rolls out platform in Reno

An example of finished laundry done by a SudShare gig worker left on the doorstep of a platform user. The Baltimore-based laundry service startup recently expanded its service to Reno.

An example of finished laundry done by a SudShare gig worker left on the doorstep of a platform user. The Baltimore-based laundry service startup recently expanded its service to Reno. Courtesy Photo

By Kaleb Roedel

Wednesday, September 22, 2021

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Tired of spending hours every week doing laundry? In Reno, there’s now an app for that.

SudShare is an on-demand laundry cleaning, pickup and delivery service that the company describes as “Uber-for-laundry.” Rather than picking up and dropping off people, however, SudShare gig workers — known as “Sudsters” — pick up and drop off people’s laundry.

Specifically, users of the platform place their laundry outside in a hamper or disposable bags (machine-dry in one bag, hang-dry in another). Sudsters pick it up, take it home, then wash, dry and fold it all before returning it in new bags the next day. The cost of the service: $1 per pound of laundry.

“From a customer perspective, we’re selling the most important thing you could ever buy,” SudShare CEO Mort Fertel said in a phone interview with the NNBW. “Time … You don’t have to be burdened two to three hours a week with the dreaded chore of doing laundry.”

Raising five children, including triplets, Fertel and his wife, Ari, saw a lot of their free time being washed away up by the nagging chore they could not ignore. One day in 2017, Ari voiced her frustration about being stuck in an endless cycle of washing, drying and folding.

“She was like, ‘This is crazy,’” Mort Fertel recalled. “I can tap an app to get to the airport. I can FaceTime someone on the other side of the world. And I can deposit a check without going to the bank. But I’m still doing laundry like my grandmother did.”

She was right. Over the years, technologies have transformed just about every aspect of peoples’ lives to make the more efficient and convenient — from communicating to shopping to banking. Yet, the act of doing laundry has stayed relatively the same since the dawn of the washer and dryer in the 1950s.

“The chore that takes us the longest to do every week hasn’t been affected by technology since the invention of the washer and dryer, which was 70 years ago,” Fertel said.

Folded laundry that was done by a SudShare gig worker ready to be returned to a plat-form user.

 

But what innovation could they bring to a centuries-old chore?

Their tech-savvy son, Nachshon, 16 at the time, had an idea. What if, to solve the laundry quandary consuming his parents and families across the U.S., he started a business that was the Uber-for-laundry?

“We thought he was kidding,” Fertel said with a laugh.

He wasn’t.

After a year of teaching himself to code, in February 2018, Nachshon had developed a laundry service platform that was ready to launch in their hometown of Baltimore.

For the first two years, SudShare was only available in the greater Baltimore area so the team could “perfect the policies, procedures and systems, and scale their infrastructure for growth,” Fertel said.

And grow they did. Starting off 2021 in only a few cities, the laundry service platform is now available in nearly 400 cities across the country — most recently, the Biggest Little City.

“It turned out that a lot more people than just my wife like the app,” said Fertel, noting SudShare’s revenue has grown about 1,000% over the last year. “The growth has been explosive and we have no reason to think that it won’t continue.”

After all, the main reason the Fertels launched a laundry service was to take away the weekly (or for big families, daily) time-suck of laundry. And the pandemic, Fertel said, has propelled people to make the most of their off-the-clock hours.

“Forget the laundry, we’re offering you time,” Fertel reiterated. “And I think one of the reasons it’s growing so significantly is because these days, more than ever, people want to outsource things, they want their time back.”

What’s more, Fertel pointed out that SudShare not only provides a COVID-friendly service to the end users, but also creates a COVID-friendly job opportunity for people who are unemployed or looking for a non-white-collar job they can do from home.

“This is really the first manual labor work-from-home gig in the world,” Fertel said. “Prior to SudShare, if you wanted to work from home, you had to be someone who could sit behind a computer and be productive.”

To date, roughly 40,000 people in the U.S. do gig work for SudShare. Since launching in Reno-Sparks a few months ago, the laundry service startup has seen roughly 100 people sign on as Sudsters, he said.

When asked, he said the private family company does not share how many people are using the platform in Reno or nationwide.

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