Who We Are – The highest-rated cleaning and laundry delivery service in Austin!

Ian’s Dry Cleaning and Laundry Delivery is a full-service dry cleaner in the Austin, Texas area.  We provide pickup and delivery service only as we do not have a brick and mortar.  We offer services such as dry cleaning, laundry, wash/dry/fold, wedding dress cleaning and preservation, tailoring, and leather garment cleaning.  Because Ian hates delivery fees, we never charge a pickup and delivery fee.  

Our goals include providing our community with the absolute best customer service, delivering the highest quality of cleaning, and ultimately, bringing our customers a personalized experience filled with excellence from start to finish.  

The personal nature of what we do cannot be overlooked or minimized.  Clothes are obviously very personal.  We are cleaning someone’s favorite sweater, a jacket their family member gifted them, their interview suit, or preserving their wedding dress.  Our customers trust us with their most personal belongings.  As a result, a relationship inevitably develops that is built on trust.  We are serving our community!

Ian’s is proud to be a small business.  We started in July of 2018.  In just over two and half years, our incredibly diverse team has grown to include two drivers, one manager, and three vans.  Our annual revenue is currently $245,000 and growing year over year.   

Our desire to be the best small business in Austin has paid off.  We have a loyal following of customers that grows weekly.  Our Yelp and Google rating is the absolute highest in town.  We continue to be encouraged by the feedback from our customers and look forward to developing our team, our technology, and our business in ways that enable us to continue to bring the growing Austin community the very best service possible.

What Makes Ian’s Awesome – Our Team!

Meet Ian

It’s like Ian was meant to do dirty things.  His Dad started the very first one-price dry cleaner in Austin the year before Ian was born.  As a kid, he grew up in the cleaners hanging from the clothes racks and napping in the clothes buggies used to sort the clothes in the cleaning plant.  

After college, Ian ultimately landed himself in the role of Operations Director at his Dad’s company.  Ian immersed himself into every aspect of the dry cleaning business including working in the cleaning facilities in the Texas heat learning to press shirts and pants with the crew in the plant.  

Ten years later, he now owns Ian’s Dry Cleaning and Laundry Delivery.  Bringing a passion for a business that he has known his entire life in conjunction with a creative and forward-thinking approach, Ian has incredible attention to detail, a work ethic like no other, and a desire to be the best in the industry.  He is involved daily in every aspect of this business.  

Perhaps his biggest strength is that he has a mind for business and a heart for being fair to his team and his customers.  These qualities combined with his experience make him poised to be successful no matter what. 

Our Team

A diverse as Austin, our team is made of people of varying ages, gender, race, and educational backgrounds.  Our collective differences make us rich in 

experience and perspective that, together, make our group uniquely equipped to bring our customers an experience second to none.

Lucindia: Ian’s right hand who helps to make things work on a daily basis in whatever capacity needed.  She is the go-to for interacting directly with the customers and ensuring that their concerns and needs are addressed to 100% satisfaction.   

Ashley: Our manager and a native Austinite who has over a decade of experience in customer service and the dry cleaning industry, Ashley brings more than just knowledge of how to do things right.  She brings a desire for excellence and an enthusiasm for creating the best experience possible for our customers.  

Wesley and Patrick: Our drivers who literally deliver the whole experience.  These guys are the ones who pick up and deliver to our customers and represent our values from one door to the next.  

Our Community Involvement and Giving Back

Ian has been involved with Big Brothers/Big Sisters for years (he was even chosen as Central Texas Big Brother of the Year in 2020).  We are happy to provide volunteers with the BBBS program a discount on their cleaning.  We also appreciate our veterans and are humbled to provide them with a cleaning discount as well.

In addition, we support the important work of The Austin Humane Society by sponsoring their annual gala by donating gift certificates for cleaning for their silent auction.  Every holiday season, we provide our customers with the opportunity to donate nonperishable food and toys for the Travis County Brown Santa program.  We pick up donations from our customers & deliver them to the donation site.  This program provides food & toys to children in desperate need across the Austin area.

How COVID Affected Us?

Immediate Impact

In March of 2020, when the news came that everything was shutting down, our business was steadily growing with orders increasing weekly.  We had just hired our manager, Ashley. This was an added role. We were executing a marketing strategy on a weekly basis vis-a-vis neighborhood bag drops.  All at once, because of COVID, everything came to a screeching halt. Everyone was scared.  None of us knew what the next hour was going to bring much less the next week or months to follow.

At that time, we were well into establishing and solidifying our relationships with our core customers.  Immediately, the focus shifted to keeping our team and customers safe. Dry cleaners were deemed essential and as such, our business reopened.  However, there was immediately an 80% drop in orders.

With most businesses either shutting down or moving to a work from home model, demand for cleaning dropped dramatically.  Our commercial accounts and hotel valet cleaning dropped to zero.  The impact was immediate and it was significant.  

Bouncing Back

The pickup and delivery model provided us with the opportunity to not only continue servicing our regular customers safely.  It also allowed us the opportunity to reach people who would have not previously sought out a pickup and delivery service, but because of the pandemic, were seeking out a safer alternative.  Avoiding contact by not having to go into a dry cleaner becomes an incredibly alluring option for people who still need the service but do not feel comfortable going into an establishment.   

The support of our customers has been nothing short of amazing.  Our numbers are slowly climbing back to where they were a year ago. This return has outpaced our direct competition and the industry standard of just 50% retained revenue. We are thankful to be able to continue doing what we enjoy and serve our customers.  Providing dry cleaning and laundry is essential and a service that people will always need.

Click below to see our team in action:

Ian’s is the best choice for the grant!

The plan to digitally grow and enhance our business:

There will always be a need to have one’s clothes cleaned.  Certain aspects of what we do involve cleaning that people can’t do at home.  When you couple this need of having clean clothes with living in the fastest growing city in the nation, all of a sudden having the option of a service that picks up and delivers your laundry becomes invaluable.  We offer people the ability to cross an errand off their list.  This creates the chance to save time by using our service.  And time is priceless.

Due to the nature of the pickup and delivery service and the nature of our online platform, there is a huge opportunity for digital growth.  The biggest obstacle standing in the way of that digital growth is funding.  Being that we have a small team, in order to grow as well as preserve the continuity of the level of service we are able to provide as a small team, there are multiple platforms that would help us to achieve growth and further develop processes and systems that will contribute to expansion in leads and revenue.

How will we use the grant?:

1.  Online Advertising (30%): It is essential to advertise on platforms such as Yelp, Google, Instagram and Facebook because all of our competitors are doing this.  Expanding this focus will allow us to remain competitive with those big businesses with deeper advertising budgets.
2.  Online Reputation (5%):  Birdeye, a review encouragement tool, is utilized to obtain internal feedback from our customers as well as review requests.  Both of these things are vital to our business.  Without feedback from our customers, we are unable to identify areas that we need to improve upon.  Obtaining reviews is one of the best ways to let other people know about our service and why they should trust us with their cleaning.
3. Customer Retention Management (15%): Ian’s currently doesn’t have CRM software in use.  By investing in a CRM system, it will equip us with the ability to identify areas that we need to focus on for customer retention.  It will help us organize and streamline our processes in order to optimize our talent and time.  With the funds obtained by this grant, we will be able to invest in a CRM program to help us manage and improve the customer relationships we already have and pursue and secure leads to increase growth.
4. Digital Marketing (50%):  Pre-pandemic, our business was already heavily reliant on the digital landscape; however, now more than ever, digital marketing is critical for us to expand our reach and revenue.  This includes further developing our social media presence, email marketing campaigns to connect with customers, increase our website marketing efforts, and expand the use of video marketing.  All of these avenues will help us achieve our digital marketing goal of generating and converting leads, increasing website traffic, increasing brand and customer engagement, and ultimately, realizing an increase in revenue. 

In Conclusion

“Let the beauty of what you love be what you do”–Rumi

Small businesses are so much more than the service they provide or the product they sell.  We are the heart and soul of our community.  In no way has that been more evident than in the past eleven months of this pandemic.  

At Ian’s, we are acutely aware of the significance of the service we provide and the positive impact we make on our community.  This is a business that is so heavily rooted in personal relationships as we develop a level of trust with our customers since we are caring for items so personal in nature.  

With this grant, we will be able to add tools to our digital toolbox that will inevitably improve our team’s ability to operate more effectively and efficiently than ever.   As a small business in a growing market, we understand that in order to remain competitive, we must use every possible resource to reach new customers and maintain existing customer relations by utilizing digital strategies and resources.  

Find Us:

www.ianscleaners.com
Facebook and Instagram: @ianscleaners