Why Wash Cycle Laundry launched its first major ad campaign this spring

Wash Cycle Laundry, the Center City-based sustainable laundry service that recently expanded to Washington, D.C., launched its first major advertising campaign this spring, said company spokeswoman Leigh Goldenberg.

Look for its ads on taxi TV screens, in and on SEPTA buses and subways and on radio station WXPN. Its cyclists, who bike laundry across the city, are also sporting a new look: instead of using trash cans hitched to a bike, they’re using electric-assist tricycles and biking around big box carriers of laundry. Goldenberg said that “having cyclists out on the street is our best way of reaching new customers,” so the new look is also part of the marketing campaign.

The company has customers of all types — large institutions, like the Philadelphia VA Hospital, small businesses and individuals, but this campaign is targeting individuals, with a focus on those in Center City, Goldenberg said.

After laying relatively low for four years, the company is making waves with a buzzy expansion to D.C., a recent $330,000 round of funding and this new campaign. Why launch an ad campaign now? Three reasons, Goldenberg told us:

• The rebranding. Wash Cycle is using the campaign to push out its recent rebranding. It used some of its new funding to hire a sales and marketing team (Goldenberg herself joined the team in December from the Arden Theatre Company, where she ran marketing and PR) and did market analysis and customer surveys to help execute the rebranding effort. The rebranding was done by San Francisco-based, Philadelphia native Carly Hall Scott of Mama Bear Creative.
• The infrastructure upgrades. “We’ve increased our capacity with the addition of electric assist tricycles to our fleet, added new services such as Dry Cleaning, expanded delivery hours and updated the online customer experience,” she said. That means that Wash Cycle can handle an increase in customers.
• The weather. The spring is “historically a time when we see an increase in business,” she said.

Wash Cycle declined to share how much it was spending on the campaign but said that it “spent less on actual ad buys or printing than on contracting designers for branding and design.”

The Wash Cycle team is now 33 people strong, with about a third of those staffers being cyclists. It has three employees in D.C. and is looking to hire more there, Goldenberg said.