'IIT Laundrywala': Meet Arunabh Sinha, man who set up a 100-crore business

There is a roaring demand for laundry services, regardless of whether they are delivered by a vendor association, by a functional plant, by a hub and spoke model, by aggregating laundromats or bulk laundry, according to Inc 42. Since laundry has latent potential in India’s top ten cities and more, many startups have sprouted to take on the challenge. Tracxn, a capital market company, states there are more than 100 startups in this space with $6.2 million in funding. One of the most successful entrepreneurs in this unorganised sector is Arunabh Sinha, founder of UClean.

Who is Arunabh Sinha?

Born in Jamshedpur, Sinha belonged to a lower middle-class family. While his father worked as a tutor, his mother was a housewife. Education wise, he pursued a Master’s in Metallurgy and Materials Science from IIT Bombay. After graduating from college in 2008, he began working for a US-based company in Pune as an analytical associate. Later, he joined a non-profit that connected small-scale farmers with brands.

UClean, which has branches in more than 100 cities today, was founded by him in Delhi in October 2016.

Journey from IIT Bombay to startup

In 2011, Sinha founded Franglobal, a business consulting firm dedicated to helping foreign companies. As a result of selling his business to Franchise India in 2015, Sinha ventured into hospitality. Treebo Hotels hired him as the director of the North India region.

During his time there, Sinha noticed that guests complained about dirty clothes, bedding stains, and other laundry-related issues. Upon examining the problems closely, Sinha realised how unorganised the large sector was and that it lacked professional players.

In an interview with Indiatimes, Sinha explained how ‘almost 60 per cent of the complaints that we were receiving were about laundry.’ He further added, “That’s when I realised there was an opportunity in the market and left my job.”

The rise of UClean

It was in January 2017 that Sinha started UClean in Delhi NCR, after some market and product research. He shed light on how their ‘initial focus was on building the business, understanding the challenges, and finding solutions’. In addition, he explained how they built their own platform and backend software. By the middle of 2017, they were convinced that this business could be scaled through franchising.

By the end of 2017, UClean started working franchises in Hyderabad and Pune, which has grown into more than 350 stores in 104 cities across India. A few more countries in Africa and the Middle East are set to join UClean, which has already expanded to Bangladesh and Nepal.

Unique features

UClean’s revenues come from franchise fees and monthly royalties, accounting for 7 percent of the company’s total revenue. He termed the pandemic years ‘a blessing in disguise for UClean’.

Another feature that is said to have attracted the customer base is ‘laundry by the kilo,’ where the nearest franchise reaches the customer’s doorstep, weighs the clothes on a digital scale and charges per kilo. The washed clothes are delivered to the customer within 24 hours.

UClean claims to have reduced water consumption by using an enzyme-based detergent that is not harming the environment and assures of becoming plastic-free by March 2023 with packaging moving to corn-based and plastic baskets being replaced by metal baskets.

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