James Joun grew up doing the laundry.
As a 10-year-old, Joun worked weekends and summers in his parents’ South San Francisco dry cleaning shop, “taking orders, working the cash machine, and inventoring clothes.”
“I’ve touched every part of the business,” he said.
And once again, he is back in the family business, albeit in a novel way: He is the co-founder of Rinse, a start-up located at 438 Treat Avenue that has joined the long list of Silicon Valley firms looking to capitalize on young professionals’ aversion to doing laundry.
Think of Rinse as Uber for clothing: Download an app, schedule a twice-weekly delivery, hand your laundry to uniformed valet, and it comes back a few days later washed and folded. It’s a 21st century update to one of the world’s oldest professions.
A profession Joun had no intention of returning to.
“I had no plan to go back,” he laughed. “Honestly, it was tough in the sense that my friends were doing something else, it’s really hot [in the shop], working 8-10 hours a day, there’s a lot of steam… It’s tiring, very monotonous, repetitive work.”
Which his parents have been doing since emigrating from South Korea.
“It’s a typical immigrant story,” Joun said. Leaving after the chaos of the Korean War, his father moved to the United States in the late 1970s. His mother first went to Germany, working as a nurse with the World Health Organization before moving to the United States.
They opened a liquor store first, and then started Wright Cleaners in South San Francisco.
“The name was from the previous owner,” Joun clarified.
Doing laundry was common for Korean immigrants, Joun said, and his aunts and uncles were also involved in dry cleaning.
“During holidays, they just talk about this all the time,” Joun said. “A lot of is just ‘Hey, how’s business? What’s volume like?’ They have stores in different areas of the Bay, so it’s ‘How’s Marin doing versus San Francisco?’”
The laundry business failed to rebound quickly from the 2008 financial crisis, Joun said, and therein the Ivy League graduate found an opportunity.
“My uncles and aunts have kids to feed, to put through college,” Joun said. “It was like, ‘Man, they need more volume.’ The infrastructure needs volume, because they have machines but they’re not running all the time. How can we leverage the existing infrastructure?”
The breakthrough itself came from a breakfast conversation with a college friend, Rinse co-founder Ajay Prakash.
Joun and Prakash both went to Dartmouth before attending equally prestigious business schools (Joun went to Harvard and Prakash to Stanford). Both were working in finance and during a visit Joun made to San Francisco in 2013, they started talking about what was next in their careers.
“He was just a sounding board for me,” Prakash said. “He had just come from his parents’ shop, and he brought up the idea of dry-cleaning. When were were talking he kind of stopped me and said ‘Would this work for dry-cleaning?’”
The pair decided it might, and rented a van to pick up and launder the clothes of friends who lived in the city.
“It was all my grad school, high school, childhood friends,” Joun said. “We decided we’ll text them ahead of time, pick things up, get these clothes cleaned very quickly, and return them a few days later and see how they like it.”
They liked it a lot.
“I was just running this experiment and they said ‘When are you coming back again?’” Joun said. “I’m like ‘Huh, interesting, they actually would like our service.’”
“That was kind of the ‘Aha’ moment for me,” he added.
Then it was time to talk to his parents.
“I got a wave of anxiety,” Joun said. “‘Now I have to explain this to my parents.’ You know, in the beginning, I don’t think they quite understood what we were doing.”
When Joun broached the idea, his parents thought he and Prakash were just opening a dry-cleaning shop, continuing the family business in the traditional way.
“I was confused, I was pretty confused,” his mother, Chun, said. “I was very against it actually. But the way it’s turned out… I’m very surprised, the way he built up his company, I’m really surprised. They have been very good.”
His father even accompanied him on trips to dry cleaners in the beginning, helping with introductions.
“My husband used to go with him just for support,” Chun said. “That’s the way he got much stronger, [by] visiting another cleaner.”
Joun added that having his dad by his side brought “real credibility to the table.”
That, combined with some $5.5 million in venture capital funding Rinse has received since inception, seems to have served them well. The company just opened a second space in Los Angeles in March, serving customers west of the 405 highway.
But there are already a handful of start-ups that offer similar laundering services. LaundryLocker and Washio are just two mentioned by Prakash as possible competition, but a cursory search reveals many centered in millennial-heavy San Francisco. Rinse is one of many working in the area of on-demand laundry, but Joun’s background, he hopes, gives them an edge.
It has already helped in establishing relationships with vendors.
“You know, because I can kind of empathize with [dry cleaners], that’s really set the tone since day one,” said Joun. “If I were coming at it with no experience, I can see how they would be skeptical. But I’ve always told them that it’s my vision and goal to work with a network of vendors so we can all grow together, and they’ve been very responsive.”
It was an arduous process, ringing the bells of different dry cleaners – dad in tow – asking them to join.
But years of work later, the tables have turned.
“It’s funny. Now vendors are calling us to say ‘Hey, can we work with you?’” Joun said.
Uber for clothing? You mean Rinse will deny responsibility if they ruin your clothes?