‘Café Meets Laundromat’

By Bob Nieman | Jun 01, 2009

The last thing most people think about on vacation is dirty laundry – much less other people’s dirty laundry.

But that’s exactly what Greg and Joy Fuhrman had on their minds while relaxing one night on a resort island on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia.

“While on that island, my wife and I brainstormed this idea,” explained Greg Fuhrman. “We came up with this vision: ‘Café Meets Laundromat.’ That’s how we described it to ourselves.”

The couple, both CPAs, had reached a crossroads in their professional careers, which coincidentally made this particular business vision more than just some farfetched daydream.

Greg Fuhrman, who grew up in Los Angeles, spent the majority of his post-college life in accounting, most recently as the CFO of a real estate and private equity fund, also based in southern California.

However, a few years ago, Joy decided to make a career change and subsequently was accepted into veterinarian school at Colorado State University in Fort Collins.

“We knew we were going to move,” Fuhrman said. “So we sold our house in west L.A. a year in advance of when we needed to, because we felt the real estate market starting to tighten up. We did pretty well, so we decided to travel around the world for four months at the end of 2006.”

And this is when their self-service laundry idea was hatched.

“While traveling, we did our laundry in a lot of places,” Fuhrman said. “And one of the things that we discovered about the laundromat business was that virtually every laundromat we went into – no matter the city, the country or the continent – was basically the same as every other laundromat you had ever seen.

“We were in one laundromat in Rome, and our skin was just crawling until we could leave there,” he added. “We thought that there must be others like us, traveling through towns and just looking for a nice place to do their laundry.

“We definitely knew we had to be in a college town to make this particular vision work, because we wanted to cater to the student market. That was very important to us from the get-go – to have a place where students want to come to do their laundry and just hang out.”

So, in April 2007, once Greg and Joy had returned from their extended vacation and settled into the college town of Fort Collins, Colo., it seemed like a good sign when the couple happened upon an existing laundry for sale.

The more the Fuhrmans researched the industry the more excited they became about opening their own laundry business.

“You’re providing a service that is really more of a need than a want,” Fuhrman reasoned. “People are more likely to continue to spend money to wash their clothes, even in a down economy. Nothing is really recession-proof; every business is going to take a hit. However, in the right location with the right clientele, a laundry is pretty recession-resistant. That hit is not going to be as dramatic as it would be with a clothing store or health spa.”

As a result, the Fuhrmans purchased existing North College Laundry almost two years ago, even though it wasn’t the type of store they had initially envisioned while on their vacation.

“North College Laundry is a typical laundromat,” Fuhrman explained. “We bought it cheap. The price was right. Even if it failed miserably, it had been an existing store for a long time – and we felt the price was right to take the risk.”

Over the last two years, Fuhrman noted that business has been building slowly, as the couple continues to add new revenue streams. However, surrounded by mobile homes and pay-by-the-week motels, North College is definitely not the ideal location for the Fuhrmans’ “café-meets-laundromat” concept.

It’s a very different kind of market,” he explained. “That concept wouldn’t work up there.”

Fortunately, about five miles from North College Laundry sat a vacant former laundromat with the perfect location for the upscale type of business Fuhrman wanted to bring to Fort Collins.

“Last July, I was presented with the opportunity to buy that old store through my distributor, Jim Hohnstein of Martin Ray Laundry Systems in Denver,” Fuhrman said. “Jim was my distributor for North College, and, in fact, he actually built out that store with the original laundry equipment 20 years ago.

“We looked at the space, and we collectively figured that if we cut the space in half, we could probably fit the same number of machines in there. I started talking to Jim and my wife, and I realized this was a perfect place for us to realize our vision.”

It was a 3,600-square-foot facility, of which the Fuhrmans ended up taking 2,300 square feet. Despite the fact that the laundry had been closed for nearly a year when the couple signed the lease, the fact that it was a former self-service laundry was the key to the deal.

“In Colorado, water is really a big deal,” Fuhrman explained. “If I tried to open a laundry in a former Blockbuster video store, for example, and had to bring in the water – just to get the water to the store with fees, permits and infrastructure would cost $125,000. So buying an existing store, even though it was closed, was a no-brainer.”

Not that there was no work to be done to get the couple’s second store open for business.

“The first thing we did was to lay out our vision of what we thought the store should look like and how much equipment we could fit,” he said. “Then we gutted everything. We knocked down some walls that were there. We rebuilt the entire front counter space. We selected the equipment. We met on the furniture.

“It’s a real exercise in management. There is so much stuff that needs to be done when you build out a store. You have to stay on top of it. It was important to communicate our vision, and one thing that Joy and I did was to never waver from our vision.”

In December 2008, two years and thousands of miles removed from that beach in Australia, the Fuhrmans’ vision of a café within a laundry (or was it a laundry within a café?) finally became a reality with the opening of The Washouse, located just off the Colorado State campus.

Within a two-mile radius, there are about 80,000 people, and according to Fuhrman, roughly 53 percent of them are renters.

“The place is a big hit with students,” he explained. “We’re just over a mile from Colorado State University, which houses 25,000 students. Cracking the student market was our biggest priority. We look at our clientele in three different buckets. Bucket Number One is the students.”

“Bucket Number Two” includes homeowners who can’t fit their larger items into their washers and dryers at home.

“If I get 1,000 people to come in twice a year to do their stuff, that’s great,” Fuhrman said. “Yeah, you’d like them to come in every week, but if they’ve got laundry equipment at home, you’ve got to live with what they’re going to give you.”

The Washouse’s third market, which Fuhrman feels is the most difficult to hit with his advertising and marketing messages, are the weekly customers.

“You never really know where they’re coming from,” he explained. “It’s difficult to target them. I have as many people come in from apartment complexes where they have washers and dryers in their units, and those who don’t. The apartment market is difficult to hit in terms of marketing and mailing lists. It’s just not as easy as single-family residences.”

Clearly, Fuhrman markets heavily to the CSU students – on campus (through the student newspaper), in the dorms (through advertising on dry-erase boards distributed to dorm-dwellers) and even in the campus bars (through flyers posted on the restroom walls).

“I would say at least three times a week someone will come in because they’ve seen our ads on the bathroom wall,” Fuhrman noted. “It’s about constantly refining our message to the student market. We keep finding new mediums and ways communicate with the students because that is our core market.”

The Washouse logo appears on a number of giveaway items, such as magnets, T-shirts, laundry bags and plastic bottle openers. What’s more, the Fuhrmans have taken advantage of their market’s Money Mailer program and soon will be rolling out their store’s ads on nearby bus shelters.

“We’ll have 5,000 cars driving by our bus shelter ads every day,” said Fuhrman, who employs one full-time attendant and three part-timers.

But it’s not like Fuhrman didn’t have a few doubts when the store first opened.

“I remember during the first couple of weeks in December, which is the worst month to open up a laundromat in Colorado, there were a couple of consecutive days where nobody came into the store,” he recalled. “And that freaked me out. I don’t know what my expectations were, but I didn’t expect that.”

Since then the tide has turned significantly for The Washouse, which features a number of first-class amenities including a convenient card system, the latest high-extract washers, large-screen televisions, free Wi-Fi access, a computer station available for customer use, a wide array of books and magazines… and, of course, a Starbucks coffee machine that serves two types of coffee, hot chocolate and hot water for tea.

To complete the store’s café ambiance, The Washouse is decorated with warm colors, pendant lighting, comfortable chairs and couches, and hardwood-style flooring.

“The customer feedback has been even more overwhelming that I thought it would be,” Fuhrman said. “I can’t claim 100 percent customer retention, but I do get a lot of, ‘I’m never going to another laundromat again.’ Some love the coffee, some love the comfortable seating and some love the big-screen TVs. I can tell you that of all of the men who have been dragged in by their significant others to do laundry probably dreaded going; however, once they saw that the basketball game was on and then got a cup of coffee, they were like, ‘This place isn’t so bad. I think I can hang here for a while.’”

And for those who don’t feel like hanging around a laundromat, no matter how nice it is, the Washouse also offers a wash-dry-fold service for $1.25 per pound.

“The drop-off business is going surprisingly well,” Fuhrman said. “We beat our forecast for drop-off business in the first four months by 100 percent each month. We had drop-off customers from Week One. Most people here don’t have a clue that is an existing service. People in Chicago and New York know all about drop-off laundry. But people in Colorado go, ‘Huh, what’s that?’ It’s a big secret.”

It won’t be a secret for long – not if Greg Fuhrman has his way.

“I would like to either franchise the Washouse concept or get an investor group together and open these up in other areas,” he divulged. “Whether that means just other cities in Colorado, I don’t know. But I think it’s a concept that will work in either a student location or in a big city location.”