Meet Alex Burns of Life Without Laundry in Boston

Today we’d like to introduce you to Alex Burns.

Alex, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
You know, I loved college. Like, REALLY loved college.

The atmosphere, the “scenery”, the life in general. But I always had this one thing that would nag me: Laundry Day.

Despised it! Hated it like Indiana Jones hates snakes.

See, I don’t know about you, but I just had one too many times dragging that cheapo hamper from orientation down four flights of stairs, pockets stuffed with quarters, just to find that all the darn machines were being used!

Then, whenever we actually do get to use the machines, we both a. lose a single sock, and b. we have to deal with folding afterwards! And all this while taking up 1 to 1½ hours of our days. Ridiculous.

So, while my automatically-laundry-folding super-high-capacity washer-dryer is being built, thought I might start a laundry service. Born in October of 2009, I present to you, “Life Without Laundry”.

Never again will a friend ask “what’s that smell?” while visiting your room. Never again will your girlfriend, boyfriend, husband, wife, or confused cousin refuse to show affection for you because your 3 week old gym socks are sitting in that odor basket at the foot of your bed.

Instead, check us out. We’re unlike anything out there because, well we’re AWESOME! For as low as $1.99 per lb. you can have your laundry picked-up and delivered back to you all nice and lovely.

Oh and we can pick up and deliver your dry cleaning too!

How did you ever live without us?

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Struggles at times. Obstacles to overcome. But would it be fun any other way? 🙂

Let’s just say in Feb 2010, with the company still in its infancy, we ran a Groupon. Sold 1100 + coupons (Wooo!). We are rolling now I thought!

Few problems:

1. Procedures weren’t in place to handle very high volumes yet.

2. We didn’t restrict usage on the site enough. We allowed upwards of 60/70 people to schedule on night 1 to redeem.

3. We got it all picked up! But that’s where the good news ends. By the end of the night we had 30+ orders and we had absolutely no earthly idea what belonged to who. Just labels customer A, customer B, customer C, etc…. not exactly what people are looking for right?

In any event we had people come down to the mat we were working out of at that time, identify their laundry, like a suspect lineup, and we reimbursed many many people for the trouble.

Anyways best news from that night…. We worked out a TON of kinks, all at once, and better procedures and methods were born. That was 2/10, so 7 years later, we now do more than that night nightly, and we have a ridiculously high success rate. Ty Groupon! 🙂

Please tell us about Life Without Laundry.
Specialize laundry.

Proud of laundry.

Specialize laundry (oh wait said that… sorry we do a lot of it!).

Some people say they love our customer service (that’s me yay!). I handle all my customer service personally. (I is Alex, the owner… <—That’s a fun sentence.). I work very hard to ensure each and every customer is treated exactly the way I would like to be treated by a business and that seems to go ok :-).

Others say they love the folding. We use super snazzy folding contraptions (they aren’t that snazzy but they are contraptions) to ensure folding and our quality of our product remain super-duper high.

Lastly some people say they love our dry cleaning. We partner with one of the best dry cleaners in all of Boston. They have over 40 years of experience and do a ridiculously great job on anything from pants, to shirts, to dresses, to suits, to jackets, to wedding dresses (their specialty). In any event I am very proud to be working in tandem with them. We are the laundry experts, they are the dry cleaning experts, together we form a bad ass power ranger robot (well not really, we would be easily defeated by those robots, but I am still excited to see the movie coming out soon, and will be looking for weaknesses in their robot we can exploit with our excessive amount of detergent, fabric softener and dryer sheets. (You don’t want none of this!)

Do you look back particularly fondly on any memories from childhood?
Burns Beach!

Yes that’s my last name in front of the word beach…. let me explain quickly:

We had a big backyard growing up. It had an above ground swimming pool in it. One day my mom decided we didn’t want the pool anymore. Professional pool removing people came and did what they were trained to do, you guessed it, (well if you guessed the following you guessed it, if not I still think you are awesome but you didn’t guess it) they removed the pool!

Anyways this is where the story gets fun. My best friend and I (we are 6/7 years old at this point) decide we should flood the backyard and make the biggest beach ever (the term beach admittingly is being used loosely here, it was a very large mud puddle. But I like the term beach!) My mom, being one of the coolest moms to ever walk the mean streets of West Springfield, MA, of course gave us the go ahead and the only piece of equipment we needed, a hose. Let the fun begin!

Anyways to summarize, we flooded our backyard, played for hours, remembered as some of the most fun had by all ever in the history of fun, and so ya, there’s my fav childhood memory.

Maybe I should flood my backyard now… I’ll be back in a bit!

Pricing:

• Laundry- 1.99 per lb (free pickup / delivery included)
• Dry cleaning – Listed item by item on website!
• Alterations – Listed item by item on website!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.LifeWithoutLaundry.com
• Phone: 617-768-7779
• Email: alex@lifewithoutlaundry.com
• Facebook: https://facebook.com/lifewithoutlaundry/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/lifewolaundry
• Yelp: https://m.yelp.com/biz/life-without-laundry-boston