Laundry app services gather steam in Korea

You can get almost everything delivered to your doorstep in Korea — including your laundered clothing now.

A Washswat employee organizes laundry clothing. [SCREEN CAPTURE]

You can get almost anything delivered to your doorstep in Korea — including your laundered clothing.

Contact-free laundry services like Washswat and Laundry Go are gaining huge popularity as Koreans, especially young people in their 20s and 30s, are shunning doing chores themselves or going to dry cleaners.

Instead, people can just leave their laundry on their doorstep. The laundered clothes will be delivered to the doorstep in a day, at the earliest.

"I'm so satisfied with the service as we have no dry cleaners near my home," said Mr. Kang, a resident in Gyeonggi, who uses the service every week. "The delivery fee is quite a burden, but I'm planning to use it for a while."

The monthly active users (MAU) of Washswat reached 90,000 as of the end of April this year, more than double from the same period in 2020.

The MAU of Laundry Go also doubled to 30,000 during the same period.

The local market size of contact-free laundry service, which stands at some 5.7 trillion won ($4.3 billion) now, is expected to reach 7.2 trillion won in five years, according to estimates by Statistics Korea.

The service, which currently accounts for only 5 percent of total laundry services in Korea, will take up to 25 percent in 2028.

Established in 2015, Washswat currently has around 1 million users servicing roughly 12 million items of clothing so far. It handles around 30,000 items of clothing a day, and up to 900,000 per month.

Laundry Go, founded in 2019, has seen its orders rise 85 percent every year. The company posted 5.42 billion won in sales in March, up 105 percent on year.

Washswat offers contact-free laundry service that collects customers' laundry and delivers them to their doorstep after cleaning them. [SCREEN CAPTURE]

Meanwhile, the number of dry cleaners is on a constant decline.

There were around 27,000 dry cleaners in Korea in 2017, but that fell to some 20,000 this year, according to data from the Ministry of Health and Welfare.

On average, around 1,600 dry cleaners have shut down their businesses every year since 2020.

During the same period, the number of newly opened dry cleaners decreased annually from 518 in 2020, 418 in 2021 and 342 in 2022.

BY KIM KYUNG-HEE,SARAH CHEA [chea.sarah@joongang.co.kr]