From Product-First to Full-Funnel: A 12-Year Evolution

0:00You know, with dry cleaning and laundry, you have an industry that's always been around, but one that has not innovated in decades. The experience has been basically the same outside of the washer-dryer. There hasn't really been that much innovation in this space. The laundry is being picked up on my house. It's being taken care of and then being brought back to me. So I would need to also have a certain type of trust. There are certain products that are an impulse purchase. You see it and you buy it. And for rent, because you have to really trust us, you're giving us your clothes. We find customers, they're really intentional about their closet and what they wear.

0:28And so it's much more a considered purchase. And so a lot of the pieces of the puzzle as we've been building RINSE have been in service of building trust. You're setting a benchmark in what a good customer experience is and what an excellent service means. I think a lot of that is related to creating a category, building awareness, educating customers that this sort of thing exists. But the idea of you can do it this way, where it's kind of the combination of technology and innovation and customer centric design, the craft of high quality cleaning, they can press a button and have this happen.

0:58And so.

1:03Hey, everybody. Thank you for listening. My name is Andres Figueira, and I'm going to be your host for the day. This show is brought to you by the Global Talent Company, helping fast growing teams hire exceptional remote talent from Argentina, South Africa and beyond. We connect companies with world-class professionals who bring skill, reliability, and global perspective to every role. So if your team's looking to grow with proven remote talent, head on over to theglobaltalent.co and see how we can help. And today, with me here, I'm speaking with Ajay Prakash, CEO and co-founder of Rinse, a company that is creating a seamless dry cleaning and laundry experience for their customers through a combination of technology, incredible customer service, and strong back-end partnerships.

1:49So Ajay, it's a pleasure to have you here on the show. How are you doing? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me, Andres. No problem at all. It really is a pleasure to see a company like yours, Ajay, hop on because I must say it is the first time that I'm speaking with somebody who has found success through a dry cleaning and laundry experience. So I must say that I'm generally pretty interested in hearing how everything started, Ajay, and how this idea came to mind. So would you be able to give us a bit more of your background and just put us in context in your own words as to what Rinse is? Yeah, absolutely.

2:23So I started Rinse with my co-founder, James, in early 2013. So prior to that, I had experience in consulting and private equity. And then in 2010, when I was in or 2009, when I was in business school, I did an internship at a early stage startup called Bonobos, which was, you know, at the time just selling men's pants. Now it's a powerhouse men's brand. And I loved it. And so that was, you know, sort of my transition into the startup world, into the consumer world. And I left business school as the first hire of a consumer startup. The COO and the CFO really enjoyed that experience. And when I transitioned out in 2012, I think the one thing I knew was that I wanted to be in startups.

3:03I love the feeling of building and I knew I wanted to be the one building it and actually starting it. And so I started on a journey of trying to understand where there was an intersection of, you know, where am I excited? Where am I an expert? Where is there a market opportunity? And I went on this exploration that led me to determine that my expertise, because my background was all being a generalist helping various industries. My expertise was much more about being an individual who was always working long hours and never had enough time and really needed to be intentional about how I optimize my life.

3:37And so, you know, I started looking at ideas where there was friction in the consumer experience and also couple that with opportunities to bring technology to various industries. And, you know, I had different ideas I was thinking about. But James, my co-founder, is one of my best friends from college. I'd known him since, you know, now 26 years, I guess. But at the time, you know, he was also thinking about startups on the healthcare side. But he actually came to me and he mentioned the idea of dry cleaning and laundry. and it was a moment where I think the stars sort of aligned because dry cleaning and laundry really fit the pain points I was trying to solve.

4:16James is someone I really trusted and I'd always viewed as a potential co-founder and he actually grew up in dry cleaning. His parents were dry cleaners, he understood the industry. And so that was where the conversation started in early 2013. And for us, it was a little bit of looking at not only why should we be the one starting it, But why at that moment? And it was also a moment where the iPhone was becoming ubiquitous and everybody was kind of starting to get trained on, I press a button and something happens. Companies like Uber and Lyft were really starting to explode. And, you know, the on-demand industry was starting to come to fruition.

4:54So a lot of that stuff happened around the same time. And that's where we started the rinse journey in early 2013. okay and and ajay when you mentioned that laundry and dry cleaning were things that um address the pain points you were thinking about at that time can you specify what pain points you were looking at like what was the the catalyzer that that made you decide that hey yeah besides your partner and everything like laundry and dry cleaning is it yeah yeah well so i mean again i was looking at the two main things i was looking at was which customer experiences at that time were full of friction.

5:31You know, where was it hard to accomplish something or hard to do, or it took a lot of extra time or extra thinking? And then where was there an opportunity to bring technology to the industry? And so when, you know, with dry cleaning and laundry, you have an industry that's always been around, but one that has not innovated in decades. The experience has been basically the same. Outside of the washer dryer, there hasn't really been that much innovation in this space. And if you think about the pain points, you know, one thing that I knew as a customer of the services. And the beauty of it is we're all customers of the services to a certain extent.

6:03But what I knew was that when you look at it, and this got reaffirmed with everyone we talked to, there wasn't one silver bullet to solve this pain point. It was like when you look at the experience of dry cleaning or you look at the experience of laundry, there's all these little pain points along the way. And so we always referred to it as death by a thousand cuts. It wasn't just go do that one thing and this will be a 10X experience. It was like, actually, you got to do a lot of things really well and kind of create this seamless experience from start to finish. And so that's where I got excited because there was clearly friction that we could remove.

6:38And AJ, in terms of marketing this new service and marketing rinse, how have you gone about it? What channels are you using and what is working best for you right at the moment? Well, so at the moment, it's an important piece because I think the way to think about as you build a consumer business, the way you market, the way you earn customer loyalty over time can evolve. And it really does depend on the moment. You know, right now we are 12 years into the journey. We're in 11 major markets across North America. You know, we have we have created this category and we continue to create it. And so our marketing has evolved to the point where we are really investing in a full funnel marketing approach where you think about demand generation at the top of funnel and building brand awareness.

7:24And you kind of build the full funnel all the way down to demand capture where you get people searching for a pickup and delivery service near them or searching for rinse directly. But you can't start there, right? So early on when we started, this was not about, hey, let's go build top of funnel awareness as much as it was about whoever comes in the door early on. Let's just make sure they have an amazing experience. So when they come in, they love it. They come back. It's not an inherently viral space. People don't really talk about their laundry and dry cleaning needs. But if you can have people come in and love it and keep coming back, then you can start building word of mouth.

8:03And early on, it was really about focusing on the customer experience and nailing that. And then as we've evolved, it's been about evolving the marketing to reach more and more people, to think more broadly, and to have a more holistic approach to customer acquisition. Of course. Now, and I can imagine also in terms of what I believe Rinse, what it provides as well is that like if I were to use Rinse, the laundry is being picked up on my house. It's being taken care of and then being brought back to me. So I would need to also have a certain type of trust and know that nothing is going to happen to my clothes.

8:36Nothing is going to get lost or washed incorrectly. And that is also a thing you need to fill in that journey with the customer and just make them sure that they're trusting you and that you're providing the best experience possible to them. So I get why it would begin that way. and in terms of campaigns that you can use as an example, Jay, that you feel have worked very well for you guys as you say like, hey, we got a bunch of conversions and a lot of people started using it after we did this. Do you have something that you could use as an example for that? Yeah, well, first, before I do that, just to build on the trust piece, I think that is a really important part of our service.

9:16What we learned early on was that there are certain products that are an impulse purchase, you see it and you buy it. And for Rinse, because you have to really trust us, you're giving us your clothes, you're giving us clothes not only that you've invested in, but you care deeply about. And we find customers, they're really intentional about their closet and what they wear. And so it's much more a considered purchase. And so a lot of the pieces of the puzzle as we've been building Rinse, the brand, the company, the business over time have been in service of building trust. And so it starts with an amazing product experience.

9:49And it's not just one time where you have a great experience, but you have to build the emotional bank account over time. You have to be consistent and reliable. And every time we show up, we have to nail it. And you do that through amazing quality, through, you know, great design can lead to trust, right? Great communication can lead to trust. Our valets who show up at the door are all W-2 employees and they're professional and they're friendly. And that leads to trust. And so, you know, every piece of the customer experience reinforces that trust. And that's been really, really important in the journey.

10:24You know, in terms of specific campaigns, I can't point to one because I think they all kind of build on each other, right? There is this element of, there hasn't really been a spiky, you know, hey, we did this one campaign and all of a sudden everything worked. It's all about, you know, compounding building of trust, right? Every ad you see, every time you hear about Rint, every time you engage with us, you should feel more and more trust in the brand and the company. And I think where we are as we've evolved, again, this goes back to at the moment, wherever the company is at the moment, the way you might approach acquisition is different.

11:02It depends on where you are from a size standpoint. It depends on how many customers you need to acquire to see the growth you're looking for. It depends on how much money you have. You can't always just invest in a lot of marketing and go top of funnel and be on TV or billboards. But I think where Rinse has evolved is we started off really just focused on product, execute the customer experience, start building that trust. We evolved to being very channel specific. Hey, we have a certain amount of capital to test different channels. And, you know, if you look at most companies, there's this power law around customer acquisition where one or two channels drive most of it.

11:40And so, you know, you want to kind of find what that is. And for us, from a capital standpoint, from the fact that this is a new category and, you know, there's real capital involved to build awareness. Our best channel has been through AdWords and, you know, SEM, where there's high intent traffic, SEO as well. people who are already looking for it. That's historically where we've been. But then as we've had more capital and the ability to test more, we, you know, we've been, we started with the channel specific approach because we couldn't afford to do more. And I think we've graduated or evolved to more of a, you know, being able to take an integrated marketing approach, which I think is really important for a service like ours, where we're creating the category, we're building the brand, we're trying to build trust and do it all at the same time.

12:27So now there's not one campaign. It's just it's always a continuous evolution. And I love that that you're pointing that out and that that has been a journey that you guys have had specifically because I have talked to other companies that it was, yes, like this one channel and this campaign was what caused a lot of change. But I think it also leads back to what you were telling me and the fact that laundry and dry cleaning, it isn't. I'm laughing out loud of this term nowadays because I've heard it a lot and people are talking about how sexy a company can be in terms of what they provide and how they look to the customer.

13:00And laundry is something that is so routinary and so mundane that people don't think much about it. But I could think that as you're doing it and as rinse is being such a, what's it called? You're setting a benchmarking what a good customer experience is and what an excellent service means and just not faltering in that, in what you represent, is something that I think brings a lot of organic marketing, like very word of mouth. People say like, hey, I'm having trouble here with my three hours I need to spend by doing laundry. And somebody's like, hey, why don't you just use rinse? And it's like obvious to them because it's just something implicit that it works, it's trustworthy, and that it's seamless.

13:39So I think it's also pretty cool that you are still able to grow and just by remaining steady and constant with what you guys do. Yeah, I think a lot of that, you know, it is related to creating a category, building awareness, educating customers that this sort of thing exists. And I think, you know, laundry and dry cleaning has certainly been around forever. Everybody needs, everyone does laundry. Most people do dry cleaning. but the idea of you can do it this way where it's kind of the combination of technology and innovation and customer-centric design with the craft of high-quality cleaning on the back end.

14:20It is new and there are still people who don't know. They can press a button and have this happen. And so that consistent education is super important and that's where as we do a great job with our existing customers, certainly one piece of that puzzle is their brand loyalty and their espousing the brand to others as we grow. And the hope is as we continue to grow and scale, at some point the brand takes hold and everybody knows what Rinse is and it becomes a default. Of course, I'm going to use them. I'm listening to you speak and in terms of now that I properly understand what Rinse is, and I feel like it can turn into an Uber in the sense that people could just say like, hey, you got your laundry.

14:59Why don't you just rinse it? or why don't you make sure that you rinse your laundry? It becomes natural and ingrained in their mind because it represents this new automated process of doing laundry. Because honestly, here in Argentina, since I live in Buenos Aires, if I have to walk five blocks with two bags of laundry one more time to the dry cleaners, I think I'm going to lose it. And I'm listening to the proposal that Rinse has. And I'm like, if this existed here, it would be amazing because I would use it so much. Oh, my goodness. Yeah. I mean, it's a universal pain point. Exactly. It's something that everybody needs to do.

15:36So I feel like you really hit the jackpot in terms of understanding some place that was actually this solution was needed. So I think that's really cool, Ajay. Really, really cool. And, okay, using AI, Ajay, which is a very trending topic nowadays. I understand that Ritz is a very, I feel it's like a very physical company. company, like you need to get the clothes, you need to clean them. Are you guys leveraging AI in any way in your processes that you have within the company, be it backend or be it even like an AI bot assistant that is talking to people, not just share, just wondering what you guys are doing with that?

16:14Yeah, no, absolutely. Well, I mean, I think just even stepping back to, you know, when we started Rinse, we knew that the barriers to entry in this space were going to be pretty low. anybody can kind of go do someone's laundry, but it's the barriers to scale that are really high. And a core part of building RINs has been the technology backbone and our ability to leverage technology to scale challenging problems. So as an example, before any of, you know, OpenAI and all these other things have come out, you know, we had developed automated route creation as a way to make sure that we're optimizing our routes.

16:48And that's one example of many. But the way we think about AI is, you know, AI is not a solve for everything. AI is a tool to enhance productivity. And so we want to use AI to enhance productivity wherever we can. And so certainly we're using it in the back end. Our engineering team uses AI to help accelerate development work. We are using AI on the customer care side. That's a great example, a great place where you can use AI to help with, you know, agentic workflows around conversation, easy to handle type requests from customers. And it's great because if you can get to a point where, you know, it's not only a consistent response, but it's a fast response because speed and quality are the two most important things on customer care.

17:28It can become very valuable. And then it creates space for our customer care associates to handle, you know, more challenging or, you know, higher need customer inquiries. Right. So so it's enhancing productivity across the board. There's workflows that can be smoother. When you think about managing a very operationally complex business across 11 major markets and soon to be more major markets in multiple countries, you know, there are a lot of workflows that if you if you build that manually will break. And so AI certainly can help enhance productivity. So it's something we're thinking about.

18:02But I mean, I think you have to be thinking about it, no matter what type of company you are. We're a laundry company, so AI is not going to do the laundry. But, you know, you have to be thinking about it in terms of being able to build the systems and processes to be able to scale. And for us, as a category creator, as someone trying to build a dominant, you know, brand and a household name, AI is going to be a core tool to help us get there. I'm a super fan of Ritz now. Like, I really want you guys to become a household name for real. and jay i i heard and i believe if i'm not mistaken i saw on linkedin that you guys are in several different cities and states in the u.s right but you're not anywhere outside of that country is that correct well so a few months ago we launched uh canada so we are now in toronto as well okay so cool okay you're laughing you launched canada very nice and do you have any plans and this is just me asking of expanding into Latin America or Europe or any other markets?

18:58Absolutely. I mean, I think the one thing we've learned as we built RINSE is that, again, it is a universal need, right? It is a service that and a pain point that is felt not just in the U.S., not just in Canada, but in Argentina, in Europe, in Asia. And, you know, I've actually, as we've built RINSE and we've been creating this category, I've had founders from different countries reach out to me and tell me a bit about what they're trying to build, based on what they see Rince doing. And so I know that there's a global need here. I mean, I think for us, the near-term opportunity certainly is the U.S.

19:31It's a massive market. There are a lot of customers that we can help in the U.S., but one of the reasons we launched Canada as an example was to start to build out our global expansion playbook. And so I don't think we're going to be in any new countries in 2026, but certainly as we think about our roadmap, other countries are part of the journey. Now, and I love that you're using Canada as like the test drive for global expansion because it's a market that I believe could be pretty similar to the one you find in the States. And AJ, in terms of the team that you have backing you up with all of this project, like I feel like it's a very big endeavor and this cannot be handled by just one man alone and you have your partner, but how many people compose RINSE And how big is the workforce that you have helping you out?

20:22Yeah, I mean, this is certainly a team effort. You know, we're north of 100 employees across our markets, not including our valets. And, you know, we have several hundred valets across the markets as well. And again, they're all W2 employees. But, I mean, I think the team is really important. And we've been very intentional about how we built this team. You know, not only do I have my co-founder, James, who's our COO, and our other co-founder, Sam, who's our CTO. We've been here, we've all been working together since 2013. And so you can imagine 12 years plus together, the amount of institutional knowledge we have and the ability to collaborate.

20:59But when you look at our top 10 senior leaders, we actually have over 70 years of RINCE experience among that team because there's so much retention and people have stuck around a long time. And as we scale, we're building out the team. We actually, we just hired a CMO this year, Jennifer, who's been excellent, and she's really helping take us to the next level. And we're going to continue to build the team. But it is absolutely a team effort. I think, again, as I said, the barriers to scale are what's really harder. And you have to be able to manage significant operational complexity while you are creating a category and building a brand and building trust with all of these customers and helping them change behavior from something they've already had to do and finding a better way.

21:39I mean, this is not an easy problem to solve. It takes a lot of work and it takes a lot of, you know, everyone else to kind of be aligned and row in the same direction. But our team has been incredible. And, you know, I'm confident we have the best team in the industry. And I love that we've been able to stick together for as long as we have because it really gives us a huge advantage when it comes to the continued evolution and pushing forward. Now, and having such a tight knit group really helps out with creating culture for the company. And it really helps with whoever is a newcomer that comes in.

22:10And you can totally catch the vibe of how everybody acts, how you report and how you work and responsibilize yourself. So I think that is really, really, really nice. And in terms of the way that you guys work, would Rince be a remote first company? Or do you have the team segregated into different headquarters around the states or something like that? Yeah. So the way I would describe it is we're a distributed company. And I think it's a little bit complex because, one, we are in 11 major markets around North America. And so we have a physical operation. So we know we have to have people on the ground in every market where we are picking up the clothes.

22:50We're getting the clothes clean with our partners. We're delivering them back. So there's a need for on the ground, in the warehouse employment and a team there. We also have people who don't need to be in a warehouse. And so, you know, if anyone's watching our video, you can see my background. I'm at home and these are my kids. This is my kids' art behind me. But, you know, like we have people who are working from home. And so it is a distributed workforce in the sense that we have to be excellent at navigating across multiple regions anyway. And so we're able to have people work from all over.

23:23But culture is critical, right? So how do you, you know, there are complexities when you manage a culture that has a combination of people who are working from home and people working from the warehouse. We have other challenges of, you know, we have people who've been around for years since pre-COVID and understand the journey we've been on others who we've been hiring over the last year or two who don't have all that context. And so I actually spend a lot of my time as we're building RINs focused on the culture, making sure that we're bringing the right people on the bus, making sure that, you know, they are aligned with our core values and they have the context of how we got here and we're all, you know, aligned on where we're going.

23:57And I think that's in my job. I think the two most important things are making sure we have cash and then taking care of the culture. So that's where I spend a lot of my time. What do you believe is Rince's priority for 2026 or the top three things you would love to accomplish with Rince in this next following year? Yeah, I mean, 2026 is all about continuing our journey as a category creator. And really, you know, I think we have market leadership, we've pulled ahead of everyone. And I think we're really focused on pulling away as we up level on the brand side, on the product side, on the customer experience side, and really just invest in scaling the business.