It's curtains for laundry services startup DoorMint

Chaitanya Gudipatymoneycontrol.com

On-demand laundry services startup DoorMint has called it a day. The Mumbai-based startup — which began its journey from Powai and expanded to Gurgaon and Bengaluru to become a trustworthy name in the online laundry space — has succumbed to the financial pressures of processing clothes.

In an email to DoorMint community, DoorMint Co-founder and Chief Executive Abhinav Agarwal wrote, “A truly scalable and profitable business model in laundry as an online-enabled business for mass consumption eluded us till the end. The costs of processing clothes, pick up and drop logistics and packaging made it difficult to recover through prices.”  

He further wrote: “As of 19 September, DoorMint will not be accepting any new orders. All the orders in the system will be processed.”

The signs of an impending closure were visible when DoorMint had shut operations in parts of Gurgaon and Bengaluru in July. It had started out as an online firm providing on-demand electrician, plumber, carpenter, electronics appliance repair and pest control, but ultimately restricted its operations to laundry and related services. The startup had claimed to make Rs 300 per order on an average through 500-600 orders a day.

“We are proud of what we have accomplished during our journey, we served more than 1 lakh orders and processed more than 12 lakh clothes with an average turnaround time of 3 days,” Agarwal wrote.

Agarwal was optimistic of bringing back DoorMint in a new avatar soon. “We will be back again in some new form very soon offering something different, but that story will be told only in time,” he wrote.

DoorMint was launched in September 2014, by IIT alumni Agarwal, Naman Lahoty, and Piyush Ranjan. It had last year secured USD 3 million in Series A funding from Helion Venture Partners and Kalaari Capital, and also seed funding from Powai Lake Ventures.

Industry estimates peg the size of India’s laundry industry at RS 2.2 lakh crore of which unorganized market —dhobis, etc — accounts for about Rs 5,000 crore. DoorMint’s peers include PickMyLaundry, Aap Ka Dhobi, Urban Dhobi, Wassup and Dirk Da Dhobi.

India’s startup industry has seen quite a few shutdowns in the recent months. In the first half of the year about 29 startups terminated operations owing to financial pressures, markdowns and funding crunch. According to KPMG and CB Insights report India based funding in Q2 FY16 dropped 59 percent  (Q-o-Q) to USD 600 million. Some of them include Intelligent Interfaces, PepperTap, Fashionara and AskMeBazaar.