We are again pre-announcing our plan for the entire holiday season this year to provide a consolidated announcement.  We will also resend a reminder just before Thanksgiving.  As always, we will work closely with and prioritize our business customers, who we know need their returns to serve their own customers.

As always, we ask that regularly scheduled customers traveling for the holidays remember to place their account on vacation hold to avoid the monetary and environmental cost of sending our team to your location, and the resulting $17 no laundry left for pickup charge if we do go out to your location.

Also, please remember that the email and text notification component of our software is determined by days of the week, and not dates on a calendar.  Unfortunately, we are not able on these small handful of adjusted holiday dates each year to adjust the notifications.  Please disregard the night before notifications if they differ from what follows (and please bear in mind that night before notifications may not be sent on the adjusted days).  

However, the same day notifications and reminders will occur on the date of your holiday adjusted scheduled pickup or return.

Looking way ahead, the Christmas and New Years holidays in 2022 both fall on Saturdays into Sundays.  Therefore, there will be no changes for these holiday weekends this year.

July 4th falls on a Monday in 2022.  Friday July 1st pickups will be returned on Tuesday July 5th.  Saturday July 2nd pickups will be returned Wednesday July 6th.  And, pickups scheduled for Monday July 4th should be placed out and will be picked up on Tuesday July 5th, with our business customers being returned on schedule Wednesday July 6th, and our residential customers either being returned on schedule on Wednesday July 6th, or being returned on Thursday July 7th (depending on our volume and staffing on Tuesday July 5th).

Our Thanksgiving day (Thursday) pickups and returns will be moved to the day after Thanksgiving. If you have a pickup the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, please anticipate a Friday return date.  Our Wednesday pickups should not be effected by thanksgiving, though return times on Friday may be later than normal in the day because of the consolidation.

As noted above, we will work to focus on prioritizing our business customers and getting them prioritized returns, on days that are earlier than the adjusted return dates above.

We know each year that this does create some added complexity.   Nonetheless, we believe that enabling the people who handle your laundry to take time off of work on the some specific holidays ultimately leads to serving you better through the year as a whole.

We wish you all the best on July 4th, on Thanksgiving weekend, and during the holiday season and in the new year.

Sincerely,

The Marin Wash and Fold Team

We recently on May 6th shared a message about having hired a far more experienced Operations Manager.  Please review that, if you have not yet done so.  We are pleased to share here our plan to begin using The Predictive Index (PI) as part of our process for hiring our Laundry Service Professionals.  You can learn more about the PI at https://www.predictiveindex.com.  It has been in use for over 65 years.  It is designed to improve hiring practices by assessing the key behavioral and cognitive drivers that determine what people are good at and what drives relationship dynamics in the workplace. 

Unlike resumes that primarily address a person’s past, the PI is forward looking.  It will enable us to create a personality profile for the Laundry Services Professional role (analogous to a job description, but focused on required personality traits) that summarizes the key traits we believe are essential in the best people for this role.  Candidates will take the five minute online survey that will inform us of whether they appear to be a good fit for the role even before we move to a formal discussion and interview. 

Of course, this is not fool proof, as people will know the job for which they are applying before taking the survey, and can attempt to answer according to what they think we want to hear.  But, PI has a 65 year track record of success in this field for a reason.  

Please allow us to close this communication by explaining why we are making a substantial, annual, recurring, capital investment in licensing a tool traditionally used by much larger companies.  We went to great lengths when we launched in 2018 to have and create the best people, best software package for tracking customer preferences, and most thorough and detailed operational processes, all put in place to help assure that we could scale and maintain attention to detail as we grew.  Hiring to meet demand and training new people at a healthy physical distance in the Covid era gave us a crash course in realizing that some personality types are resistant to adhering to the detailed procedures, processes, checklists, redundancies, and communications methodologies we had put in place.  These only matter if we hire people who follow, adhere to, and use them.  Hence, we are attempting to close a gap that has existed in our organization by  matching the people with the role.

Like most businesses, we are not perfect.  We can only strive to continually learn faster and improve our performance.  We hope both our current and future customers, and our residential and business customers alike, will recognize and appreciate that this is another example of how we strive to provide the best service possible.  We are essentially hiring on behalf of the customers we serve.  Our investment in the PI will help us further improve our performance.

Very sincerely yours,

Michael Gralnick
Co-Owner
Marin Wash and Fold

We are pleased to share how we will be able to serve our customers even better as a result of a recent change in our Management Team. 

Our General Manager, who had over a decade of laundry service experience when we launched in 2018, has been with us from the start and remains our General Manager.  However, we have replaced our Operations Manager.

We operate with a General Manager responsible for overall quality and an Operations Manager responsible for training, developing, and overseeing our growing production team of Laundry Service Professionals, so a larger number of people can deliver the same quality as our most experienced team members.  Our new Operations Manager has exponentially more management, hiring, and leadership experience than our prior, original Operarions Manager.  He is therefore much better equipped to translate all our detailed and thorough processes and procedures into consistent implementation by a larger team of people, thereby enabling us to better maintain and improve our attention to detail as we grow.

This change actually took place over three months ago.  However, we wanted to wait until some time passed and all of the Laundry Services Professionals on our team adapted to the change to make this formal announcement.  All of our six driving team members who I have personally and carefully selected who have been with us for years are still with us, and we also have a new addition starting this week. 

Yet, as I anticipated might happen, the past few months has resulted in some departures and even more new members joining our team of Laundry Services Professionals.  The new additions are coming in under the collective expectations being set by myself and my wife as co-founders, our General Manager, and our new, far more experienced, Operations Manager.  I am optimistic that the culture shift we have created recently has resulted in the removal (either deliberately by us or organically) of the former members of our team whose selection and hiring may have been either rushed (due to the rapid increase in demand for our service, while we were also navigating Covid) or made in error due to the relative management inexperience of our former Operations Manager.

Unfortunately, our prior Operations Manager lacked the management experience to be able to maintain what our new Operations Manager can maintain and achieve.  As startup businesses grow, they often transition from the people they are able to attract early on as managers to having the ability to attract and pay more experienced managers.  (In our case, we were able to start with a small team of people who even then had over a decade of experience with Wash and Fold laundry service.  However, this is different from management expertise.)

When it became clear to me last December, 2021, that this change was both necessary and in the best interest of our customers, I began preparing and interviewing multiple potential candidates.  We feel very confident that our new Operations Manager who joined us in January was an excellent choice for the long term.  We are confident that his management style will lead to even greater quality, and improved service to our customers. 

I have learned in life that my decision-making, while guided by experience and wisdom, is not fool proof.  Inherent in life is the inescapable fact that wisdom is acquired over time.  Just as I am wiser now than I was a few years ago, a few years from now I will have new hindsight on the decisions I have made recently.

So, I will close by sharing the feedback of another key member of our team on the result of our selection process.  One of our long term driving team members decided in January, 2022, just as the above referenced transition was happening, to train and become a shift leader within our production team of Laundry Services Preofessoinals.  She knows our philosophy and vision for the business.  After spending extensive time with our new Operarions Manager, she recently said to me “I don’t know how you could have found anyone better.”

We have tried to use these notifications and messages as a source of both logistical updates and full transparency on how we operate, and how we evolve and improve over time.  We apologize to those who feel we provide too much detail and transparency.  We appreciate the trust you have placed in our ability to evolve and improve, to serve you better.  And, we also appreciate your referrals.

Very sincerely yours,
Michael Gralnick
Co-Owner
Marin Wash and Fold

This message serves to explain how our credit card preauthorizations work, alert existing customers to a slight change in that process, and explain the reasons for that change.

Going forward, you may notice that our preauthorizations may start to be slightly more than your ultimate invoice.  Our software is being reset to preauthorize an additional $10 automatically, and we may ultimately adjust this to an additional $20.  Here is why.

We initially chose to not add an additional preauthorization amount.  We wanted to minimize placing a hold on cards for any more than necessary, to support our more cost sensitive customers.  Unfortunately, some customers have expressed frustration recently due to the impact of how the banking system handles credit card preauthorizations.  And, we have realized that others have been effected (albeit without being bothered).  When the credit card preauthorization is even slightly less than the final invoice, some banks automatically separate the final transaction from the preauthorization.  Instead of the preauthorization automatically being replaced by the final invoice, a duplicate charge may remain until it automatically disappears after several business days. 

Unlike a gas station that preauthorizes for the maximum potential charge and stops the transaction at that amount or a hotel that places a hold for potential incidental charges beyond the room rate and tax, we had previously leaned toward a lower preauthorization amount.  We did this knowing that there may be some additional charges for per item pricing.  We will now be seeking to strike a better balance among the needs of our different customers in this regard.

The credit card preauthorization balance is not an exact science because of what we just described above about how the banks process estimated preauthorizations. Our new approach is intended to strike the best balance possible among the slightly different needs and priorities of our different customers. 

Our service enables people to exchange a cost in the value of time put into doing chores (ar time and cost spent driving to a drop off laundry service) for a dollar cost for a service that saves time and allows people to re-invest their time in things that provide either a non-monetary return or a greater financial return from how our customers use their newfound free time. 

On aggregate, if you are in the group that prefers the old approach to the new approach, we trust that the aggregate value of time saved will still exceed any inconvenience from our attempt to strike this balance among our customers.

Sincerely,
The Marin Wash and Fold Team

We are pre-announcing our plan for the entire holiday season this year to provide a consolidated announcement. We will also resend a reminder just before Thanksgiving and just before Christmas.

As always, we ask that regularly scheduled customers traveling for the holidays remember to place their account on vacation hold to avoid the monetary and environmental cost of sending our team to your location, and the resulting $15 no laundry left for pickup charge if we do go out to your location.

Also, please remember that the email and text notification component of our software is determined by days of the week, and not dates on a calendar. Unfortunately, we are not able on these small handful of adjusted holiday dates each year to adjust the notifications. Please disregard the night before notifications if they differ from what follows (and please bear in mind that night before notifications may not be sent on the adjusted days).

However, the same day notifications and reminders will occur on the date of your holiday adjusted scheduled pickup or return.

The Christmas and New Years holidays in 2021 both fall on Fridays into Saturdays.

Our Thanksgiving day (Thursday) pickups and returns will be moved to the day after Thanksgiving. If you have a pickup the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, please anticipate a Friday return date. Our Wednesday pickups should not be effected by thanksgiving, though return times on Friday may be later than normal in the day because of the consolidation.

Our Christmas and New Years Eve pickups and returns (Fridays) will occur on schedule. The Monday returns from our Christmas and New Years Eve (Friday) pickups should occur on their scheduled day (Monday), though later in the day or potentially in the evening. There is a small chance that some of those returns may be delayed into Tuesday morning.

Our Christmas and New Years Day (Saturday) pickups and returns will be formally moved to the following Tuesday. We anticipate being able to return some of the Thursday pickups on Monday rather than Tuesday if possible.

We will work to focus on prioritizing our business customers and getting them prioritized returns, on days that are earlier than the adjusted return dates above.

We know each year that this does create some added complexity. Nonetheless, we believe that enabling the people who handle your laundry to take time off of work on the holidays ultimately leads to serving you better through the year as a whole.

We wish you all the best during the holiday season and in the new year.

Sincerely,

The Marin Wash and Fold Team

This update will only impact a small subset of our weekly customers by increasing their total monthly cost for receiving our service by $20 per month ($5 per week). If you regularly exceed the new $35 minimum, the following will not have an impact on you.

We will be increasing our Marin County minimum charge from $30 to $35, effective November 7th. (The slightly higher minimum service charge in some locations mentioned on our website remains the minimum in those locations.)

Our software has been set to apply our slightly lower weekly customer rate to every other week customers, so long as they remain on a regularly fixed schedule. We invite any customers impacted by this increase to contact our customer satisfaction team by phone or email or log in to your account online to change from weekly to every other week service. Our software will automatically exclude you from our manifest every other week and include you every other week.

We strongly encourage our every other week customers to keep both email and text notifications turned on, so they can receive reminders the evening before their scheduled pickup.

Should you be able to switch to every other week service, you will simply be consolidating the pounds sent into fewer pickups, which will, as a result, exceed the minimum charge.

We trust that our long-term customers continue to appreciate the value in time saving and convenience of the service we provide. We hope that those impacted by this change will stay with us and continue to refer their friends and neighbors.

Sincerely,

The Marin Wash and Fold Team

The welcome email we send to new customers discusses the option to reuse plastic bags and the request to customers who have clothing hung to return hangers. For those who may have missed it, we are including the content of this email below.

We are having trouble ordering replacement hangers given the current, pandemic related supply chain challenges we have all heard about on the news.

We are therefore making a special request to all customers who have their clothing hung to return hangers to us each week when you send your dirty clothing. Please simply place extras in the pouch in your hanging item bag or above or below your clothing in your primary duffel bag.

This will help us assure that we can continue to provide the option to hang clothing and help us maintain prices without increase despite the increasing cost of the items we need to provide the service we provide.

Sincerely,
The Marin Wash and Fold Team

Above Referenced Welcome Email

Subject: Welcome To Marin Wash and Fold – What To Expect On The Day of Your First Pickup 

Thank you for scheduling your first pick up with Marin Wash and Fold Laundry Service. This short email will help orient you to what to expect on the day of your first pick-up. If you have any additional questions, please contact us by replying to this email or by calling us at (415) 858-9274, and pressing extension two. Please also don’t forget to review the FAQs on our website, which also answer a lot of questions.

Please leave your clothing out front, or in the location you specified in your pickup and delivery instructions, in a closed or sealed bag, such as a large plastic garbage bag, by 900 a.m. This allows our driving team members to place the entire bag or bags within our bags. Your clothing will be returned in our bags, which you will have for future use.  You can simply leave it on top of or alongside our primary laundry duffel bags.

You will notice that we return clothing in plastic bags within our duffel bags. This helps us separate clothing by family member (to the best of our ability to do so) and keep folded clothing neat during transportation. Unfortunately, it is also a a major source of wasted plastic and not good for our environment. If you would like to help minimize plastic waste, please place the several plastic bags within one plastic bag within your duffel bag when you send us your dirty laundry. We will maintain those as your plastic bags and reuse them with your personal clothing only. We will periodically discard them and provide new ones if they either develop a scent or become excessively wrinkled. But, this is better for our environment than replacing them every week or with every service. If you prefer to have fresh plastic bags with every service, then simply keep the plastic bags.

If you select to have certain clothing returned hanging rather than folded in your customer preferences, please return your hangers to us with your dirty Laundry for reuse. We know that over time the hangers we send back eventually end up discarded. So, asking our customers to periodically send them back rather than discarding them is also another way of reducing waste and helping our environment.

We look forward to being of service. If anything ever does not live up to your expectations, please let us know right away so we can make it right.

Sincerely, 

The Marin Wash and Fold Team