Boring businesses still work and a community-based GTM

Brooklinen and Tower 28 have both rented a laundromat for events.

Not a gallery that looks like a laundromat. An actual working laundromat on Grand Street in Williamsburg, where people bring their washing seven days a week. Brands pay to hold events there, because it's a room people want to be in.

That is not a line item on any laundromat's financial model, ever. It exists because two 25-year-olds made a decision every experienced operator in the industry told them not to make.

What a laundromat's go-to-market has always been

Proximity. That's the whole strategy, and it has been for forty years.

You can read it off the walls of almost any of them. Machines filling every rentable square foot. Fluorescent tubes. A payment system installed a decade ago and never touched since. A few plastic chairs, placed to make waiting bearable rather than pleasant, because nobody is supposed to stay.

None of that is neglect. It's the correct answer to the question those businesses were built to answer: how many machine cycles can this square footage produce. And it was reinforced by something genuinely true about the category. Ben Razin, who co-founded Launderette, describes laundromats as running on if-it-isn't-broken logic — and notes that once you have a customer, they're very hard to lose.

Both halves are accurate, which is exactly why nothing changed for four decades. Customers arrive because you're close and stay because switching is annoying. If that's your acquisition and retention model, spending money on the room is irrational.

Then delivery apps made proximity worth much less, and nobody moved the furniture.

The Christmas dinner

At Christmas in 2023, Ireland McCaughey was 25 and listening to her family discuss their friends' retirements. Car washes, parking lots, laundromats — businesses that had paid for houses and tuition, now facing owners with no successor. The children had become consultants and engineers. Nobody wanted the 4am start and the broken dryer.

She and Razin saw the opening. Then they did something the standard boring-business playbook doesn't recommend: they didn't buy one.

They moved from Orange County to New York, pitched investors and lenders, took on real debt, and signed a lease on 1 July 2024 with six months of rent-free build-out. In January the payments began whether they were open or not. Launderette opened in February 2025.

Building is harder than buying on nearly every measure — no revenue, no customer list, a countdown clock instead of a cash flow statement. But it bought them the one thing an acquisition can't transfer. They got to decide what the room looked like.

Why the acquisition lane isn't the edge anyway

Worth calibrating expectations here, because the internet version of this thesis has the risk backwards.

Scott Shane at Case Western Reserve gave Fortune the relevant numbers. Americans filed 5.62 million new business applications in 2025, up around 8% and among the highest totals ever recorded. Over the same period BizBuySell, the largest marketplace for businesses for sale, recorded fewer than 10,000 completed sales — with volume falling further into early 2026.

Shane's summary: "Watching videos about buying a laundromat and buying a laundromat are very different activities."

The supply of aging owners is real. That part of the thesis holds. But the number of people who want to buy from them has grown far faster than the number of deals closing, and financing, seller negotiations and badly kept books are all in the way. Acquisition is the crowded trade.

The uncrowded question is the one nobody queues for: once you've got the business, what would you actually do differently?

The floor space decision

Launderette's space runs about 3,000 square feet with twelve-foot ceilings. It could hold considerably more machines than it does. Instead, a meaningful chunk went to communal seating and work tables — floor area producing no wash cycles at all.

Experienced operators told them not to. McCaughey has described the advice as blunt and unanimous, from people who understood the machine-cycle arithmetic perfectly well. What those advisers were pricing was the revenue the floor space would forgo. What they weren't pricing was what it would become.

The seating wasn't an amenity. It was the acquisition channel.

A room people choose to sit in produces things a wall of machines cannot. It produces a reason to walk past two closer laundromats. It produces the word of mouth that shows up as a 4.8 rating across 97 Google reviews. And it produces two revenue lines the category has never had.

The first is commercial. Hotels and Pilates studios became clients — B2B accounts with volume and predictability a walk-in wash-and-fold never has. That business is far easier to win when a prospect can stand in a room that looks like it's run by people who sweat details.

The second is the events. Which brings us back to Brooklinen and Tower 28, and to the fact that the least productive square footage in the building turned out to be the part generating the most interesting revenue.

Why this works better here than it should

The stickiness Razin identified is the part most operators misread.

If a customer you win stays for years, you can afford to spend considerably more to win them — including by surrendering revenue-producing square footage to make the place somewhere they'd choose to be. High retention doesn't argue for doing less. It argues for spending more up front, because the payback window is long.

The incumbents looked at the same fact and drew the opposite conclusion. Customers are hard to lose, so why bother. That inference held perfectly well for as long as the only competitor was four blocks away.

This pattern isn't confined to laundry. A California gas station now markets itself on lattes and little treats. A New York moving company built real branding around a purely transactional service. Convenience became table stakes the moment everybody had an app, so the competition moved to whether anyone wants to be in your room.

What's actually known about the money

Less than the coverage implies, and worth being straight about.

They pitched investors and lenders. They took on debt. Ben's mother Lisa invested early, before there was anything to show — the company says so plainly on its own site, which is more candour about first money than most startups offer.

No amounts are public anywhere. No round size, no valuation, no debt figures. What's on the record: rent-free from July 2024 to January 2025, a large share of the interior work done themselves when construction costs climbed, and open before the clock ran out.

What transfers

The succession wave is real and the acquisition lane is crowded. Everyone watched the same videos and is looking at the same listings. The observation isn't the asset. What you'd do with the business afterwards is.

Ask what the incumbent's layout optimises for, then ask whether that's still worth optimising. Every laundromat in America is tuned for machine cycles per square foot. That was correct when the nearest competitor was four blocks away. It stopped being correct when the competitor became an app.

In a high-retention category, the room is an acquisition line, not an overhead line. If customers stay for years, build somewhere they'd choose to come. The forgone revenue shows up in a spreadsheet; the acquisition it generates doesn't, which is why the advice will always be not to do it.

Boring businesses still work in 2026. The cash flow was never the edge, though — it's available to whoever buys the thing. The edge is knowing something the incumbent stopped asking about twenty years ago.