Every hotel needs it, every hospital depends on it, and almost nobody wants to talk about it at a dinner party. On this episode of The Founder’s Dream podcast, host Abhishek Vyas sits down with Anand Dubey, Country Head for India & South Asia at Jensen Group, for an Anand Dubey interview that makes the case that commercial laundry is quietly becoming a profitable business in India — one most founders have never even considered.
Anand has spent over 22 years in leadership roles and travelled to more than 32 countries, watching laundry evolve from a back-alley chore into a technology-driven industry abroad. His story starts far from any of that — in a small village in Uttar Pradesh — and the Anand Dubey success story is worth understanding on its own terms before getting into the business itself.
From a UP Village to 32 Countries: An Entrepreneur Success Story India Should Know
Anand grew up in a small farming village in what was then Varanasi district, later split into Bhadohi, Chandauli and Varanasi, with a population of around 150-200 people. His family was lower-middle-class, and education was, in his own words, a privilege rather than a given. When his father decided to send him to a Navodaya Vidyalaya — a government residential school for rural, talented children — it changed everything.
Living in the village, maybe I wouldn’t have been able to afford that kind of education. That decision my parents took became a complete turning point for me.
He spent seven years — sixth to twelfth grade — in full boarding, in a temporary campus that didn’t even have toilets for boys in the early batches, with water fetched by hand through a human chain the students organised themselves. Sundays weren’t for rest; they were for washing your own clothes and cleaning the campus as a team. That survival mode, he says, built an instinct that stayed with him for life — figure it out yourself, wherever you’re dropped.
It was curiosity built in that same spirit that led him to laundry. On a work trip to Chicago, he spotted a shop labelled “coin laundry” and couldn’t make sense of the words together. Watching people walk in with bags, insert coins into a machine, and walk out half an hour later with washed, dried, folded clothes — no ironing, no fuss — reshaped how he saw an entire industry back home.
When you travel and step outside the places you know, the way you look at everything changes. That curiosity is exactly what brought me into laundry.
Why India’s Laundry Industry Is Still 90% Unorganised
Anand is blunt about the scale of the opportunity and the scale of the neglect. He estimates that roughly 90% of India’s laundry industry remains unorganised — every neighbourhood has its own dhobi or dry cleaner, and large cities like Mumbai have entire buildings dedicated to washing clothes, but almost none of it is standardised.
When he tried to bring the Chicago-style self-service laundromat concept to Navi Mumbai in 2014, it failed. India, he realized, is culturally different — people don’t want to wash and iron their own clothes in a public space; they want full service, pickup and drop included. His early years were rough enough that he seriously considered walking away.
By 2015 I had convinced myself it was a disaster. I thought I’d made a huge mistake — maybe I should just go back to a stable, well-known company.
A major early setback came when a laundromat inside a mall caught fire — clothes from a spa, loaded with chemical residue, were left overnight in dryers that generated heat, and the chemical mix triggered a blast. It was, in his telling, a brutal but necessary lesson in why this business can’t be treated casually.
Commercial Laundry as a Profitable Business in India — If You Get the Model Right
Ten years on, the picture looks very different. Anand points out that some single laundry brands in India now operate over 1,400 stores, with some planning to add 400-500 more stores next year, and a few aiming for 1,000. Across the top ten brands plus newer standalone players, he estimates the country has crossed 10,000 laundry stores — and still only scratched the surface of a largely unorganised market. Much of this growth traces back to the Jensen Group business model itself — supplying commercial-grade machines, training and technical backing to operators rather than running laundromats directly — which is why Anand keeps steering founders toward professional equipment over domestic shortcuts.
But he’s careful not to oversell the entry point. He refuses to give a single investment figure — metro, tier-2 and tier-3 cities differ hugely in rent and manpower cost — and warns founders against treating a 10-15 lakh budget as a template that forces compromises, especially on machinery.
- Domestic washing machines cannot handle 8-10 commercial loads a day — they’re built for 4-6 loads a week at home.
- Location has to be chosen around nearby PGs, working couples, students, hostels, small hotels, salons and spas — get this wrong and no branding will save the business.
- Customer retention in retail laundry has to be very high, because the model depends on repeat weekly volume, not one-off transactions.
His real point is that laundry is not one business — it’s several stacked together.
This is a manpower business. It’s a logistics business. It’s a chemical business. There’s engineering in it. There are a lot of moving parts here.
Retail, Commercial and Industrial Laundry: Know the Difference
Anand draws a clear line between the three formats that anyone exploring this among the startup ideas in india they’re considering — or as one of their entrepreneurial journey options — should understand. Retail laundry serves households, charging by the kilogram rather than per garment, and fills the gap between the typical neighbourhood washerman and an expensive premium dry cleaner. Commercial laundry serves smaller institutional clients — salons, spas, small 30-40 room hotels. Industrial laundry operates at the scale of hotel chains and hospitals, where volume, consistency and linen quality matter more than anything else.
The pitch to the retail customer, he explains, is transparency: come in, sit, and watch your clothes being processed instead of handing them over to a dry cleaner and having no idea where or how they’re actually treated.
The Real Bottleneck: Skilled Manpower, Not Machines
Talking to franchise owners across the country, Anand says the same struggle comes up everywhere — not funding, not demand, but skilled manpower. India’s fabrics complicate things further: colour bleeding from sarees, delicate zari work, stains that need specific treatment, all require a sorting process that an untrained worker simply won’t follow correctly.
If a pizza arrives 15-20 minutes late, that’s fine. But if my blazer doesn’t come back on time, and it comes back damaged, that’s not acceptable.
He’s candid that laundry still carries a stigma — people see it as a “dirty” or “boring” business and would rather put in the money and let someone else manage it, rather than get hands-on with logistics, chemicals and engineering themselves. His argument to founders exploring business ideas india right now is that this stigma, not the economics, is the real barrier — and that a dedicated academy to train and motivate skilled workers into this space could fix the single biggest bottleneck the industry faces today.
Hospitality and Healthcare: The Next Big Growth Engines
Post-pandemic hygiene standards, Anand says, have permanently raised the bar for linen quality in hotels and hospitals. He cites roughly 13,000-14,000 new hotel keys added in 2025 alone, and projects more than 30,000 new hospital beds being added by 2030 — each one needing clean, consistent linen supply, not just occasional cleanliness.
Automation, in his view, isn’t a threat to the people working in this industry — it’s what makes that consistency possible at scale.
Automation doesn’t replace manpower or create a struggle point. It empowers manpower, and it pushes the whole laundry industry in the right direction — toward becoming organised.
Consistency Over Quick Money — Anand’s Golden Rule
Asked what single rule carried him from a Navodaya classroom to leading a global laundry company’s India operations, Anand doesn’t hesitate: consistency, learned initially through boarding-school discipline, sustained daily since. He works a minimum of two hours every day on self-development — reading, learning about the industry — regardless of where he is or what day it is.
If you chase success and run after quick money, you won’t find relevance. Stay consistent, keep learning about the industry around you, and chase relevance instead — the future takes care of itself.
It’s a point that fits naturally into the kind of self growth lessons this show tends to surface — not a hack, just repetition done honestly over years.
Watch the full conversation with host Abhishek Vyas on The Founder’s Dream YouTube channel and subscribe for new founder interviews every week.
Frequently asked questions
Who is Anand Dubey?
Anand Dubey is the Country Head for India and South Asia at Jensen Group, a global commercial laundry solutions company, with over 22 years of leadership experience across more than 32 countries.
Is the laundry business profitable in India?
According to Anand Dubey, laundry can be a profitable business in India, but returns depend heavily on location, choosing commercial-grade machines over domestic ones, and building skilled manpower rather than treating it as a simple washing service.
How much investment is needed to start a laundry business in India?
Anand Dubey says there is no fixed magic number because rent, manpower cost and location vary across metro, tier-2 and tier-3 cities, though many franchise entry points start around 10 to 15 lakh rupees.
What is the difference between retail, commercial and industrial laundry?
Retail laundry serves individual households by weight, commercial laundry serves businesses like salons and small hotels, and industrial laundry handles large-scale linen processing for hotels and hospitals at volume.
Why is India's laundry industry still unorganised?
Anand Dubey estimates nearly 90% of India’s laundry industry remains unorganised, run by neighbourhood washermen and dry cleaners, because it has long been dismissed as a low-skill, unglamorous business despite rising urban demand.
