Impressed - door-to-door dry-cleaning for busy Hongkongers

(SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST) Hong Kong has some of the longest working hours in the world, so any service aimed at alleviating the burden of the city's time poor comes as a welcome relief.

Enter Impressed, an on-demand, door-to-door, dry-cleaning and laundry service, which was launched in November and covers Hong Kong Island and Kowloon.

"We started the service because people shouldn't waste time doing laundry," says Henry Lau, who co-founded Impressed with Victor Siu. "With our busy lifestyle, we weren't happy with how laundry and dry cleaning were done in Hong Kong and identified a few problems."

Those problems, says Lau, included a schedule mismatch, with dry-cleaners closing in the early evening, when many people are still working. "This meant people had to waste personal time on weekends or make special arrangements during weekdays to drop off their laundry."

Another problem, he says, is "there are few options for pick-up and delivery services and these are usually limited to a minimum order in the range of HK$300 to HK$400 - and, even then, a routine pick-up and delivery schedule would still have to work around the dry cleaner's schedule."

Lau was keen to iron out these problems with "a really easy-to-use app".

"We offer a free pick-up and delivery service, which comes with a minimum order of just HK$180. You don't have to worry about timing and fitting laundry around your busy schedule because the service lasts until 12am, seven days a week."

And using it is simple. Download the Impressed iOS or Android app and create an account, select items that need washing, enter an address and select a pick-up and delivery time. Customers can track the cleaning process and pick-up/delivery status with real-time in-app status updates.