Dry cleaning vending machines are on their way to marketplaces, thanks to a pilot of Presso machines at JLL properties. “Our vision has always been to bring [our] technology to where people are: where they work, where they live, where they shop, where they travel,” said Presso CEO Nishant Jain.

Presso installed around 10 dry cleaning vending machines at apartments in states like Florida and Michigan in a partnership with Wash Multifamily Laundry Systems in 2024, and it will launch a 10-location pilot with JLL in 2025. The plan is to scale that to 500 retail, office and mixed-use locations over a few years, he said. He added that Tishman is an investor and wants to bring the machines to some of its largest hotels, like its Disney resort hotels.

Jain sees these on-demand, on-site machines as incentives for workers to come to the office and residents to choose particular properties. He named grocery stores as a strong use case, as well, thanks to the volume of people already passing through.

The idea for a quick laundry solution struck Jain during his college years at Purdue University. “Laundry and dry cleaning were painful chores,” he recalled. “I was living in an apartment where the laundry room was on another floor. The inconvenience of walking to the laundry room and then waiting for two hours made no sense to me.” But the real driver, Jain realized, wasn’t about time but rather the need for an on-demand solution. “The fundamental need is: ‘I want to wear this outfit now.’ That’s where it all begins,” he explained.

He and Presso co-founder Thibault Corens set out to create a method that could press and clean clothes within minutes. Now, Presso vending units can launder, press, steam and dry clean clothes in under five minutes using robotic “stretching” technology and eco-friendly cleaning liquids. He called their solution the “microwave of laundry.” The company is part of a global vending machine industry whose value is expected to double from $18.3 billion in 2022 to $37.2 billion by 2032, according to Allied Market Research.

Jain talked with ICSC Small Business Center contributing editor Rebecca Meiser about the importance of listening to your audience, Presso’s partnership with JLL and how vending units can benefit landlords and property managers.

You had this idea in your basement. How did you go from idea to fruition?

I realized that after food and shelter, clothing is a physiological human need. I pitched [the idea] at an event, and we got $1,000 as a grant from a fund called 1517. They support young people who want to get their hands dirty and build something. We had that capital, and I was like: “I have no clue where to start. I knew nothing about laundry, so for the first two months, I just watched everything about laundry: YouTube videos and lots of videos of moms showing all the hacks that they figured out over time about how to quickly clean your garment and quickly press it without effort. Then I started ordering a few things from Amazon like a steamer. I had my own hair dryer, and I bought a bunch of liquids and started mixing them together and creating sprays and trying them out.

There was a time I would go to the gym every morning, not because I needed to go to the gym but because then I would have sweaty clothes. Then I’d spend 30 minutes after the gym trying to treat them and see if I could get them ready to wear again without the whole two-hour process. I started seeing some success. There was a period where I was like: “This is starting to seem like it’s actually physically possible to treat clothes in just a few minutes rather than multiple hours.”

How did you test that theory?

I drew a sketch [of what the machine could look like], went to Walmart, spent four hours and just picked anything that felt like it could work. I put together a contraption that I could bring to a gym [where] I would give $5 to anyone who tried it. I was just testing the hypothesis: Would people even believe their clothes can be cleaned in two minutes? If not, there was no point in trying to invent something. Once I started putting this out there, at least 50% of the people believed that, yes, this was amazing. There were even some people who wore their clothes immediately. And I was like: “Are you sure this is clean? Are you just making me feel better?” And they said: “No, really, this is perfect. I can use it again now.”

I was like: “If with just trial and error, I can make something work, imagine if we put out some resources behind this. There’s an entire world of instant, on-demand clothing care that is completely uncharted territory, and nobody’s looking at it. There was no stopping after that.

How did you decide on apartments, office buildings, retail and hotels as your primary locations?

In this this day and age, we want things now. We want packages delivered in 15 minutes. We want our food delivered quickly. Nobody wants to wait. Our vision has always been to bring [our] technology to where people are: where they work, where they live, where they shop, where they travel. So some of the obvious use cases are apartment buildings [and] common laundry rooms, hotels where you can’t wait a day, [and] office buildings. It all comes down to accessibility. That’s why we like retail, too, where you get a lot of foot traffic at a singular location. Grocery stores, we think, for example, can also be a great use case, for instance. We’ve also talked with JLL about doing pop-up locations [in stores or centers]. Our machines take up such a little space and don’t require any permitting. We can really go into any location and start offering our Presso services.

Is there anything people need to know about power or needs?

Wherever you can place a stacked washer and dryer, you can place a Presso. It needs a water inlet and a drainage outlet. As for electricity, it plugs into dryer outlets. We need about a 220-volt outlet. [Most appliances require 120-volt outlets.] It’s portable. It’s on wheels. You can really place it anywhere.

Can landlords and developers reach out to you?

If you’re a developer, a multifamily property owner or commercial developer and you want this as an amenity for your tenants or your residents, know we’re definitely open for business. We are looking for partners now because the cycles are long. In the hardware world, you have to set up for scale far in advance. If I want, for instance, to deliver 200 machines next year, I have to be thinking at least 12 months in advance, so the sooner you talk to us and we can identify who you are and how many machines you want and when, [the better].

You’ve talked about the importance of listening to market signals over focusing solely on technology. Can you share an insight from a customer that shaped Presso?

If you want to build a high-growth company, you look for a burning and frequent pain point for someone; if you find that one person, there’s probably more people like them, so even [a bad] solution would be like their hair is on fire and you [gave] them a glass of water. We basically went on the hunt for the burning pain point. While doing laundry sucked, it was not as burning a need as I thought it needed to be. We went on the lookout for the right market, the right consumer. That’s why we put the product in different places, to keep talking to people and stay close to them.

At the time, I was in a venture accelerator program called Matchbox Acceleration, a group of founders and small business owners. We were talking about business models and brainstorming. One of the people was like: “Does your product do dry cleaning?” He had a wedding coming up and said: “I have this suit, and I absolutely hate going to the dry cleaner.” I was like: “Tell me more about your hatred of dry cleaning. What do you mean?” The guy wouldn’t stop talking about how much he hated the entire experience: You have to drive 15 or 20 minutes to get to a cleaner, it looks dingy in the back, most of the stuff is behind a curtain — you don’t know what they’re doing with your precious clothes — they charge an exorbitant amount and to top it all off, you have to still wait three, four days and then drive [to pick up the clothes] again. That was a signal for me. I had not yet heard that burning of a pain point for anyone.

Some companies scale too early, when their products aren’t robust enough. How can you avoid leaving that bad taste in customers’ mouths?

The more you can grow with your product instead of ahead of it, the better you’ll be at getting to your milestones. The support from [seed] investors like Yeti Capital, AME Cloud Ventures and SOSV allowed us to [avoid rushing and prematurely building] thousands of machines before fully getting the tech right. We’ve been able to keep a very low volume of machines and just move them around as necessary for running different kinds of tests. [With that time], we’ve been really able to see: Is the experience good? Is it convenient? Is it simple and easy to use, and how long does it take for someone to grasp it? Only this year, we’ve finally delivered the tech and validated the performance.