YouSaid · the spoken record

Vijen Patel

lines on the record: 84
first: 2025-10-06
most recent: 2025-10-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think luck plays a huge role in her life, and timing and luck played a huge influence, and not just the exit timing, but the multifamily way, the new construction wave. And so I think there were a lot of forces that we benefited from. I used to think 80% of it was hard work, smarts, grit. I now think 80% of it was luck”
2025-10-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, we've realized these opportunities are everywhere, you know, from dentistry, we looked at something recently and property tax appeals. We've looked at pediatric services. Like if there's all of these industries that are Frankly, they're oversubscribed from private equity and buyouts, but they're completely undersubscribed from technology and innovation. And, you know, when was the last time you went to a doctor's office and it was newer or a mortician and it was newer, they're integral, but they're 40 years behind best practices. And so if we think about some of the stuff that's going on right now, it's important that we lift these industries, which then will lift these economies.”
2025-10-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We just recently did an investment in pet cremation and we were blown away 80% EBITDA margins. And I have to imagine there was a similar profile with the end of life space.”
2025-10-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I realized this is a giant hole in our economy. You know, we're in the greatest economic period in global history, but the profits are going to 10,000 people. And so that was the inception of the 81 collection.”
2025-10-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I noticed that everyone in this technology world was continuing to look for the same thing. They were all looking for the next asset-like, employee-like, cloud-based unicorn. And then I look back at my own experience guy and I'm like, wait, we built the opposite. You know, we built this plant up in Skokie. We ended up having these assets all across the walls of America bolted into the walls of all these buildings. And we also built a good company, but in a completely different way. You know, a lot of our employees who originally started making $15, $20 an hour as the business grew, they started making $50K a year, 75K a year. And having gone to their weddings and seen them buy homes, and in many cases, even start their own businesses. We move people from lower class into middle class.”
2025-10-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We did some math on this recently, guy, and there was about 3400 early stage or early investing firms. And about 90% focus on software. Leaving only 10 to 20 percent to fund things that are quite critical to our society. And even in that group, half are not even active anymore.”
2025-10-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“March of 2020. And so the world was falling apart. Our business, right? You could think about dry con volumes. Our business had hit a wall and was starting to see some real hit in terms of what people were wearing. And I was somehow in this sanctuary in Chicago with capital and with free time. And it was a wild world to be in.”
2025-10-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We stayed for two years. And in fact, they wanted me to stay longer. And guy, I had a great experience. Not just did we have capital, but Drew and I could shine. You know, I could finally, for the first time, I made a PowerPoint slide again. And, you know, all of our employees who were making $15, $20, $25 an hour because we didn't have more capital, all of a sudden they got a pay raise. We made some like actual salary. We didn't make a lot, but we had like a real salary where like I could, you know, pay rent, not from savings. So we had this two year experience at our PNG. It was great. And finally, like our earnout had ended. And around then, there was also this thing called COVID. And we got Guy our last earnout check.”
2025-10-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, like I think we would have probably found another purchaser, another dry corner to sell to, but they never would have meshed the terms or the capital available. And it was an incredible alignment that led us to that opportunity.”
2025-10-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Incredibly. And guy, I made $40,000. I had friends in private equity who were at this point making partner and making a million dollars plus per year. I'm at one point calling my dad and saying, hey, dad, when this doesn't work out, if this doesn't work out, can I borrow some money so I can start again? Like, not a business, but to start life again. My wife and I on our first trip, she was a resident. I was this dry cleaner. We wanted to do a trip and so we went to Kansas City because it was where we could find Spirit Airlines flights and we found a hotel on like some website and like the altogether the trip cost us $500. That was our life and I just didn't know what the end state would be and we were incredibly burned out.”
2025-10-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No kids, no kids. And she'd say, hey, let's go out on Saturday night. And I want to see my friends. And I'd be like, I am so exhausted that I can't do that. And there was just such a toll that had taken on us from bootstrapping this that we just wanted to make sure that this wasn't our permanent state.”
2025-10-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At this point, we had been working for about 1,000 days in a row. And I'm not joking. Like we worked seven days a week. We were open 24-7. I had missed friends' weddings. I stopped getting invited to friends' birthday parties because I would just be no-show. And this path of us building just took a huge toll on our life. You know, every night my wife would come home and on the weekends and she was a resident in med school.”
2025-10-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“100%, and we know we wanted a home, right? I think what kept us up at night guy was a night in Nashville, was raining and I was walking to an event to sell dry cleaning. And I remember realizing, I don't want to do this when I'm 45 years old. Like, we need to find a home for this. And it doesn't have to be now, but there has to be some longer vision here.”
2025-10-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Go work for PNG and they would rebrand Pressbox that tide cleaners. It was a short debate about seven minutes of which brand name was stronger. Tied one and the tide spin team would work for us and we would end up running the urban division of tide cleaners in which they wanted our model to go national”
2025-10-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'll never forget that was next to my wife, and she's like, Don't you just want to talk about this maybe for a second? And she was right because it was like, it would have been life-changing money. But what I value so much about Drew is how principled he was about how we had built something of value. And yeah, maybe we should have taken longer than 20 minutes to respond to it, but we didn't. And I think a few hours later, P&G, they said, give us 24 hours and we'll come back with something.”
2025-10-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we ended up with a couple term sheets for funding and P&G at express interest. And they lowballed us, I think, a couple times. And I remember the third time Drew was a little bit fired up and upset. And I think within 20 minutes of the response, had redacted a term sheet and sent it back to them and said, we're going to go ahead and sign this term sheet. We look forward to competing head to head.”
2025-10-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep, and switch from us And it makes a ton of sense because for them, their math they're doing is again build or buy. Do we should we just give tight spin more money? Or should we buy is there something special here? And ultimately, all of our partners except for one, said no thanks. And that meant an incredible amount to us. And still, I get emotional thinking about it because we had this trust that was embedded with all of these partners that had been compounding over five or six years”
2025-10-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Correct, and this is where multiple things happen at the same time, but we then ultimately got some term sheets. And for P&G, they started offering capital to owners to switch from Pressbox to tide spin.”
2025-10-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, because we were just upfront about that, whenever there was a PNG conversation, we would be there. And we'd say, yeah, we'll make the time for this. Let's make it happen. Because from their end, guy, they were thinking through, all right, they're at 52% market share of tide, and they can't push that much further. And so they've always organically had this journey where if they can't provide the goods for laundry, can they just do your laundry? And so they were more curious to meet with us because of how we built Pressbox. And then, guy, we ultimately around 2017 realized like, hey, we will have no negotiating power with P&G if we don't have anything else on the table. And so this is when we did then start having some conversations for additional funding.”
2025-10-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“PNG was doing work here. And so we were always just actually very proactive about I always kept our competitors close. And it was, you know, it'd always be guards up, not tell them everything, but we would always have a relationship. And so around 2017, Mark, we actually got to know the Tide Spin team. And we decided, hey, what are you guys doing here? Like, I remember they actually wanted to come to our plant. And Drew said, yeah, I come. And I was like, absolutely no way you're coming in. But we were, we wanted to make sure we knew all of our competitors because either we were going to buy them or they would buy us.”
2025-10-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because at that point, my homepage for our computer was my bank account. And I only now realize how unhealthy that was because we were so focused in our business that we never actually got time to spot on our business. And so this was a huge issue. And it was an issue that we never fixed. But it was around that 2017 mark where we started to realize also like what are we going to do with this thing, right? Because as you know, we were not looking at this as like we were passionate about dry cleaning. You know, one of the first things we did, guy, in that 12-page deck early on, that investment deck, one of the biggest issues was who are you going to sell this to? And you never IPO it. You would not really be able to sell the private equity because we had come from that world. And so it was always quite logical that we would want to get a strategic buyer. And we actually viewed it as a really good sign.”
2025-10-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A huge chip on her shoulder. You know, we tried to be vulnerable and expose ourselves and let people invest. And they all said no. And so we had a huge chip on our shoulder. And probably too much of a chip on our shoulder because at that point, you know, we talked about we have a few regrets.”
2025-10-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The numbers are on our side, and it was because we were so frugal. We didn't have any money to spend to make any of the upfront cost. Like, we would have loved to have invested more upfront to make the lockers and get QR codes and to do all this signage, but we didn't have the money.”
2025-10-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our view was that if we just capture three percent market share, we're going to be millionaires. And so we didn't view this as a winner-take-all market because again, we could only sell into high rises. And so if you're in some small build-in in Marina and SF or Bucktown in Chicago or, you know, Brooklyn in New York, we can't serve you. And so our view is that we knew exactly where our product was for, which was these 25 to 45 year olds and high rises. And if we could just capture that across the country, that would be our model.”
2025-10-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, even back then we were just focused on execution. I mean, we had enough confidence that DC was going well, but still it was like death by a thousand cuts. Like, it was just barely starting to stay afloat. And so we just had this tension throughout our company's history of like grow, but also be paranoid about quality. And so yeah, there are probably some inklings of like, you know, we could be a national company, but it didn't feel like it.”
2025-10-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so 2016, we were in Philly, and I believe we were just getting going on Dallas. And what was exciting is around that 2016 mark, partly why we went to DC is that four of our developers in Chicago said, hey, we're going to go build in DC. Do you want to come with us? And then those same developers did that in Denver. And this became our expansion plan, is that we kind of just followed our customers. And then that would always lower how much we need to get in revenue for us to break even because we would have a head start versus any competition.”
2025-10-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Get into the same buildings, they would try to pitch the new construction. And every time we would win because we would have this track record, we've also oftentimes worked with these developers and owners. And if it was an existing building, it's like, why would I take out these lockers and put your lockers in? Like, that's the same thing. And again, Pressbox has done a great job. I'm not hearing complaints. So why would I create my own headache?”
2025-10-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's exactly what they did. And so they ended up realizing that pickup and drop off was not the path. And then they went down the locker path And for about three to six months, they competed with us head to head.”
2025-10-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then we drive half a block down the road and pick up three orders and drop off five. Then we take a left turn, do that all over again. We could do 26 transactions per hour where all of our competitors are doing four. And so it's the same cost where everyone has to send a driver on the road. And by the way, because it's 24-7, we got our drivers on the road at like 5 a.m. And they were done with their routes at 9 a.m.”
2025-10-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So luckily, we were used to competition. And as tide spins started to get going, we kind of, we saw them coming, but it wasn't like we had a different level of fear. It was like, all right, same old, same old. Ty had been followed the wash up model. They started with pickup and drop off. And around the year mark, I think for them, they realized that they were not going to make money off of this. Because again, the uneconomics just don't work where if you're just doing four transactions per hour for a driver and you then take into account this 50% gross margin guy, you're taking home like $5. And funny enough, their order sizes were bigger. I think for that model, you generally have like $80 per order instead of like $40 for us. But still, it was really hard to make money. And the good part guy at this point for our journey was we had $250 buildings in Chicago. And so we'd go to one building. We'd pick up four orders, drop off six.”
2025-10-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And we realized that people are just really reluctant to change behavior. So if you can find them during these moments of change, then you get them, they're set in their ways. And then Washio can come to them. Any of these becomes something like, no, I'm good. I'm kind of into my habit. I'm going to use Pressbox.”
2025-10-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not just did we get these lockers in a great location where they'd be highly visible, we ended up being able to create behavior instead of change behavior. So someone would move into their building and as they walk into their apartment, we'd have a gift box. This cost us like $7, but it would be a bag, a water bottle, a handwritten note, and a flyer with our pricing. Those four things. And we would drop off 200 of these at every one of our new buildings. And we slowly realized that we would track this KPI called Revenue Perit. And revenue per unit was twice as high at a new construction building versus an existing building.”
2025-10-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right, and timing plays such a huge role in everything. But one thing that we got right was that we were on the front end of not just the amenity war, but also the new construction development in all these major cities. But I think the year was 2016. And I believe there were 55 new buildings coming up in Chicago. And Guy, I think we were in 53 of the 55 And it was because we just skipped the game overall. We didn't pitch any property manager. We didn't go to any of their customers. We talked to the owners. And we said, hey, we're in three of your buildings. We notice you're building this other building. Can we just go ahead and spec these lockers into your architectural drawings now? And then the best part was as we got into these new construction buildings in Chicago, DC, Nashville was our third market”
2025-10-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't know where to go. And we asked our suppliers if they would work for us and they would say no. And then we finally have this light bulb went off that we were looking in the wrong place. You know, instead of looking at indeed, we decided we just started advertising in Spanish newspapers. And so there's a newspaper in Chicago called OI. And so all of a sudden, we posted these jobs of this new facility open up in Skokie. And my phone wouldn't stop rain. And we ended up staffing this entire plant in two or three months with incredible people all through the Spanish newspaper Oi.”
2025-10-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are employees, and this was probably a guy, though, the hardest part is that it's one thing to hire a driver or someone who's to, you know, can sit in front of a lobby at a table. It's harder to staff oppressor. You know, I thought we would, at the time indeed was out, Craigslist, you know, we'd post these roles and we got no hits.”
2025-10-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Leased it, and it was really hard to build this plant, and we had to get all these licenses Utilities figured out. We even had to get an architect because we were the first dry cleaner that was in this facility. But once we were up and running, We ended up realizing that we could all of a sudden get rid of this middleman. And so instead of 50% of our cost, all of a sudden going away. All we had to do was pay for our own people and rent. And so again, our margin was typically around 25% of the bottom line, 50% at the gross margin level, both of those went up by 10 percentage points.”
2025-10-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I think around this three year mark, we were in DC and then also Nashville. And so I want to say at this point, we probably had 45 to 50 employees. And so we had a huge transportation team. We had a team that would inventory all the items. At this point, we had a marketing team that would set up these events. We had a sales team. And when we decided to insource this, this is where the issue with the business model up front became our asset later on because this opened us up for debt financing. And so we were able to buy all this equipment. We bought some of it used, some of it new, but we were able to finance about 80% of our plant using debt and asset backlending.”
2025-10-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So at this point, we probably should have raised some venture funding. We should have raised something. Guy, our bank account, I'd get a call every two weeks from our banker because our bank account would go from positive $300,000 to negative $400,000. And the driver of it was payroll.”
2025-10-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so it was so critical that we nailed quality because we couldn't just replace someone, right? We kind of had a smaller audience. And so for us, quality is what really kept me up at night. And we ended up with our wholesaler and our supplier. We end up just building this friction where at times, you know, they might have a staff shortage. And so all of a sudden, they're delayed in all of our cleaning by six hours, which then means lower quality cleaning, which means that we then take the hit on our user base. And we did the math guide. We realized that the difference between 98% retention and 96% retention, even though it sounds small, when you compound that every month, it's astronomical. The difference, I think, is between having 55% of your customers at the end of two years versus 78%.”
2025-10-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, so the big trick we realize in our business model was that take 1225 Old Town. There's 220 units. If we lost a customer guy in that building, our serviceable addressable market now is 219 people.”
2025-10-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and they also had a lot of new construction coming up. But there are two pieces of data that we miss completely. One is that no building in DC can be higher than the capital statue. Our entire model is built off of density. And two is that we didn't realize how hard it would be to staff our facilities because we're competing versus the government for hourly labor. Our cost for a driver was 60% higher than Chicago. Wow. And also they wouldn't stick around. We ended up turning through people in DC at two times the rate than we did Chicago.”
2025-10-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was an incredible threat. And by the way, you know, they had the funding to go down to a dollar per shirt. And we didn't have that. And all of these customers, users, buildings, they could have switched, but they didn't. They were happy with our service and they kept using us.”
2025-10-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was an investor, and it was the one that we were terrified of. And again, I'll remember this moment. It was around the year two, Mark. They decided to come to Chicago as their third market. And I don't think I slept that month. I'll never forget just the paranoia Drew and I had. I mean, like, we don't have nearly as much money as them. You know, how are we going to compete with these guys? And then I never will also forget feeling as good as I felt one month after they launched. And we looked at our revenue and had only gotten down by 2%. And that was the moment where I was like, oh my God, it actually does not matter how much money you've raised.”
2025-10-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I was making almost $300,000. And I was, what, 27? Wow. And threw it all away to make $40,000 for five years. And Drew's the same.”
2025-10-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is why 1225 Old Town is so clear in my mind that we then could go to any building in Chicago and say we work with 1225 Old Town. And in real estate, it's so critical. You are matching the amenities of the building across the street. And once we were in 1225 Old Town, the snowball started to form. And we ended up adding eight new locations a month. And then ultimately, guy, we grew to 250 locations in Chicago over the course of, call it three years.”
2025-10-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we, it was Drew and I doing a lot of it, but we ended up hiring two people and these were our third and fourth employees. And David came on to work with Drew and Ariana helped me on the marketing and sales side. Drew would be in charge of ops. I would be in charge of sales. And so the team of the four of us did this work. We operated seven days a week. One of the worst decisions we ever made. But we did it seven days a week. And Drew and I would always do the routes on the weekends and David would do it on Monday through Friday.”
2025-10-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, in general, with all these facilities, they have a big fixed cost component, right? Which is labor, people ironing, washing clothes all day. And so they were open to working together with other dry cleaners to process more volume. But to your point, our work would always be secondary. So they always want to take care of their own customers. And then if they had capacity, they would then entertain our items. And so to start off with, we actually use three or four different cleaners. And ultimately, as we realize is like that was an operational headache. And this is where, again, maybe call it a break, but we realized there was a cleaner in the city that did a lot of hotels. And they had capacity to take. And so around, again, the one year mark, we started using this facility on Goose Island. And they became our”
2025-10-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The first year, I'll never forget when we hit the $80,000 mark per month because 80 times 12 is roughly a million dollars. And we got there at the round around like the 15 month mark after starting.”
2025-10-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In one location, we'll make money. And by the way, that's every month. So over the course of a year, we were going to be cash flow positive. And this is when it clicked. And this is when we really found what we'd call product market fit. It was at 1225 all-time moment where we broke even, guy, in six weeks.”
2025-10-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, 50% of it, and there's transport cost, and then the other one was actually parking tickets. We ended up on our P&L having a line item, which was parking tickets. I've been to all of Chicago's tow yards. Drew has been to more of them. But our marketing was a flyer. That's it. And so we realized our break-even mark was around that 26 mark, 26 customers. And so if we can just get 26 customers to use us.”
2025-10-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT