When laundry advice comes from everywhere but Home.

By Jeff Moak

I recently had a call with a client on the distribution side of my business—a new investor looking to get into the industry. We covered the usual ground: locations, equipment mix, pricing strategies. As the conversation was coming to an end, it shifted from logistics to learning—and influencers.

“No problem,” I said. “Let me recommend some people to follow.”

When Laundry Went Social

The influencers, social media personalities, and more recently, “industry celebrities” are now very much a part of the laundromat space. Having grown up in the industry and watched it evolve, that’s not something I ever expected to see.

That reality really hit home last August at The Clean Show in Orlando, Florida, an event every laundromat owner or operator should attend. I was sitting in a hotel lobby with a group of store
owners when one of them paused mid-sentence, looked over, and said, “I can’t believe that’s Joe, Dan and Kelli. I watch them all the time.”

Later that day, I was speaking with someone I know well in the industry — someone I’ve shared stages with at events. When a Wash & Fold operator rushed up and said, “Oh, you’re X, you do Y,” he smiled and confirmed it. The person then turned to me and said, “But you’re Jeff Moak, right? I really wanted to talk to you.”

I laughed. With the number of social media personalities that now exist in our industry, I don’t consider myself to be one of them. Waleed Cope, standing beside me, laughed as well and joked that he was just there to carry my bags.

It was a light moment, but it reinforced something I’ve been thinking about for a while.

More Information, Less Clarity

With the rise of social media personalities, there is more information available about the laundromat and wash-and-fold industry than ever before. At the same time, filtering good information from bad has become more difficult.

Much of the renewed interest in the industry can be traced back to early TikTok videos that brought new eyes to laundromats—from first-time and solo investors to large capital groups. The quarter-collection videos showing how much money could be made created curiosity and momentum. Whether that was ultimately a positive or a negative development is debatable, but what it undeniably did was inject new attention into an industry that had seen relatively little change for decades.

Back to my conversation with the new investor, I began recommending people to follow — Waleed Cope, Dave Menz, Josh and Hannah Chapman along with Joe Dan and Kelli Reed. These weren’t recommendations based on popularity. They were people I consider experts, whose insights come from operating businesses, not just talking about them. Then I paused.

“You know,” I said, “these are all U.S.-based people.”

He agreed. “I don’t see much content coming out of Canada,” he said. “At least not the kind of information that’s being shared south of the border. They even have conferences.”

I told him I was well aware, and that I speak at some of those conferences.

As is often the case, we consume a significant amount of information from abroad and not nearly enough from home. If you start searching for Canadian operators producing widely visible content, the list becomes short very quickly, and that’s unfortunate.

That’s not an invitation for more operators to start dumping quarters on social media for clicks. That moment has largely passed. Even many of the original creators have moved on to producing
more thoughtful, educational content—like my friend Carlos, better known as LaundromatMoney, who now focuses on helping store owners better understand their businesses.

A Different Market, A Different Reality

One challenge Canadian operators face when we rely too heavily on U.S.-based content is that it can blur the real differences between the two markets. Demographics, population density, property values, and costs of entry all vary significantly. Consuming content without context can skew perspective, and I often speak with new store owners or investors who didn’t spend enough time understanding their local market. They just assumed that what worked elsewhere would work the same way here.

That circles back to my recommendations of industry experts and influencers. While many of the voices I suggested are U.S.-based and share valuable insights, their guidance still needs to be adapted to Canadian realities. Information is only useful when it’s applied with an understanding of local conditions.

One area where this disconnect has become especially visible is in store valuations. The attention generated through social media has created unrealistic expectations around what some existing laundromats are worth. In some cases, long-standing owners are attempting to sell older, under- invested stores (often with short lease terms or minimal profitability) at prices that don’t reflect the true value of the business.

Even in the U.S., where much of the hype originated, barriers to entry have historically been lower than they are in Canada. When those higher Canadian barriers are combined with inflated expectations, the gap between perception and reality widens further.

Finding a Canadian Voice

As a Canadian operator who is active on social media and regularly speaks at U.S.-based conferences, I’m often struck by how few Canadian voices are shaping the broader conversation. Our market is different, our challenges are different, and yet much of the learning happening here is still imported. That gap doesn’t exist because there’s nothing to say; it exists because too few experienced operators are saying it publicly.

My challenge to Canadian operators is to get out there, be more visible and share your knowledge publicly. If we want better-informed new investors and store operators, more sustainable stores, and an industry that reflects Canadian realities, we need to contribute more than silence. Whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, TikTok or YouTube, there is an audience looking for grounded, experience-based Canadian insight. If we don’t create it, we’ll continue relying on content that was never built for our market in the first place.

Jeff will be speaking at The Laundry Summit in Vancouver on April 1. More information is on our Conferences & Events page.

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