Every laundry service has a starting point, and ours began with one very ordinary problem: too much washing and not enough hours in the day. That simple frustration is what led to The Laundry Lady, and it’s still at the heart of everything we do today.
Where It All Began
The Laundry Lady started life in 2012 on the Gold Coast in Australia. Our founder, Susan Toft, was a new mum juggling a full-time corporate job with a toddler at home, and the spare room had become a permanent dumping ground for clean washing that never quite made it back into drawers. Sound familiar?
Susan figured she couldn’t be the only one drowning in laundry while trying to hold down a job and raise a family. So she built a simple solution: a pickup and delivery laundry service that gave people their time back. What started as a side hustle, squeezed in around a full-time job and single parenthood, slowly grew into something much bigger.
From Side Hustle to National Name
Growth didn’t happen overnight. Susan spent years building The Laundry Lady step by step, taking on customers, refining how the service worked, and building a network of local Laundry Partners They deliver the wash, dry and fold service in their own communities. A turning point came when The Laundry Lady appeared on Shark Tank Australia, bringing the business to a much wider audience and helping it grow into a household name across Australia.
Crossing the Ditch to New Zealand
In 2023, The Laundry Lady officially launched in New Zealand, starting out in Auckland and Christchurch before expanding into other centres, including Hamilton, Wellington, Palmerston North, Tauranga and Hawke’s Bay. The response from Kiwi households and businesses was exactly what we’d hoped for. People here wanted the same thing Australians did: their washing done properly, without giving up an evening or a weekend to it.
Since then, our network of local Laundry Partners has kept growing across the country, giving more New Zealanders a simple way to get their laundry pickup and delivery sorted without setting foot in a laundromat.
More Than Just Laundry
From the very beginning, The Laundry Lady has been about more than clean clothes. It’s also been about creating flexible, home-based work for people who want it, including mums, dads, career-changers, retirees and carers. Our Laundry Partners run their own laundry business, on their own schedule, with the support and systems of an established brand behind them.
On the customer side, we work with households, families and busy professionals, as well as businesses like salons, gyms, cafes, medical clinics and Airbnb hosts who need reliable washing turned around fast.
Where We’re Headed
New Zealand was just the beginning of our story beyond Australia. The Laundry Lady has since expanded into Canada, with the UK on the horizon too. But wherever we grow, the mission stays the same: take laundry off people’s plates so they can spend their time on the things that actually matter.
Still the Same Idea, Just Bigger
More than a decade on from that first spare room in Queensland, The Laundry Lady has grown into an award-winning, multi-country business. But the idea hasn’t changed. We’re still here to save people time, one load of washing at a time.
If you’re ready to hand your laundry over to someone else, book a pickup with your local Laundry Partner today, and see what a bit of extra time in your week feels like.
