When first-year mechanical engineering student Vosse Plackis Cheng moved into Rieber Hall, he quickly began experiencing issues doing his laundry, including broken machines and limited availability.

After students threw his laundry on the floor, Plackis Cheng said he was left searching for a better way to clean his clothes.

One quarter later, he created B-Laundry – a door-to-door laundry and dry cleaning service for UCLA students – alongside Angelo Freese-Binder, a first-year business economics student. Their goal in creating the organization was to make it easier for students to do laundry by collaborating with an off-campus service provider, Plackis Cheng added.

“People forget that time costs money, and if you’re spending two hours a day doing your laundry, those are times that you could be studying for midterms, calling your parents, hanging out with friends or doing actual work that’s more impactful,” Plackis Cheng said.

B-Laundry serves residents who live on the Hill. It also offers several sorority and fraternity houses as pickup locations for users, according to its website. The service provider takes 24 hours to process wash and fold orders and 48 hours for dry cleaning orders.

Customers pay for the service after the laundry is delivered, Freese-Binder said. B-Laundry provides dry cleaning services for students’ professional attire, which is important for students in Greek life and business clubs, he added.

“People literally don’t have to leave their rooms,” Freese-Binder said. “All they do is click two buttons – it takes two seconds, and the whole process is optimized so they get notifications when their laundry or dry cleaning is back.”

UCLA Housing introduced the WASH-Connect mobile app – a laundry payment service – for the 2025-26 academic year. The app allows students to track their active loads of laundry and shows available machines in the dorms.

[Related: UCLA Housing launches laundry payment app WASH-Connect, track machine availability]

Alex Marino, a first-year aerospace engineering student and B-Laundry customer, said payments through the WASH-Connect app sometimes do not go through.

“I remember for some of our marketing, we literally took pictures of the amount of laundry machines that were out of service,” Freese-Binder said.

Marino added that he chose B-Laundry, as opposed to other student-run laundry services, because of its partnership with a commercial laundromat.

“This was the only actual professional one, and I didn’t really see the point of paying students to do it (my laundry),” he said. “I wasn’t super comfortable with students going through my clothes.”

Amelie Pagona, a first-year mathematics of computation student and B-Laundry customer, said she started using B-Laundry when it launched in winter quarter.

Pagona hands her laundry over to B-Laundry every two to three weeks, she added, giving her time to complete other tasks.

“I had three extra hours of free time every week when I didn’t do my laundry, which meant more studying, more going out with friends, hanging out with friends,” she said.

Pagona said she hopes to continue using B-Laundry next year, because she prefers her clothes to come folded and professionally washed.

“Having to do no laundry was the best thing to happen to me,” she said.