#StartupsEverywhere Profile: Laurel Hess, Founder & CEO, hampr
This profile is part of #StartupsEverywhere, an ongoing series highlighting startup leaders in ecosystems across the country. This interview has been edited for length, content, and clarity.
Proving Quick, Affordable, Local Laundry Services
As a mom, Laurel Hess understands the difficulties of multitasking and juggling competing priorities around the home. She created hampr to provide busy people with freshly done laundry and community members with a source of additional income. We spoke with her about the multiple ways hampr benefits local communities, the impact of various data privacy laws on her business, and her experience as a mom and woman founder.
Tell us about your background. What led you to create hampr?
My background is in PR and digital marketing—initially for some of the largest companies in the world like Verizon Wireless and American Airlines—and I eventually created my own digital marketing agency. Around that time, my husband and I had our second child, and I was traveling all of the time for work, making it really hard to manage things at home. One day, I came home and there was laundry everywhere, and the fridge was empty but the kids had t-ball opening day and we had three birthday parties to attend. I had multiple competing priorities—finding a way to order food for my family, and navigating important chores I didn't have the bandwidth to do. And it wasn't until I was at the ballpark ordering groceries on my phone that I realized one of these priorities had better options and accessibility than the other. My kids needed clothes to wear, and I couldn't opt out of doing laundry the way I could with groceries.
At the time, one of my friends offered to help out at my marketing agency—she was a stay-at-home mom and wanted to bring in a little income, but obviously couldn’t leave her kids to do something like drive for Uber or shop for Instacart. I didn't have any open roles for her at the agency, but realized what would help me the most day-to-day is having my laundry done.
So that was the genesis of hampr—tapping into the workforce of stay-at-home parents and retirees living in the same community. We launched in January 2020, managed to survive the pandemic, and really started to scale in 2021. We went through the TechStars Austin program accelerator which really opened our eyes to the key drivers of our business. To date, we’ve raised around 7 million in venture funding and have generated millions of dollars in revenue. We’re a team of 20 and have over 12,000 members across 15 states.
What does hampr do?
We pair busy people who need their laundry done with people who need additional income—like retirees, stay-at-home parents, and people who work remotely. And because hampr is hyper-localized, you're helping people in the community. Our washrs, who do the work of washing our customers’ clothes, are local residents who are usually unable to work traditional jobs to contribute to their household income. (Or at least they wouldn't be able to without any opportunity costs like having to find and pay for childcare) So this is a really unique opportunity for them.
How do you reach your users?
Today, we get most of our users by word of mouth. We used to do social media advertising that was very effective, but both changes in technology platforms and in the law have made it less useful for us to retarget users. It’s really a frustrating overcorrection. I can understand a consumer not wanting us or others to know their name, that they live at 123 Main Street, for example, and have three cats. But I don’t need or want to know that. All I need to know is that there's somebody living near 123 Main Street that might be interested in my services. I want to be able to find that person, let’s call them person #789—I don't need to know their name. But in order for it to be worthwhile to pay for the advertisements, we need to understand that the audience might be interested, and whether they ultimately interact with us.
Over time, we’ve tried out several non-digital marketing alternatives, like PR, which has its own challenges because it has a long lead time and changes in newsrooms in recent years. It is hard to break through when you’re trying to reach a very overworked, underpaid reporter and then trying to sell to them like everybody else all the time. We’ve also used billboards and direct mail, but you simply can't measure the effectiveness of these alternatives the way you could digital. That makes it really hard to justify spending our limited money on those channels because we don't really know the return. What’s worked best for us is hyper-local partnerships—teaming up with schools, teaming up with little leagues, and things like that.
In addition to the impacts on your user reach, what has been your experience with data privacy laws?
For us, obviously privacy laws present a huge issue because we're a tiny team of 20 and we’re working with a startup budget and all the resource constraints and tradeoffs that come with it. Right now, we’re operating in 15 different states and looking to expand quickly, but it would be next to impossible for us to be compliant in all of those states if they each had their own unique privacy laws. The unique state privacy laws are a huge problem.
There are efforts to reclassify some independent contractors as employees. What would that mean for Hampr if those efforts passed nationwide?
The classification of who is an independent contractor or a gig worker is an existential issue for us, as our model would not be as cost-effective for the consumer and would be disruptive if we classified washrs as W-2 employees. We’d like to provide more guidance and support for our washrs in this area, but we also don’t want to get in trouble for misclassifying anyone so it’s something we have to be very careful about. We don’t want a lawsuit alleging we misclassified someone and then have to fight that battle. We just don't have the resources for that.
I feel like there needs to be an alternative to both a W-2 employee or an independent contractor that pairs the support of the first with the flexibility of the second to help everyone have a better experience.
What has your experience been like as both a mom and woman startup founder?
First of all, raising capital is hard for anyone, but doing it as a female founder makes it even harder, and doing it from a state like Louisiana feels impossible. So, I’m grateful that we've been able to raise what we have. To get there, the most instrumental thing we did was go through TechStars in Austin and really break out of the ecosystem here in Louisiana. It's a double-edged sword here in Louisiana, however. If you're not a man who works in the oil or gas industries, you're considered the odd one out. But anywhere else, as an innovator from a Southern state, we face coastal biases.
Sometimes it feels like VCs from bigger ecosystems or coastal hubs think we must ride alligators to work or something—they’re always telling us you can’t scale a startup from a place like Lafayette, Louisiana. Prefacing investor meetings with the fact that I’m originally from Dallas has helped to be taken seriously, which is just a sad truth.
I don’t think there’s anybody more innovative in the world than a mom. Moms have to figure out and balance so many things—we’re naturally problem solvers. That’s why it is such a shame that more women don’t have the opportunity to build a startup—only 2 percent of venture funding goes to women. I’m in a group called VC-backed moms, and the struggles we’re up against are infuriating. For example, investors automatically think that if you’re a mom, all of your focus is going to be on your kids. And for me, pitching something like hampr feels impossible because we are seeking investment from a bunch of men that don’t think laundry is a problem because their wives do it.
We need more diverse investors—more women investors—so that startups like mine get funded. Part of the way we accomplish that is by allowing more people to invest in startups by expanding the definition of an accredited investor. There are so many people who want to invest but just simply can't because they don't meet the qualifications. Another solution to widening the opportunity gap for women innovators could be to create more affordable childcare, which would allow moms the time and flexibility to launch their businesses.
What are your goals for hampr moving forward?
Our immediate goal is to continue scaling nationwide at a quick pace. My long-term goal is for hampr to become a verb, in a way similar to how people might say “let's Uber. There are many ways for hampr to add value to the lives of both our members and our washrs - and we are currently exploring way to do that both in and outside of our existing service offerings.
All of the information in this profile was accurate at the date and time of publication.
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