Digital Temporary Homes Use WeWash Europe-Wide

City Pop is an innovative and future-proof living concept where, thanks to in-depth neuroarchitecture studies, the surface area is optimised to make their tenants’ lives easier, inspiring, fun, and rewarding! They offer fully furnished apartments of 21-83 m² to rent for 4 to 52 weeks in Zurich, Lugano, Bern, and Lausanne – more openings in Europe will follow throughout the next few years. WeWash is their partner for the laundry room solution at all their existing and future sites.

WeWash as Part of a New Living Concept

If you design a modern living concept such as City Pop by the Swiss Artisa Group, where an app is the heart and soul of the entire customer experience, a traditional coin-operated laundry room is naturally not an option. The City Pop Tribe – that’s what City Pop calls their community – customises and improves their living experience with the City Pop app: they manage their stay, check in contactless, connect with other members and book any living services such as mobility, cleaning, or laundry on-demand.

App Meets App

All payments are made by credit card which is stored in their account. To avoid a switch to the WeWash App surface, a prerequisite for the collaboration between WeWash and City Pop was the seamless integration of WeWash App functions into the City Pop app. Another advantage of the white label solution is that WeWash only offers the laundry service but does not process any user data. This makes this integration fully GDPR compliant.

City Pop’s Requirement:
Seamless Integration in Their App

The idea of “PopWash” was born! The City Pop laundry rooms are and will be equipped with WeWash washing machines and dryers which all residents can book using only the City Pop app. The advantage: The City Pop Tribe remains in their familiar user interface and WeWash does not appear as an external provider.

A Technical Challenge

Easier said than done: both development teams cooperated intensively and planned the technical details of the integration. “One key challenge was the complexity of use-cases which needed to be implemented, so we can offer a convenient user journey keeping our customers updated on the state of their laundry in real-time”, explains Jan Allenberg, WeWash CTO. Digital laundry service is not trivial as it includes both software stacks and hardware units. “However, we managed to specify a clear set of scenarios which City Pop was able to implement smoothly into their app.”

The White Label Solution Development

The early establishment of an integration testing system covering both environments was crucial to ensure successful development. Another contributing factor to success was the agile approach to fully and incrementally test the integration as new parts were developed.

Both teams worked fast: they took approximately two months from the first planning meeting until the integration release. However, the City Pop app itself launched in parallel. At the same time, the actual properties and physical laundry rooms were just being completed and opened. In total, the whole process to go live took around four months.

Since the rollout of PopWash, the City Pop Tribe is convinced: the members have already made frequent use of the washing machines and dryers available at all locations and carried out several washing and drying cycles. And the app integration? “It’s been stable from day 1,” says City Pop CTO Alex Sassella.

“WeWash Provides the Certain Extra Comfort to Our Tenants”

Interview with Alex Sassella, CTO at City Pop

WeWash: How did you get to know WeWash and why did you choose them as your partner?
“Since the conception phase of City Pop, we were looking for a partner to manage the laundry rooms in a smart way. We met WeWash at the exhibition So!Apart in 2018 and it was love at first sight.”

What was the main goal of the collaboration of WeWash and City Pop?
“We wanted to remove the outdated coin mechanisms and give extra comfort to our tenants.”

Why did you choose a smart system for the laundry?  In what way did WeWash present a better solution for your needs?
“WeWash facilities enhance the tenants’ experience by checking real-time availability directly on their phone, paying with their registered credit card and being notified whenever the laundry is done. On the company side, we can measure and track the machine usage in each building, directly by checking our City Pop Property Management System.”

 

How much time and input did the City Pop team put into the collaboration?
“Approximately 8 days of analysing and prototyping, and 20 days of development and quality assurance. The City Pop and WeWash teams worked very close together and the collaboration has been smooth, enjoyable, and successful. The final result is impressive: the integration has been stable from day 1 and  we had satisfied tenants since the beginning of the service.”

 

Next steps: How do you plan to develop PopWash in the future?
“Mmh, is there anything else that we could implement? I’m in.”

 

Find out more about City Pop at citypop.com and download the City Pop app to start experiencing your next living concept.

August 2022

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About WeWash

WeWash offers you a convenient service tailored to your needs. We can either equip your shared laundry room free of charge with commercially approved washing machines and dryers. Or we can retrofit your existing equipment with our WeWash Box. The result is the same for you: cost and time savings. The professional machines are manufactured by Bosch exclusively for WeWash and ensure excellent washing and drying results. However, if you have existing machines that are in a good working condition, we can easily retrofit them to modern, cashless operation – regardless of brand or type. Users of your laundry room will benefit from an easy-to-use, digital service and will be able to book machines, check the status of their laundry and pay digitally via the WeWash App.