Not too long ago, Cleanly looked like a promising tech startup. In 2015, journalists marveled at the ingenuity of the founder, Tom Harari. Fast Company said Harari had "streamlined laundry delivery using smartphones." A Wall Street Journal reporter chronicled her experience shadowing a Cleanly concierge and witnessing the company's signature laundry process. Cleanly raised more than $7 million in funding before it merged with NextCleaners in late February and created a new company named ByNext, for which Harari will serve as chairman of the board.Do you know of a company behaving irresponsibly in the coronavirus era? Fill out this form, or reach out on Signal at 310-614-3752, and VICE will be in touch.
Explaining the company's shortcomings, Saifi confirmed to VICE that the company had been overwhelmed by the number of orders they received as a result of the pandemic, but argued that the company was prioritizing health care workers' clothes."The health care ads were a bonus when I was choosing Cleanly. They were paying it forward. Good for them. Or so I thought."
For more than a week, Philip Sieverding, an actor who lives in Brooklyn, had been thinking the same thing. For days on end, he had been engaged in a back-and-forth conversation with Cleanly's customer-service department over email, unable to reach a person on the phone. He was curious if his clothes were being held hostage, but no one could tell him where they were."I picked Cleanly almost explicitly because they seemed to be addressing COVID concerns," Sieverding said, adding that his local laundromat had also closed. "They seemed like a company that was taking the epidemic into account.""I picked Cleanly almost explicitly because they seemed to be addressing COVID concerns. They seemed like a company that was taking the epidemic into account."
Hobrecker and Sieverding both said that the Cleanly Instagram account appeared to be deleting all the negative comments it received. "I distinctly remember reading one comment from a woman that her husband was forced to wear the same pair of dirty scrubs for a week because they lost their laundry," Hobrecker said. "That comment was up for a bit. But the medical worker ones, from what I can tell, seem to have disappeared the fastest."Saifi, the ByNext CEO, denied that anyone was deleting comments on the company's behalf. But he did forward a statement that said "ByNext reserves the right to remove or delete any and all comments we find to be abusive or harassing to a member of our staff or other customers, or in cases where personal identifiable information is shared by a user comment."By April, the situation had reached a breaking point, and a group of customers, led by a disgruntled customer named Chelsea Larson, met one another on Cleanly's Instagram page and started a group chat. They were trying to lend one another clarity and somehow alert medical professionals. The one person helping them? Howard Kennedy, the former Cleanly employee. He had left the company a couple of weeks earlier to become something of a detergent vigilante and was now sliding into their DMs and giving them instructions on how to get their clothes back."An employee called me, telling me, like, that she was from New York, and this was important to her. That I was important to her. Like, I don't care anymore. You're fucking thankful? You're stealing my clothes."
Blackstock didn't know any of this when she decided to join the service in late March. So when she was leaving the hospital a few days after she sent her clothes in, she was surprised to see a message pop up on her phone: It was from Cleanly, saying that her laundry would not be delivered that evening. The stated reason was an odd one: Nobody could find her clothes. That included most of her underwear, and most of her scrubs."I'm literally scared every day of getting coronavirus, and this added on a whole other level of stress," she said. "Especially in the middle of a pandemic, where everyone is super stressed. I just need my stuff to wear to work."Cleanly didn't reimburse Blackstock at first. But eventually, the company decided to do so. All it took was Blackstock complaining on Twitter—to her more than 33,000 followers.Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.Follow Alex Norcia on Twitter."I sifted through garbage and unmarked laundry bins and customer bags for about an hour with a manager onsite until I was able to find all my bags. Everything was filthy, soaking wet, and frozen together from being outside for a week and a half."