Inglewood has a population of less than four thousand, but it's home to the most sophisticated laundromat in the country.
Each day 3500 sheets, 6000 towels, and 4000 garments pass through the La Nuova facility, with robots ensuring they come out the other side, sparkling. A recent $5 million upgrade has made it the most technologically advanced laundry in New Zealand.
Fifty-five real people work there too, but AI has made their jobs safer and easier, with less heavy lifting and fewer touchpoints.
"We get tar, blood, make-up - you name it. Now, we throw things on a conveyor belt and don't touch it again until it's ready to be dispatched," said La Nuova's managing director, Brad Craig.
The company spent two years preparing their team for the changes and through natural attrition, avoided redundancies.
'Laundry's not exciting'
"I was nervous about how it may go down with the team, in terms of automating the plant, but I've been blown away with how positive they are," Craig said.
He added it's also about making their jobs more enjoyable: "Laundry's not exciting, no-one likes laundry, so can we make it fun?"
Craig is the third generation to take the washing helm.
"My grandfather started this in 1959. It started as dry cleaners. If anything had to be washed, it was in a bucket."
Craig said drycleaning has been on the decline for many years, due to things like changing dress sense, the rise of easy-care fabrics and improvements in home washing machines.
"Covid didn't help either, with more people working from home, not wearing pants,' he laughed. "All those big events, like races, work functions and awards, haven't really come back."
The family moved into commercial laundry and hasn't looked back.
“We process about 10 tonnes of laundry a day here, about 50 tonnes a week. We've got other laundries ringing us up wanting to come and have a look."
Linens and uniforms from hotels, aged care facilities and restaurants arrive by the truckload and are run through an X-ray machine.
"Primarily this is designed to identify foreign objects, so if something is tangled up in the sheets and towels, we don't want it to go in the wash. It'll reject the item."
"We're looking for the person who's left a set of keys in the pockets, a screwdriver, a razor blade, whatever it may be. Of all the garments 20% of them had things in their pockets.
"The old way we had to check 100% to find that 20%. This way we can use the technology to do that for us," Craig said.
They've even found the occasional soft toy and returned it to its distraught owner.
From there, AI cameras sort and separate the washing, automatically sending each bundle to the correct machine.
"We batch-wash everything in 50 kilo lots. Your home washing machine would use 35 litres per kg wash, we operate at about nine. We have dryers that are 120 kilos. A load of towels will dry in 17 or 18 minutes."
Robotic pressers and folders process nine hundred items an hour. Smart hangers ensure no orders are mixed up, with garments travelling independently around the plant ready for dispatch.
It's a far cry from the shop his grandfather started, with La Nuova taking home a regional business excellence award.
"I grew up with my father telling me that the first-generation starts it, the second-generation builds it, and the third-generation stuffs it up. So that's been a huge motivation to make sure we do some good stuff and prove him wrong," Craig said.
"I think it'd blow his mind."
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