PurpleTie.com Takes Cleaners to the Web

By Jay Hipps, Hacienda Network Staff Writer

New Business Hopes to Make Dry Cleaning Only a Click Away

PurpleTie.com, an e-commerce business that will offer dry cleaning services through a Worldwide Web interface, has opened their corporate headquarters in Hacienda on Chabot Drive.

PurpleTie is the latest venture for Payam Zamani, who founded Autoweb.com with his brother Frank in late 1994. With the new company, he'd like to do for dry cleaning what Autoweb did for car buyers.

"I think some company is going to drive up standards in the (dry cleaning) industry and make everyone provide better service," he says. "Someone is going to get into consolidating this business and providing one major brand and we think we have what it takes to do that."

While the specifics of PurpleTie's business model are still closely guarded, Zamani admits admiration for services which offer pick-up and delivery of goods on a timetable picked by the customer.

"If someone offered that service today, I would definitely use them until we had our service up and running," he says.

"One thing that I'll tell you is that our standard service at PurpleTie will be next-day service," he adds.

The company, which launched in late August, currently has 16 employees and is conducting a recruiting campaign for corporate level employees. Zamani expects to employ over 75 by the second quarter of 2000.

It's an ambitious plan, but Zamani notes that offering the service via the Internet offers a great deal of flexibility.

"The Internet offers efficiencies that storefronts don't," he says. "It makes it more attractive on a lot of levels when you don't have to open up three or four hundred stores you simply have people do business with you online."

Zamani notes that the company is committed to delivering a superior product as well.

"The most important aspect of the business is that when we get out there, we are able to offer consistent service and a top-quality product and be able to meet customers' expectations and exceed them every single time," he notes. "If we can't do that, then we haven't been able to deliver on our promise and we haven't been successful."

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