My Review Of Kisafi, A Laundry And Home Cleaning Business

I like businesses that do bold things, and Kisafi is bold. We have seen “all you can eat” buffets, “bottomless” soda promotions but how about “all you can fit” laundry bag? That is what drew me to Kisafi – this was bold, especially in Kenya. If you have hosted an open bar event, you know how hard Kenyans will try to fit everything in a limited space. 😀

Kisafi promises to fix the mama fua (cleaning ladies) dilemma that most of us have experienced, when we need someone to clean the house or do laundry. If you do not have a house help, your choice is limited to picking one of the cleaning ladies that wait for work outside the estate gate. A stranger you do not know, may not trust,a lot of times will not do a perfect job, will most probably use too much detergent and water and sometimes could carry some items with her.

On the cleaning ladies side, the model does not work perfectly either. They are not assured of an income, may sometimes be harassed by watchmen and working in some homes may not be safe for them.

I love that Kisafi is fixing both ends of the problem – by providing these ladies with contractual jobs, they are assured of steady income and a safe, professional work place, while the customers get great, supervised service and even save money.

According to Kisafi’s co-founder “FO” Odunuga, they have in the last 4 months established a solid base of repeat clients in Nairobi and are now in closed beta in Lagos and Kampala, with plans to open up the service in December in the two cities.

Ok, onto the fun bit of the post.

My experience using Kisafi.

You can access the service both on the web and the mobile app that is available in the Google Play Store. I decided to test the app, though the web experience too is fantastic. The download process was pretty simple, and while there is a Sign Up button at the bottom, I liked that I could book without signing up first – they are not trying to harvest information, you do not have to sign up if you will not use the service.

Now, I did not have immediate laundry or home cleaning need because I have a helper a.k.a my Home Person^TM who handles all of this for me. I however really wanted to see if this works because she sometimes will go on leave or go upcountry with The Child^TM , and as I have blogged before, I do not do chores anymore – I am lazy. An option that is as professional as my Home Person^TM was appealing to me.

So I made up a chore for Kisafi to do for me – to launder my duvet.

Kisafi allows you to fit as much laundry as you can in their Kisafi bag, which takes about 2 weeks of laundry. I figured my duvet would fit in one bag 😀

Then the app asks you to choose how you want your laundry done; hand wash, machine wash or dry clean. As much as I wanted to stress test the business and hand wash would have been the best test, I went with machine was because, this is a duvet.

The app calculates the cost at the bottom. You can add other things too, the recalculation was quite seamless. I liked that I could see the price clearly before making the order. A comprehensive price list is on the website. I was also required to enter my location – they do not charge to pick up or drop off your laundry.

This was on 28th September, I selected that they pick up my laundry the following day (29th September) after 9am and dropped off on the 30th of September after 6pm.

Finally, I selected my preferred payment method (they have M Pesa, a voucher or card, I picked the card option).

Sweet!

On the 29th at 8:43am I got a call from a Kisafi “Pilot” (what they call the riders) informing me that he was on his way to my house. I sent him my Home Person’s number and that was it. He was super professional.

On the 30th, I did not interact with the Kisafi team at all – save for later that evening when I found my very clean duvet in my bedroom, which was packed together with a Kisafi bag, I suppose for the next time I need the service.

Conclusion

Kisafi gets 5 stars from me for a great user experience both on and offline
Did I save money? Yes. Usually, I pay between 1,000 – 1,500 to launder my duvet, and I have to deliver it to the laundry. We can say I saved on fuel costs.
Did I save time? Definitely. It takes between 3-5 days with the regular laundry, this took just a day.
Will I use Kisafi in future? Big YES. When my people go on holiday, I am glad I will not need to stress about chores.

In future, I will use the web app because of two minor issues I had with the phone application:

It required too many permissions – as a transitioning iOS user, I still cannot get over how much access Google gives to apps.
It is not optimized for payments. To make my payment, I had to use the web app, which required me to register all over again.

Have you read my review of Dandia, the latest cab hailing app in town?