Administration permits student-run DormAid to compete with longtime on-campus cleaning agency

In a move that signals a willingness to see student-run for-profit ventures compete with established campus organizations, the College decided on Monday to allow the cleaning business DormAid to unfold its laundry service for Harvard students.

DormAid will provide competition to Harvard Student Agencies (HSA) Cleaners, which has been available to students for 40 years. Unlike DormAid, HSA is a non-profit organization with Harvard administrators on its board of directors.

The announcement came as the College this week also recognized a student-run, for-profit start-up that offers “unofficial” campus tours competing with the University-sponsored Crimson Key Society guides (see story).

DormAid’s laundry subsidiary offers three plans and promises pick-up from and delivery to the entrances of residential halls. The business does not have administrative permission to enter Houses or freshman dorms.

According to its website, DormAid offers to wash, dry, fold, and deliver laundry for $0.54 a pound. HSA Cleaners charged an average of $0.62 per pound last year.

DormAid Chief Marketing Officer Robert D. Cecot ’08 said that College officials had postponed consideration on his firm’s application to run a laundry service for over a semester due to their concerns about “infringing upon the sovereignty” of HSA as the primary student business.

HSA, started by the College nearly 50 years ago to provide services and jobs to Harvard students, boasts annual revenues above $6 million. Its laundry division operates a full-service storefront on Holyoke Street and laundry depots in designated Houses.

Cecot, DormAid co-founder Michael E. Kopko ’07, and two other DormAid executives were formerly involved in HSA operations but resigned in August 2005 to devote more time to the fledgling business.

When DormAid finally applied for laundry-service permission at the beginning of this year, College officials approved the request in two weeks.

According to Associate Dean of the College Judith H. Kidd, all work of the Student Business Advisory Committee, which reviews groups seeking campus business permits, is confidential.

DormAid’s laundry services at Harvard will “piggyback off” existing clothes-cleaning operations at other Boston-area member schools, including Boston College and MIT, Kopko said.

DormAid currently serves students at 23 college and universities across the nation and plans to branch out to 1,900 schools next year, according to Kopko.

In the spring of 2005, DormAid entered the national spotlight after The Crimson’s editorial board charged that the service created “yet another differential between the haves and have-nots on campus.”

The stir inspired Comedy Central’s Daily Show to run a five-minute segment lampooning the concept.

Cecot said that after nearly two years of operation, the business has tracked its services being purchased by people of various socioeconomic backgrounds.

“We offer a service that the market wants, and it’s not just the wealthy market. It’s great,” Cecot said, citing the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Texas, Austin as examples of public schools where DormAid is popular.

Cecot, the former assistant manager of HSA Cleaners, said his ex-employers “definitely have the market power right now...What they don’t have is the agility, the speed, that we have.”

“I think it will definitely affect our business as competition,” HSA President Brian Feinstein ’07 said. “If it turns out that they are offering something that we’re not, we’ll rise to the occasion and continue being the cheapest student-run laundry service in the Square.”

Kopko said that DormAid aims to expand its cleaning-service offerings to local businesses by July 2007. Kopko and his brother at Princeton launched the firm as an extension of an informal business he ran in Stoughton during his freshman year.

—Staff writer Ying Wang can be reached at yingwang@fas.harvard.edu