Los Angeles, October 9, 2016.

Open letter to all our customers:

A few days ago, one of our customers, Mr. K, purchased one of our products, a Superpop washer and it was delivered in a little bit more than 24 hours.
Unfortunately the machine was damaged by that famous cargo company and it arrived with a crack on the lid.
Politely, Mr. K sent us an email that went straight to my inbox. He was asking how much we would charge for a replacement lid.
I started to write a formal reply explaining his washer was protected by a 3-year warranty and we would send him a replacement free of charge, as I do hundreds of times every week, but then I stopped for a moment. Wait! What am I doing? Why use this formal language? This is not me, this is not our company! We make machines to be used by humans, we interact with humans and we are The Laundry Alternative! Why our communications need to be the same as everybody else?
Then I decided to delete and restart. Now it wasn’t only Thomas the design manager writing. It was me, Thomas, the washing machine lover writing an email to my close friend K.
It was something like this:

Dear  K.

I’m sorry that incident happened to our washer.
Selling you a replacement part? Are you crazy? I refuse to sell you replacement parts for your washing machine until the warranty expires. Instead, I’m sending you a brand new washer right at this moment.Oh! And don’t forget that here you’re the boss.

Have a good one!

Tom

Yes, my friends, I asked if one of our customers was “crazy”. Who would think an American company would dare to use such colloquial language to communicate to a customer. And do you want to know why? The answer is super simple.

Since Corey Tournet started the company in 1999, the company never sold a single product. We don’t sell products, we are paid to offer solutions. That is our soul and that’s why we are called The Laundry Alternative. Life is too short to waste time with useless formalities. And come on, folks. Receive an email reply that looks like it was written by a robot? Nope! No way! Never with my signature!

That moment I could realize how big is our legacy and how important our brand is. It is true that we are the alternative to do laundry protecting the environment but our alternatives go much beyond that.  Different from competitors that think only about profit and search for the cheapest supplier in China, we design our own products focused on American and Canadian needs. We are constantly listening to people because we make machines for humans. And we are also humans. We are an American company, we understand our people and our beloved Canadian neighbors and we will never stop listening because every day we can learn something new that can be used to improve our products or our services.

We are crazy. Totally crazy.Just like the lovely Disney character Gyro Gearloose. (But our inventions work, LOL)  Maybe we should have bowl of Haldol for breakfast instead of the usual corn flakes.Who would be crazy enough to create a hand crank washing machine? We knew the idea would sound silly, maybe even absurd, and here it is. We had the guts to innovate and our non-electric washer is so good that one of our customers called it WonderWash and the nickname was turned into the model name.  Almost 20 years later and hundreds of thousands of units later, our “crazy” idea helped the US and Canada save millions of Kw/h of electricity and millions of gallons of water.  And it was only our first product.
 After that, we created our first spin dryer, so efficient that it cuts the drying time in over 70%. It can even extract more water than the best full size washer on the market that claims to be “High Efficiency”.  We went ahead and again decided to run away from the beaten path launching a clothes dryer that can be hung on a door and connected to any power outlet and uses 84% less electricity than a regular full size tumble dryer without shrinking clothes. Who doesn’t love it?

Our product portfolio grew up and thanks to our customers we improved our products. Your support helped the United States of America and Canada reduce the negative impact on the environment. Who would think the WonderWash would cause such good impact? Who would believe when we said we were going to launch the biggest capacity household spin dryer in the World? Who would say we would receive calls from customers saying the SuperPop cleans and rinses much better than the best model made by the giant company Whirlpool?

Our secret is not exactly a secret. We think simple, we think out of the box, we are crazy enough to try and we do it with love.

And that’s what we do every day, because it’s not about laundry, It’s about love. The love that we feel for the USA and Canada, the love that we feel for our environment and the most important, the love that we feel for you, our customer, our big boss.

And our competitors… well… I don’t mean to sound arrogant and please don’t understand that way, but I don’t believe those flimsy machines and even a frustrated copy of the WonderWash sold by adventurers on the Internet can be called competitors. It is true they are sometimes cheaper than our products but they don’t support the American design, they don’t even respect the so called “American Dream”. It’s super easy to bring a container full of junk from Asia and sell cheap, sometimes without even testing the products. 
I want to see those so called “competitors” doing exactly what we do in our warehouse in Nashua or in our lab in Los Angeles. We spend years testing and even intentionally destroying prototypes, redesigning, remaking everything hundreds of times if needed only to make sure our washers and spin dryers won’t explode, or a dryer won’t start a fire, for example, before we authorize the production to start.

Our products are a little bit more expensive because we are constantly investing in new technologies to protect even more our environment for the future generations and make our customers life much easier.

Thank you so much for your support.There’s a lot more to come. Designed and engineered in the United States of America, the land of the free and home of the brave.

With love

Thomas Alfred Banton-Ortega
Product Design Manager
The Laundry Alternative Inc.