A new cleaning service model

24th of March 2022
A new cleaning service model

Christian Bouzols reports from France on a cleaning company doing business differently post-Covid.

“My problem with Covid isn’t as bad as my problem with home working. Some of my clients are cancelling their business leases and this is hurting us quite badly because a large part of our portfolio is comprised of people involved in event organisation. That’s why the partnership we’ve arranged with Airbnb last spring is so important. It has enabled us to spring back into the B to C (business to consumer) sector by developing a completely new model.”

This is what Chrystèle Gimaret, founder and chairwoman of Ekoklean, a business originally launched in 2005 under the name of Artupox, had to say about the exhilarating prospects of her new venture.

Chrystèle Gimaret, a pioneer in green cleaning who also launched a sister company in Quebec a year ago, has now kicked off with Ekoklean on Demand, an on-demand cleaning service for private customers. Working initially with the 700,000 hosts of the Airbnb platform in France, the company is also reaching out to private customers and will eventually work with business customers as well.

Its services are quite simple to use. All the customer needs to do is to load the app on their smartphone(or via the company’s website) and programme various types of cleaning services. These can be one-off or recurrent, and will be billed at €30 an hour, although the actual cost will be only €15 an hour thanks to tax refunds applied to personal services in France.

Cleaners won’t be ‘uberised’

In Chrystèle Gimaret’s mind, her offering is quite similar to Uber’s but there’s a small difference: “I definitely won’t uberise my agents, she insists. “This model has already been tested unsuccessfully in the USA a few years ago by Amazon, which was underpaying its cleaners, all of them independent workers.” As regards Ekoklean on Demand, it is paying its cleaners between €12 and €14 an hour net. In order to ensure their loyalty, the company offers them the choice of being self-employed or employed under an open-ended contract.

“We select them, we train them online for free and let them adapt their activities to their own time schedules by allowing them to accept assignments or not. This new business model should attract students, mothers living alone and other people who need to supplement their income. We also work closely with the “un jeune-une solution” (one youth, one solution) project that has been launched under the Relance (economic recovery) programme.

Ready to move into B to B

Ekoklean on Demand is already working in 200 French cities and should soon cover the whole country, mainly thanks to the partnership with Airbnb. At the end of 2021, it had 20,000 clients. The company is also thinking of moving into the B to B (business to business) sector. This will involve some changes to the way it works.

The pre-payments currently required by the app will be replaced by monthly invoices at different rates while preserving the flexibility of on demand cleaning services. “We want to enable business customers to not commit themselves to multi-year contracts while abiding by those green commitments at the heart of our business,” says Chrystèle Gimaret in conclusion.

 

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