Meet Christian Sanya, the owner and founder of The Laundry Room, the newest Black-owned laundromat in PG County, Maryland. She was able to buy the business after just a few years of saving up enough money from her side hustle doing on-demand laundry with a company called SudShare. Not even a year has passed yet, and the business is already earning up to $24,000 monthly revenue.
In 2019, Sanya, who also works as a Medical Laboratory Technologist, started looking for a side job after her then 6-year-old daughter was diagnosed with autism and she lost her full-time job. She eventually stumbled upon the on-demand laundry platform, SudShare. Because she has always been fond of doing laundry since her childhood, she found the task enjoyable.
What’s more, Sanya also found that the side hustle is indeed lucrative. She usually fulfilled about 12 hours of laundry requests per day and just last year, she made $46,000. Even though she returned to work in a hospital in March 2020, she continued her side hustle.
Following these achievements, Sanya and her husband decided to buy the laundromat she was eyeing for 8 years prior. It has always been Sanya’s dream since they got married but it was held off since they didn’t have the funds at that time. When the laundromat was back on the market on March 2022, they bought it outright without a mortgage for $200,000 using a big part of what she had earned from SudShare.
After a few renovations for nearly 6 months, they opened The Laundry Room with 40 machines. Sanya spends 2 to 3 hours in the laundromat every day, while her husband runs the business with their four other employees while she’s at work. On top of working full-time, being a mother of 4, and owning a business, Sanya still accepts a few SudShare orders.
“You have to sacrifice a lot to know that where you’re going, the endpoint, is going to pay off,” Sanya told CNBC. “I’ve given up family time, I’ve given up my date nights. I’ve given up a lot for SudShare at this point.”
Moreover, Sanya dreams of turning The Laundry Room into a known laundry brand by opening more locations. She and her husband are currently working on their second location. They are also finding and training more employees so they can spend less time running the business and more time with their family.
“I refuse to accept that you can’t have good service in our community,” she says. “I’m ready to change that and that’s what I’m doing, one laundromat at a time.”
Be sure to follow the Laundry Room on Instagram @TheLaundryRoomMD
Also, support the business by going to its location at 9460 Lanham Severn Rd, Lanham, MD 20706.
