Dry cleaning firm uses drone to deliver clothes to customers

A Philadelphia dry cleaner is taking freshly laundered clothes to new heights by using a drone to deliver the cleaning to customers. Manayunk Cleaners is using the device to attract a younger clientele “I’m all about technology and I see a lot of these cleaners, it’s so old school. You come in…and you just pick it up. I needed to spice things up,” says Manayunk Cleaners owner Harout Vartanian.



The 24-year-old, whose shop that opened last September, has converted a four-bladed DJI Phantom quadracopter, designed for taking aerial photography, into a dry cleaning delivery machine. It takes two people, a spotter and pilot, to complete a delivery. The drone is launched from the sidewalk and once airborne, the clothes are attached to a makeshift hanging clip. Then, with clothes securely attached, the drone heads for its destination.

But since the drone is small, it’s limited in how far it can go and much can be delivered in one trip. “Right now, this particular model can only carry one to two pounds,” Vartanian said. He says that equates to a shirt or two. “There’s a higher-end model that we haven’t purchased yet, but obviously in the future that’s what we’re going to use. It carries around 5-10 pounds.”


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So far they’ve focused the drone deliveries on customers from nearby businesses to log some flight hours, according to Vartanian. Next, Vartanian says they’ll randomly select one customer a month to have their clothes delivered by air for free. Then he hopes to expand the programme and deploy a fleet of drones to deliver clothes to all customers.