After its founding in 2017, the one and only Sneaker Laundry has expanded its doors to worldwide sneaker cleaning services and innovative coffee and matcha drinks. Currently holding the world record for the most free matchas given away in one day, Sneaker Laundry has remained a leader in both of the markets it currently occupies—sneaker cleaning services and the encapsulating cafe lifestyle.

 

With sneaker cleaning situated in such a niche market, and the cafe market being one of the most competitive industries in Sydney and Melbourne, Sneaker Laundry’s journey from start-up to standing out amongst the crowd is no easy feat. Eugene Cheng, the owner of Sneaker Laundry and a previous commerce-law student turned entrepreneur, offers his past eight years of experiences and insights into marketing techniques that extend beyond pure social media analytics and superficial marketing campaigns. 

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Consistent Branding

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While the idea of consistent branding has become one of the biggest mantras in personal branding and marketing strategies, Eugene offers another sentiment: 

 

You cannot open a store “that doesn’t resonate with the demographic there”. You may have ticked the box for a consistent brand, but at the same time, “your brand is going to consistently die.” Every location is a representation of the target audience there—“I don’t want stores to look identical because there is such a big consideration between them”. 

 

Even the world’s largest chains like Starbucks and Mixue don’t have the exact same layout in all their stores. Quite frankly, a “universal fit-out that works everywhere you go” simply does not exist. A store that refuses to understand who it’s serving is a store that goes short-lived. So although a brand may have its own unique aesthetic, it is also bound to the aesthetic of its location. 

 

So how do you create that balance? In fact, Sneaker Laundry has their own brand guide, and Eugene even expressed it was something he “wish[ed he’d] learned sooner”. Minimalistic, “simple and clean”, with a characteristic neutral, cool-toned colour, and classic text fonts; these are integrated into all the details of branding. The colour of aprons, the font of the menu, the type of table and chair, are all carefully curated in relation to their personal branding. This works so well for the company because that is exactly what their sneaker cleaning service is all about: cleanliness and professionalism. 

 

But other than these distinctive features that “sets the tone for everyone”, Sneaker Laundry expands and caters to its target audience depending on location. Within Australia’s Sneaker Laundry’s locations, different cities operate on completely different wavelengths. The demographics and culture between cities vary so drastically that what works in Sydney doesn’t work in Melbourne, and vice versa. And the brand guide is what they can fall back on to maintain this adaptability without losing their identity.

It is not unknown that Melbournians favour the monochromatic black and white colour scheme, opting for all-black clothes and outfits, with an intense pride for coffee and cafe culture. In a similar manner, Sydney’s picturesque Harbour Bridge and Opera House around Circular Quay have a greater impact on Sydney’s culture than people think. The clashes between Australia’s ‘iconic-tourist-attraction’ Sydney and ‘art-music-culture capital’ Melbourne create such diverse needs and wants from their respective populations. 

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“Sydney wants the ‘futuristic Acne Studio’ cool vibe. [...] And then Melbourne, on the other hand, [...] they’ve got this big following of cafes that want this ‘homey’, warm vibe”. 

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And this is very apparent in the physical layout of Sneaker Laundry’s stores. The Sydney Martin Place Station Sneaker Laundry and Sneaker Laundry LAB scream futuristic design, with bright neon white lights, shiny blue surfaces, and bright modern signage. In direct comparison is Melbourne’s increased use of wooden materials to create a more natural look, with muted colour palettes and a cosier interior design. On top of this, within the same city, demographics can vary between suburbs, and Sneaker Laundry tailors their stores to ensure people feel welcomed. The essence of Sneaker Laundry’s physical marketing comes back to: What do the people actually want? 

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Focusing on cleaning sneakers, Sneaker Laundry’s first and main service, they have welcomed three different target audiences across different locations. Eugene describes their main target audiences as: 

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1. Parents bringing in their teenagers’ shoes for cleaning, 

2. Time-constrained office workers who wish to stay presentable, and 

3. Sneakerheads and activewear lovers.  

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These contrasting target audiences have varying needs and tailoring stores to fit all their needs can appear complicated and confusing. However, returning to the idea of varying demographics within the same city, it is important to conduct analysis before opening a store in any location; Sneaker Laundry’s analysis finds patterns in its target audiences’ primary location, allowing for tailored and consistent branding across the same city. 

 

Sydney’s suburban East Village, Zetland store and CBD, Martin Place Station store see very different day-to-day customers. The Zetland store sees masses and masses of activewear, where the most common sneaker cleaned is the classic “white sneaker” from fitness influencers and activewear enthusiasts. In comparison, Sydney’s CBD Martin Place Station store shares similarity with Melbourne’s CBD store in that the main demographic is largely office workers, a very characteristic “CBD audience”. Their stores need to be equipped with the correct equipment and interior to ensure these audiences have their needs best satisfied. 

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Sneaker Laundry’s online website, however, has a much broader target audience, allowing for a more generalised and streamlined layout. The cheaper clean-it-yourself option online targets the broader audience, and remains in line with Sneaker Laundry’s brand guide—minimalistic black and white colours with classic Sans-Serif and Serif text fonts. 

 

Regardless, Sneaker Laundry’s success continuously comes back to its ability to tailor its experience to the people in the way they like it, while maintaining its core consumer-driven principle at heart. 

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Association & Expansion

 

Finding the correct layout can be extremely difficult; it is not always clear what a community wants to see, and the influx of social media and digital marketing has only made it harder to keep a community within one trend and aesthetic at a given point in time. The process is not always simple, it always comes back to “the circle of taking feedback, implementing feedback, getting more feedback, and doing it over and over again.” 

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One of the biggest ventures away from pure sneaker cleaning has been the opening of the Sneaker Laundry LAB. Now one of the largest parts of the brand, the cafe “LAB” counterpart was initially envisioned to be run parallel by another company. It is not easy for a sneaker cleaning service to open a cafe counterpart, something that many would say is so different in terms of services, aesthetic, and operation. How do you create a successful brand that brings the sneaker cleaning and cafe parts together in a seamless manner? 

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The process of opening this cafe then came to, as Eugene describes it, asking themselves: 

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“What were the similarities between what we were trying to start with, the coffee and matcha, and what were similarities with Sneaker Laundry in the last seven years?” 

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On the surface, both parts offer services to a select group of people, but the underlying similarities always seemed to return to “largely experimentation, trial and error”, “improving the offering to the customers”, and “staying a leader in the industry”. 

 

And so, how did Sneaker Laundry LAB stay a leader in the coffee and matcha industry? What Sydney needed was “good matcha; and not just good matcha, matcha that [people] can get for a good price, fast, but also innovative”. Sydney’s coffee was even brought up from Melbourne, because Melbourne-standard coffee is just “better” with the seriousness in which Melbournians take their favourite morning drink.The brand has even grown its physical presence, with their world record in the most amount of free matchas given away in a day, sitting at 5011 free matchas given to customers at their Sydney store on the 2nd of October, with similar events happening not once, but twice in Melbourne before. 

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Yet, with the LAB’s growing presence online through social media, it brings forth the question: Will Sneaker Laundry LAB ever overshine the core essence of Sneaker Laundry’s shoe-cleaning services? 

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And the answer is, the biggest success of the LAB is that it can never be parted from its roots of its parental figure, Sneaker Laundry. After all, successes within the LAB correlate directly to expansion within Sneaker Laundry’s sneaker cleaning services. 

 

The way Eugene describes it highlights the power of association, and the importance of expanding sideways into new markets, and not just focussing and expanding vertically within your line of business. 

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“The creation of Sneaker Laundry LAB, and the benefits of deciding to create [it], was understanding that no matter how successful Sneaker Laundry LAB as a cafe became, you could never untie it from Sneaker Laundry.”

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Sneaker Laundry has been very lucky to have been able to trademark the name “Sneaker Laundry”. Due to the inability to trademark common words, after years of struggling with the Trademark Office, Sneaker Laundry has managed to prove that no one else has ever associated and put the words “sneaker” and “laundry” together before, making them the only brand in the market, something that even giant chains like Apple have been unable to do. 

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And while this has allowed Sneaker Laundry to remain the one and only sneaker cleaning chain in the world, it does come with its downsides in terms of marketing and expansion. Being the  only brand in the industry, it does mean that they’re also the only ones who are “willing to spend money to actually grow the industry”. This situation is only made harder when Sneaker Laundry operates in such a “fairly small niche” where there is a relatively small “total addressable market size”. With just themselves, there is only so long where “you can stand on top of hills and yell ‘Clean your shoes!’” and hope that you attract more customers. Eugene admits that they “tried to scale the sneaker cleaning side of the business and spent a lot of money doing that through PR and marketing”, but there comes a limit to how much one company can do; “no amount of money you throw at it [will] make that industry grow any quicker”. 

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The Sneaker Laundry LAB counterpart does, however, offer a solution in part to this problem. While sneaker cleaning may not concern the majority of the general public, food and drink in an aesthetic cafe does. And with the growth of those who come in contact with the LAB, the greater the number of people who become exposed to Sneaker Laundry. 

 

“The more matchas and coffee sold, the more sneakers cleaned. It has always been linked. You can’t physically know us as a cafe, because the name is literally ‘Sneaker Laundry’. [...] You literally can’t run from the fact that Sneaker Laundry is what it says it is, a place that cleans sneakers.” 

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The LAB is such a success for the brand because it brings people from the general public and introduces them to the niche industry that Sneaker Laundry sits in. From the performative males, to the matcha and food influencers, to just the average cafe-hopping lovers, anyone who didn’t know about Sneaker Laundry’s sneaker cleaning now does.

 

Just take Sydney’s free matcha event a few weeks ago. As random as it seems, this has been integral to Sneaker Laundry’s exposure to more audiences. The lines for free matchas are longer than most stores have ever seen, with over 5000 people waiting in lines that go around and around Martin Place Station. The effects of this decision ripple way past just the day of the event. 

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People will “line up for 20 to 30 minutes thinking about Sneaker Laundry, get to the front of the line, walk in and see “a DJ under a massive light-up box saying ‘Sneaker Laundry’. They’ll get their cup of matcha with [the Sneaker Laundry] logo printed all over it. They’ll drink the matcha for the next 15 minutes thinking ‘Wow! This matcha from Sneaker Laundry is great!’. They’ll go tell their friends what they did, go back to the office and tell their [co-workers] where they went and what they did.” 

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And the cycle continues. And that’s just the people who come in the store. Foot traffic around Martin Place Station brings on onlookers who will see lines of people waiting to enter a store called Sneaker Laundry. Not only this, but the social media impact of announcing that Sydney broke the world record for the most free matchas given out in a day furthers the exposure and outreach to audiences across Australia, and even worldwide. In the end, “it all attributes towards the brand at large [and] it will attribute to the sneaker cleaning”. 

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However, this is only feasible if you have expanded into those markets. The success of Sneaker Laundry LAB is an amazing example of the opportunities that open up when brands expand horizontally and gain new target audiences. 

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Retention & Standing Out

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Whether it’s the bustling metro of Sydney or cozily tucked away in the Melbourne CBD, Sneaker Laundry has surefootedly won the hearts and soles of sneakerheads, cafe lovers, and everyone in between. 

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Pioneering the sneaker cleaning industry, the novelty and uniqueness of the concept itself has certainly played a role in Sneaker Laundry’s journey to success. Yet rather than simply clinging onto this aspect of distinctiveness, Eugene and his team employ a complex framework of strategy, goal-orientation, and proactivity. For them, the sky is the limit, because how else do you seamlessly introduce something radical into people’s often well-solidified lifestyles? 

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“For a lot of people, they're just happy to hit 1000-2000 views. But for me and my marketing team, if that video doesn't go viral, you failed.” 

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In an age where marketing online and on social media has become the ‘norm’, distinguishing a brand from a sea of other eager businesses is no longer as simple as a cute Facebook post. Businesses have to be critical in redefining online success. For Sneaker Laundry, the bar is set incredibly high. Navigating the torrential waters of the marketing world and ensuring that they can cut through the space that they’re in is quintessential in gaining traction, both online and in person. For them, it really is ‘go big, or go home’, and according to Eugene, this requires extensive trial and error. Whether it’s making videos of cleaning shoes on the streets or holding the inaugural performative male contests, Sneaker Laundry quite certainly has done it all. Their fearless experimentation allows them to stand out in a rigid industry. And this cannot be done without guidance and meticulous attention to consumer response and satisfaction. 

 

Sneaker Laundry’s symbiosis with their audience is a key ingredient in their recipe for distinguished branding. Their social media page is a vibrant mosaic of their own content, combined with customer posts and messages. Especially in this day and age where word of mouth and social media become predominant conduits for people to determine whether a place is worth visiting, Sneaker Laundry’s professional identity that prides itself on the strong rapport between them and their customers goes a long way. On another level, this reciprocal relationship—this point of difference—goes beyond social media metrics and the Instagram grid. Eugene fondly recalls some of Sneaker Laundry’s past campaigns, a recent and memorable one being the ‘Critical Banter’ podcast and the wildly popular Scratch to Win cards. 

 

“We just wrapped up a campaign with the podcast boys, called Critical Banter and we did a full scratchy campaign, and customers had a ton of fun coming in every day, just trying to win stuff on the scratchies.”

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With locality and customer interaction at the forefront, their most recent campaign seamlessly tied together members of the local community, amassing hundreds of curious new customers, and equally as many excited returning ones. 

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“But you know—do they feel like this is the place they want to hang out and come back tomorrow? That's the ultimate question.” 

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This is especially true in terms of the LAB. Standing out in the competitive cafe climate of Melbourne requires more than just visual advertising or flashy brand deals. Standing out requires brands to build consistent and continuous rapport with customers. Customer retention is the reason why places become keystones in the food and retail world; they’re places you’ll come back to no matter what, even amidst the influx of new joints popping up around the place. It’s something that can’t be neglected or dismissed as just figures and data statistics. Businesses with strong communities see their customers as individuals—individuals keen on winning a year’s worth of free matcha, individuals who come as a result of their favourite podcast or individuals keen on a shoe clean after running The Tan. 

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And honestly, it doesn’t end there. Distinguishing a brand requires a multi-faceted approach. Eugene talks us through ‘The Ecosystem’. 

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The LAB itself really ties together Sneaker Laundry’s vivacious experimentation, whether it be in the realm of social media marketing or physical marketing. For example, their continuous innovation of drinks keeps new menu items exciting and novel, without sacrificing consistency, maintaining their ‘go-to’ status amongst regulars. From incorporating cult-classics like Yakult and Tokyo Banana into their drinks, to completely shaking up matcha on a thermodynamic level (See: Strawberry Kush Matcha), the team at Sneaker Laundry is constantly experimenting and strengthening their point of difference. Where else in Melbourne can you taste every Asian child’s dream: yakult on matcha?

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"Innovating the drinks and stuff, that again feeds. It's like a bit of an ecosystem because then you push the marketing, the marketing pushes fun campaigns, fun campaigns create a fun environment for the staff and then they want to come to work and they want to feed into that ecosystem and want to be part of it.” 

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Pivoting to the other end of the ecosystem, Sneaker Laundry doesn’t just prioritise their customer base, they also prioritise the wellbeing of their team. 

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“You have to have an amazing team. Cafes are driven by people.” 

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It doesn’t end with just hiring staff that have a strong work ethic and a knack for sociability. That’s only where it begins. To Eugene, it’s imperative that the workplace is vibrant and fosters a sense of joy, where staff can look forward to their day. And just like in a natural ecosystem, this intrinsic positivity symbiotically passes on to the customers. A good work culture is what makes staff remember customer’s names, their orders, the reason why they might smile when handing out drinks; if something were to go south, that’s also why they’re happy to take initiative, and “go above and beyond” to fix it. 

 

Funnily enough, this interview with Eugene took place on the Sydney store’s Free Matcha promotion, and we witnessed in real time (albeit second-hand), this ecosystem absolutely flourishing. 

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“Like in [Sydney] right now,I don't think anyone's gone to the toilet yet. They're all having fun, you know what I mean? And no one wants to tap out, like no one's raising their hand being like ‘I'm going on my lunch break’, you know? I mean, everyone's like, ‘**** this we're gonna smash as many matcha lattes as we can!’” 

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It’s likely this ecosystemic approach was modelled upon Eugene’s own experiences as a cafe customer. He recalled himself going back not just for the food but because when “you walk in there, [they] remember your order, they smile, they give you your favourite seat, they bring the waters over to you and I found that to be a large part of the appeal of someone's everyday routine at its core”. And perhaps this model is what makes Sneaker Laundry such a well-loved staple, especially the LAB portion which continues to thrive despite the competitive cafe climates of Melbourne and Sydney. 

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“When coffee and matcha are so accessible these days in Melbourne, the real point of difference is something that you can't offer, it's actually quite intrinsic. You want to go [to that cafe]. You want to be remembered. You want to feel like you're respected, recognised, and all sorts of things you can't really buy.”

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Many businesses fall into the trap of seeing their business models run on a two-dimensional plane: What items can we sell? How do I make this item more unique? But as Eugene mentioned, whether it’s Melbourne or Sydney, whether it’s shoe cleaning services or a hojicha, as long as it’s material and tangible, no matter ‘how good’ your offerings are, there will never be a hard set point of difference between you and your neighbouring competitor. 

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As inherently social creatures, we crave our coffee with a spoon or two of kindness or our shoes to be taken in with a kind smile. It makes all the difference. It’s what sets you above the crowd, rather than just apart. And of course, for that to happen, we must trace this back to team wellbeing. When you’re operating in or entering an ecosystem where good energy is just reciprocated everywhere, it makes you want to come back, again and again, even when lines begin to curve around the block, or the shoes keep piling in. Facades don’t stand the test of time, nor do they hold up in the harsh climates. As Eugene puts it: “you can’t just pay someone and call it a day, you need to go beyond that”. When you give others the bare minimum, that’s all you can expect back. 

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So, how exactly, do you surpass just meeting these bare minimum needs and hitting the higher needs at the top of the hierarchy? Once more, all roads lead back to this idea of the ‘Ecosystem’: incentivising them, pushing out fun campaigns, ensuring they’re seen and heard, and can have fun. 

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“You need to motivate them. Beyond that, you need to create an environment where they come in and want to smash it, you know what I mean?”

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Over time, this inevitably moulds a team that is not only creative, but confident, warm, and friendly. It is incredibly touching to see how highly respect and internal culture is valued at Sneaker Laundry, and see the real fruits of what happens when empathy and humanity are sown into a business. 

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“You couldn’t be a sook if you tried, like if you tried to be a sook…you just couldn't get away with it. Everyone would just be really happy and you'd just stick out like a sore thumb.”

 

Key takeaways

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With that being said, what can we take away from this?

 

To be able to ride out the waves of a dynamic and competitive market requires a multi-dimensional approach that operates on a continuum. And that’s what Sneaker Laundry does. 

 

Maintaining a consistent brand guide is important. For one, it can thrive under favourable conditions. But, being able to refine, push, and enrich it, is what helps businesses stay afloat in sink or swim situations. 

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And beyond that, is a thorough understanding of your consumer base: who you’re targeting, and why a certain demographic might make up a good portion of this populus. As seen with Sneaker Laundry, being able to unite a dual consumer base as a result of the sneaker cleaning and cafe hybrid model exemplifies the application of this knowledge to strengthen the rapport of two very different trades. This yet again, feeds into an ecosystem, supporting the marketing strategies that build a brand. 

 

Pushing out fun campaigns is one thing, but a positive intrinsic culture is what drives it and keeps customers coming back.

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