Wash, Dry and Fold: How a Bag of Laundry Comes Back

What the service is

Wash, dry and fold is everyday laundry priced by weight rather than by piece: shirts, t-shirts, trousers, socks, towels, bed linen, gym kit. You hand over a bag and it comes back washed, dried, folded and stacked. At Rosabelle it is $7 per kilo with a $35 minimum, and standard turnaround is about five working days.

The part that matters most is not in the price. Every load is washed separately, by household. Nothing is combined with another customer's laundry to fill out a machine, which is the shortcut that makes shared-load laundry cheap and is also the reason people stop using it. That means separate from other people’s laundry, not sorted within your own: colours are not separated.

What happens between drop-off and return

The bag is weighed and itemised when it arrives, and the order is confirmed with you before anything is washed. Anything that should not be in a per-kilo wash is separated at this stage and quoted on its own rather than run through with the rest.

The load then goes through wash and dry as one household's laundry, at the temperature and cycle the mix actually allows. Drying is finished properly before anything is folded, because folding something that is still holding moisture is how a stack develops a smell in a closed cupboard, and in Singapore's humidity that happens faster than most people expect.

We do not separate darks from lights by default. A bag is washed as one mixed load, at the temperature and cycle that mix allows, and that is what the per-kilo rate covers. If you would rather your colours were kept apart, tell us when you book and we will wash them as two separate loads — and they are charged as two loads, with the $35 minimum applying to each. Where everything in the bag is colourfast, combining is the cheaper choice and there is nothing to be gained by splitting it; where something is new, deeply dyed, or has run in a wash before, two loads is the safer call. It is a decision to make at booking rather than after the bag has gone out.

Folding is done by hand and items are stacked by type, so the bag can be unpacked into a cupboard rather than sorted again on a bed. Anything flagged during itemising comes back with it, cleaned by whichever method it needed.

Three ways people use it

Same working day, for visitors. Travellers use the Orchard outlet at Far East Shopping Centre #B1-21 for same-working-day return. A bag dropped off in the morning is ready the same working day, which is faster than the hotel laundry form and handled in-house rather than passed to an outside contractor. Same-day carries a premium on top of the per-kilo rate, and the outlet confirms the cut-off when you drop off.

Weekly or fortnightly, for households. A collection window is arranged once and then simply repeats. Most regulars stop thinking about laundry entirely at that point, which is the actual product: not clean clothes, but the hours and the planning that came with them. Pickup and delivery is islandwide and complimentary on standard orders of $100 and above.

One-off, when it has got away from you. A backlog after a trip, a household with guests, a fortnight that simply did not go to plan. Ad hoc collections work exactly the same way as scheduled ones, without the schedule, and there is no commitment attached to using it once.

What does not go in the bag

Delicates, structured tailoring, wool and silk knits, and anything carrying a dry-clean-only label are not suited to a per-kilo wash. If they turn up in a bag they are flagged at itemising and quoted separately. Separating them is what allows the rest of the load to be washed properly, and it is the same judgement call described in the guide to choosing between wet and dry cleaning.

What it costs

$7 per kilo, minimum $35. Express turnaround carries a premium, confirmed before the work starts. Items needing dry cleaning or pressing are quoted separately from the per-kilo rate. Islandwide pickup and delivery is complimentary on standard orders of $100 and above; below that, ask when booking and we will give you the options honestly.

The honest note

Wash, dry and fold is not the right service for everything in a wardrobe, and it is not meant to be. It is the right service for the volume of ordinary clothing a household actually produces, and for the weeks when getting through it yourself was never going to happen. What it comes down to is this: the load is washed on its own, dried properly, folded by hand, and returned ready to put away.