By Timothy Oommen, Owner — Laundini Laundromat | laundinilaundromat.com
Every time someone books a pickup with us, I think about the same thing.
They don’t just trust a brand. They trust people. Specific people — someone who answers their message, someone who handles their finances, someone who shows up at their door with a bag of clean clothes.
So I figured it was time to introduce you to the team actually running this thing. Not a corporate “meet us” page with stock headshots and job titles. The real people, honestly described.
Timothy Oommen — Founder & Owner
That’s me. I built Laundini from a bare unit in a strip mall on Emerson Street in Evanston, after a year of running wire through walls, fighting contractors, losing sleep, and convincing myself daily that this was going to work.
Before this I ran a food delivery company called BiteBring, onboarded 20 restaurants in Evanston, co-owned a restaurant called Fatzee’s that I eventually sold at a loss, and did a brief, formative stint making sandwiches at Subway for $8 an hour on the overnight shift while studying economics at UIC.
I tell you all of this not to impress you but because I want you to understand: I have worked every level of this kind of business. The $8-an-hour version and the build-it-yourself version. That range is what I bring to Laundini every day.
I am responsible for the big picture, the marketing, the website, the delivery system, and every decision that matters. I am not always responsible for remembering to eat lunch.
What I’m working on: finding a manager who is better at the day-to-day than I am. More on that below.
Sonu — Communications & Ideas
If you’ve ever messaged Laundini and got a reply at 11:47pm on a Sunday, that was Sonu.
Sonu responds to messages the way most people breathe — automatically, without apparent effort, at all hours. I genuinely do not know when he sleeps. I have tested this theory multiple times by sending messages at unreasonable hours. He has never once failed to reply promptly.
Beyond the superhuman availability, Sonu is sharp. He came into this as a friend of a friend and immediately started generating ideas faster than we could implement them. He is the person on the team most likely to send a voice note that begins with “okay hear me out” and ends with something we actually end up doing.
If you contact us through the website, Sonu is likely the first human you’ll interact with. He’s good at it. He actually cares, which you can tell within about two messages.
Klevi — Financials
Klevi and I go back to UIC. We were in the same cohort studying economics, which means we have shared memories of classes, late nights, and the particular stress of finals week that bonds people in ways that are hard to explain to anyone who wasn’t there.
What I can tell you about Klevi professionally: he does not lie about numbers. In a world where it is extremely tempting to make the spreadsheet say what you want it to say, Klevi will look you in the eye and tell you exactly what the spreadsheet actually says. This is rarer than it sounds and worth more than I can quantify.
He has attention to detail that borders on unsettling. If a number is off by a dollar, Klevi will find it. If an invoice doesn’t add up, Klevi will find that too. He is the reason Laundini’s finances are handled with precision rather than optimism.
I trust him completely. I also owe him a dinner from a bet we made sophomore year that I am not going to elaborate on here.
The Role We’re Actively Trying to Fill: General Manager
And now, a brief intermission.
🧺 WE ARE HIRING — General Manager, Laundini Laundromat
Cook County, IL | Full Time | Starts: As Soon As Possible (Seriously, Please)
Here is an honest description of what we need:
Laundini is growing. We have four locations across Cook County. We have a pickup and delivery operation running out of a truck. We have a founder (me) who is extremely good at building things and extremely bad at pretending that operations management is his favorite part of the job.
We need a General Manager who wakes up in the morning and genuinely wants to handle the day-to-day.
Someone who finds satisfaction in a well-run schedule. Who doesn’t panic when a machine goes down or a driver calls in sick — who instead makes three phone calls and fixes it before most people would have finished panicking. Someone pragmatic. Someone who can take a chaotic Tuesday and make it a functional Tuesday.
What you’ll actually be doing:
- Managing daily operations across our locations
- Coordinating pickups, deliveries, and staff schedules
- Being the calm in whatever storm shows up that week
- Working directly with me on everything that matters
- Occasionally talking me out of ideas that sound better at midnight than they do at noon
What you will not be doing:
- Reporting to seventeen layers of management
- Sitting in meetings about meetings
- Pretending everything is fine when it isn’t
What we’re looking for:
- Someone who has managed operations before, in any industry — laundry, food, logistics, retail, doesn’t matter
- Someone who communicates clearly and doesn’t disappear when things get hard
- Someone who cares about doing the job right, not just done
- Ideally someone who has dealt with older equipment, difficult customers, and the specific chaos of a multi-location service business
What we offer:
- Real responsibility from day one
- A founder who will get out of your way once trust is established
- A business that is growing fast and needs someone to grow with it
- The satisfaction of building something that actually matters to the neighborhood
To apply: Email us at info@laundinilaundromat.com or reach out through laundinilaundromat.com. Tell me who you are, what you’ve run before, and why this sounds like your kind of chaos.
We will respond. Sonu makes sure of that.
The Team, In Summary
We are small. We are real. We are not a faceless logistics company with a warehouse you’ll never see and a customer service line you’ll never reach a human on.
Sonu will answer your message. Klevi will make sure the money makes sense. I will make sure the operation earns your trust. And whoever we hire as GM will make sure everything runs the way it’s supposed to run, every day, even on the Tuesdays when it really doesn’t want to.
That’s the team handing your clothes.
We think that’s worth knowing.
Book your first pickup at laundinilaundromat.com. We serve all of Cook County — Evanston, Bucktown, Skokie, Wheeling, and everywhere in between.
Timothy Oommen is the founder and owner of Laundini Laundromat.