Laundries making a clean break from past

Promoting a local laundry business used to be labor-intensive. It generally required printing tons of posters and advertising leaflets, pasting them up and handing them out around the neighborhood, and then waiting for people to pitch up with tons of dirty washing.

But today's laundry industry is a lot more sophisticated, and that kind of outdated marketing campaign would deliver zero results, said Lao Chunyu, chairman of online clothes-washing business Jilin Renren Technology Co Ltd.

The industry is now dominated by smartphones and computers, and online promotion is the name of the game, he said.