There’s a putting green to practice your stroke. And there’s a barber shop. But the business’ centerpiece is a car wash that lets you buff your ride at the same time you are getting yourself cleaned up.
All three services are part of the year-round So Fresh & So Clean Hand Car Wash and Detail. The link between the barber shop and the car wash isn’t as farfetched as one might imagine, co-founder and General Manager Shay DiPina said last week.
“Our waiting room is also a barber shop, where we have four barbers waiting to cut your hair,” he said. “You know what it is – the whole concept was derived out of the opportunity to offer the ultimate in convenience. Most folks who are conscious about their look, their hygiene and their hair are conscious about their vehicles as well.”
As the name says, all the cars are hand-washed at So Fresh & So Clean, DiPina said. At any time, there are between seven and nine employees on site to wash each car. And, although there’s plenty to do while waiting, it doesn’t take long to wash a car, he added. “It only takes from five to seven minutes, depending on when you come,” he said. “If you come on a Saturday, it might take 15 minutes because we usually have 30 or 40 cars” waiting.
DiPina, 39, is a Providence native. A few years ago, he was working in a marketing position in Boston when he met co-founder Kelvin Sanders, a 38-year-old Boston native. “We’ve been friends for a while,” DiPina said. “I used to sell advertising in Boston in the early 2000s and he was a client of mine. After that, we developed a friendship and then a partnership.”
The original location, opened in October 2007, on the corner of Branch Avenue and Vandewater Street, did so well that DiPina and Sanders decided after less than a year to expand to two more locations.
They opened a store similar to their Providence location on Quaker Lane in West Warwick. But their other new shop was a little bit different – it’s in the Providence Place mall’s Stateside parking garage. Anyone going in to park at the lot can drop their car off, go do whatever they came to do and pick it up on their way out.
“Once again, our whole business is designed in the service industry and the fact that most folks who go to the mall go to shop – but there’s also an employee base of … people who go there every day to work and might want a cleaning too – so it’s a real convenient place,” DiPina said. “Now, we can wash your car while you go to work, shop or play.”
The business at the mall has been “well received,” DiPina said. And the company is also thinking about further expanding its business within the mall – DiPina wouldn’t yet say what type of expansion that could be, aside from a partnership with one or more of the other businesses.
“And we also have another wing of the company, which is a mobile division,” DiPina said, “where we have a fleet of mobile trucks that perform and offer the same services that we offer at our stationary car washes – hand car washing, full auto detailing.”
That service is geared toward companies with fleets of vehicles and to smaller clients, DiPina said. Among his listed clients are the Foxy Lady, The 903 Residences and DHL.
DiPina’s background in marketing has aided the quick growth at So Fresh & So Clean. Along with a string of local television advertisements with employees in matching jumpsuits cleaning cars – many with DiPina doing the voiceover – he’s come up with a series of events that have been drawing customers.
“We’re very promotionally active,” DiPina said. “We also operate a promotions and public relations firm called Monster Media, and we [create] all of our in-house promotions.”
Those promotions include “bikini” washes offered on Father’s Day and other select days, with bikini-clad women washing each car.
For Mother’s Day, So Fresh & So Clean has offered a “Punks in the Trunks” day, “where all the gentlemen wore shorts and … T-shirts and washed cars like that – that was a tremendous promotion.”
Aside from the promotions, the company also has become a community supporter, giving more than $80,000 to neighborhood organizations so far this year, DiPina said. So Fresh & So Clean is currently helping sponsor the holiday food drive put on by ABC 6 and Chelo’s Restaurant, he said.
When explaining the company’s success, however, DiPina is clear that the product is what brings customers back. It’s the shampoo “extracting” of dirt from interior carpeting, the manual effort to buff away scratches. The basic service is $20 for a car and $25 for a truck, prices that DiPina said are low for such a hands-on wash.
“You get a hand-wash, hand-dry with tire shine, interior and exterior windows, complete vacuum and Armor All of the complete interior,” he said, making his best marketing pitch. “So it’s really a mini-detail for 20 bucks.”
