This startup wants to solve the one big problem women have when they travel
- Added: March 9, 2021
- Author: Woloo
- In Category: News
Being on the road is all fun and games until you need to use the loo. While this isn’t much of an issue for men, women have entirely different needs and struggle to find a hygienic, safe space to do their business. Well, that might just change. Woloo, a hygiene services and products startup, is setting up safe and clean ‘Powder Rooms’ across major cities. The startup is backed by entertainment and technology company JetSynthesis, whose investment will help ramp up its digital ecosystem. On Women’s Day, the company launched an app to help women discover these and other clean loos around them.
How does it work?
Woloo’s first Powder Room has been launched in Thane. By June, the company plans to have these exclusive facilities across Mumbai, Jaipur, Bengaluru, Ahmedabad and Pune. “The idea is to create a network of women franchise entrepreneurs, making this a by-women-for-women hygiene service across the country,” Manish Kelshikar, Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Woloo told CNT. In addition to the toilet, a Powder Room will also retail hygiene products for women.
While these Powder Rooms come up, Woloo’s mobile app will help women identify and locate other cleanest loos around them—in restaurants, cafes and malls. Toilets are listed on the app only after undergoing a screening process. To begin with, only restaurants and cafes with high ratings are considered. Once identified, Woloo uses a patented technology and smart devices, developed in association with the Toilet Board Coalition—a global non-profit organisation, to rate the loo’s hygiene standards. Every loo is certified on five parameters: safety, accessibility, hygiene and cleanliness, the overall condition and setting, and hospitality. Woloo’s hygiene management officers also visit each facility every fortnight to ensure safety and hygiene standards are maintained. Certified loos are then geo-tagged and onboarded on the Woloo mobile app.
What does it cost?
You can gain unlimited access to Woloo’s Powder Rooms for a fee of Rs99 a month. The subscription offers cashback points, which you then redeem against the purchase of products from Woloo’s retail space. Minus the subscription, you can also walk in and use the facilities for Rs20 per use. COVID warriors like policewomen and certain government employees will get free subscriptions to the service.
The Woloo app is available on Android and will launch on iOS soon.
