A Halifax student athlete hopes to make his laundry subscription service a slam dunk with busy consumers.

Saint Mary’s University basketball player Jayrell Diggs is the founder of SudDrop, which offers to collect dirty laundry from users' homes and return it washed and folded. It was the experience of trying to fit laundry into his hectic schedule that inspired Diggs to launch the business at the beginning of 2023.

“The nature of this business is a recurring [problem], so a lot of our customers are repeat customers,” Diggs, a six-foot guard from East Preston, NS, said in an interview. “Originally I had a … small budget for Facebook ads, and I was getting a lot of customers through that. But I find that most of our customers come through word-of-mouth and Google Search.”

Since its founding, Diggs said SudDrop has worked for about 400 customers in Halifax, with pickup and delivery available even in outlying areas like the exurban community of Tantallon.

"We originally started with a simple website," said Diggs. "Customers weren't able to place orders at all, it was just a way I could validate the business. From there, I bought white label software, which we use for our app, and we can manage our customers and orders through that."

And based on his experience partnering with a local Halifax laundromat to actually do the laundry, he said he expects to be able to scale the business relatively simply into new cities by approaching new laundromat operators.

Customers can either subscribe to SudDrop as a recurring service, in which case they are provided with bags designed to hold “one to two loads” of laundry each, or pay by the pound on a one-time basis, Diggs said. Larger bags holding about twice as much are also available for an increased cost.

“Originally we just did the by-the-pound pricing, but I found that, for our weekly customers, it was kind of guesswork,” said Diggs. “When they were sending out their laundry, they would have to try to estimate how much they were going to pay. So this year, I changed it to per-bag pricing for weekly customers.”

Pickup and delivery of laundry is handled by a courier company, which is why SudDrop is able to provide service relatively far outside of Halifax’s urban core. But Diggs said he is looking for at least one person to help with customer service and administrative work, as well as possibly a co-founder. He is not yet seeking equity funding, but he said he does expect to do so eventually.

“(The next step) would be getting to a point where we can get some funding, even if it’s not a lot, so we can grow our operations and possibly get our own facility for laundry processing,” he said.