Trendy Wash, Thailand’s second-largest laundromat franchise, has crossed 630 stores and plans to open more than 400 additional locations this year, according to details disclosed by LG Electronics, which has completed deliveries of commercial washers and dryers across the network. The disclosure, made in early August, offers a rare look at the scale and velocity of Southeast Asia’s self-service laundry boom — a services franchise category that has quietly become one of the region’s fastest compounding retail formats.
Laundromat franchising in Thailand has grown from a convenience-store add-on into a standalone investment category in under five years, driven by urbanisation, condominium living and a consumer shift toward outsourcing household chores. Trendy Wash’s plan to add 400+ stores in a single year — growth of more than 60% on its current base — puts it among the fastest-expanding franchise systems in ASEAN in any category, a pace reminiscent of rapid multi-unit scaling elsewhere in Asia Pacific.
For LG, the Trendy Wash relationship anchors a wider B2B strategy. The company’s commercial laundry appliance sales in Southeast Asia rose about 60% last year, with sales in Thailand more than doubling and the Philippines up more than 50%. LG is now deepening ties with major commercial laundry distributors in the Philippines and has opened a smart laundry concept store in Hanoi, Vietnam, where operators can trial equipment and store-management solutions first-hand.
“We will continue to expand our efforts to target the global commercial laundry market” — Im Ki-yong, head of HS B2B overseas sales, LG Electronics
The Hanoi showroom and Philippine distributor push suggest the laundromat wave is moving along the same corridor as other service concepts — from Thailand outward to Vietnam and the Philippines, where services-sector expansion is already accelerating on the back of urban demand.
Beyond hardware, LG is selling an operating system for the category: high-efficiency machines built on inverter Direct Drive motors, paired with LaundryCrew, a store-management platform offering remote control, smart diagnostics and error alerts. For franchisees running multiple unattended stores, that kind of remote-operations stack is what makes wide unit portfolios manageable — and it is becoming a standard part of franchise economics in Southeast Asia. LG is extending the same playbook globally, launching six large-capacity LG Professional models in Europe this month and expanding supply to providers such as CSC ServiceWorks and Wash in North America.
Self-service laundry is the kind of concept sophisticated franchise investors screen for: staff-light operations, recurring neighbourhood demand, technology-enabled remote management and rapid unit replication. Trendy Wash’s trajectory shows the model compounding at ASEAN scale, and the vendor ecosystem forming around it — equipment finance, IoT store management, site analytics — lowers the operating burden for multi-unit owners. For investors across Asia Pacific and MENA weighing how to structure a franchise investment, the laundromat category is worth watching as it professionalises: the winners will be operators who secure dense urban territories early and run them with disciplined, data-driven operations.
