[100 Emerging Women Leaders] Gunjan Taneja’s journey from breadwinner of family to startup CEO

Every time Gunjan Taneja has felt an important piece missing in her life, she has identified the void for it in the larger society as well and jumped in to fill it.

Raised by parents who couldn’t finish school, Taneja knew she needed to start working early to support herself and her family. 

But there was a hurdle.

Back in 2007, when she completed her Economics Honours from Delhi University (DU), she saw that most big companies chose candidates with engineering degrees or MBAs, rather than graduates. This pushed her to get in touch with the HR team of Google and convinced them to conduct campus placements at DU. 

“Not only did they agree to have a placement drive in DU, they also hired graduates from streams that previously didn’t make the cut for them,” says Taneja. 

Years later, UClean, the laundry and dry-cleaning company she now runs with her husband Arunabh Sinha, was also born out of a personal experience.      

After getting married, Taneja saw that getting her expensive and treasured formals and linens cleaned and ready regularly was often arduous and time-consuming. The job had to be outsourced to two or three different vendors, even after which, the results were unsatisfactory.

Her husband, who was then heading Treebo Hotel’s North India business, also found out that some of the biggest complaints that arose from the budget hotels industry were related to laundry services.

“Serendipitously, during our honeymoon in Japan, we were exposed to mini laundromat (assisted laundromats where people dropped off their clothes and picked them up when done) culture, which sparked a business idea in us,” says Taneja. “We thought, in a country where a Mother Dairy or a neighbourhood departmental store was such an inherent part of community living, laundromats would be a welcome introduction.”

When it started in 2017, UClean functioned in the DIY laundromat format (where customers can use coin-operated machines to wash and dry their clothes) before it pivoted to laundry services.

“We saw that laundromats needed a huge space to accommodate a self-sustaining facility with all equipment. This was spiking our rental and other costs, especially in Tier-I cities where commercial real estate was expensive,” says Taneja. “We also realised that Indians would rather rely on help, than spending the time to step out during peak summers or winters to another place and wash their clothes."

Today, UClean laundry services have grown to more than 500 franchise stores in India. It also has a centre in Faridabad where it trains people on laundry operations under its UClean Pathshala initiative. This is a 15-day free industry-led programme that offers guaranteed placement post-completion.      

“We also realised that the need for laundry as opposed to dry cleaning was increasing because of a significant shift in what India was wearing. We had the highest-ever female workforce participation. Women had started wearing more western or casual clothing made of polyester and other blended garments that needed to be laundered and not dry cleaned,” says Taneja.

Soldiering through odds

Taneja was born into a lower-middle-class family in Delhi. After her father’s coal business failed, her mother worked as a beautician to support the household. Eventually, her mother became a well-known make-up artist and trainer at Lakme. Taneja believes much of her fighting spirit comes from her mother.

“The one thing they wanted me and my brother to have was education. They believed it was the only great equaliser in society that would help me break out of our constraints,” says Taneja.

She excelled in academics and started earning small sums of money even while in school by doing freelance gigs. 

Her relentless job hunt after graduation led her to join an IT firm Evalueserve in business consulting and research. At 20, she was the youngest employee to be hired in the company. “They became so impressed with my work that they started hiring more graduates without MBAs from then on,” says Taneja.

In 2011, after a short stint at Ernst&Young, she joined Franchise India where she learned the great scope of scaling up a business through franchising.      

“Years later in a business like laundry services where supply needs to be created more rigorously than the demand, which just needs to be tapped into, scaling fast is crucial,” says Taneja. “We were looking at the format of neighourhood stores, and franchising was a wonderful way to scale a business such like this one in a retail format.”

Taneja says the need for laundry services has increased as working professionals look for convenience.  A live laundry service, she says, is a self-sufficient unit where all services from laundry to shoes and bags can be cleaned and returned within a standardised rate and a turnaround time of two to three days.

UClean charges up to Rs 90 for 1 kilogram of laundry. The business surpassed a gross marketing value (GMV) of 100 crore last year, says Taneja.

Women in the business

As someone who had to overcompensate in her work owing to the inequity in the market, Taneja says even today, her husband is often regarded as the face of the company, although they founded it together.

She adds that it is only when teams and clients work closely with her do they realise that she is a leader in her own right and comes with a unique understanding of the market and capabilities. "From afar, it is common for them to assume that I am just being led by my husband,” she says.

There are also strong leanings towards certain degrees like engineering or MBA which leave biases towards other graduates, says Taneja, whose husband is an alumnus of IIT Bombay. 

“I am grateful that the times have changed a lot since I started working. People are hiring based on skills and not degrees anymore. And there are numerous courses to acquire,” she says, adding that learning new skills is the way to make a breakthrough in business and remain relevant.