Sparkling clean all over
There’s more to washing a car than just cleaning it. At least, that’s how specialists like Flowey, a family company from Luxembourg, see it. They have the passion—and the intelligent logistics concept—to ensure cars gleam when they leave the car wash.
The car wash of the future? In this industry, as in so many others, people tend to look first to the United States for an answer. After all, the country boasts facilities that aim to turn an unspectacular wash into a real experience— for instance, with tunnels that look like a scene from the hit film Jurassic Park, or with wash foam in a rainbow of colors. In Europe, things aren’t quite so colorful (yet), even though automatic car washes have a long history here: in Germany, a patent for technology in which two brushes operated on tracks around the car was registered back in 1962.
A shining success
Ever since then, car washes have been a fixture of everyday life—and a source of inspiration for inventors and entrepreneurs alike. Take Filippo Florio, a mechatronics specialist, and Simon Weynachter, for instance. In 1990 they founded Flowey, a provider of cleaning products for car and truck washes. They started out small, but soon they were racing ahead.
Today, the company has 50 employees at its headquarters in the town of Bissen in Luxembourg and generates EUR 10 million in revenue each year. Its key customers are carwash operators and its primary market is France.
That is where, at the start of the 1990s, Florio noticed a development that gave him the idea to specialize in the manufacture of car-cleaning products. “It was then that self-service car washes first began to appear in France,” he says. Florio seized this opportunity, and in the years since then he has become France’s number-one provider of cleaning products for cars and trucks.
For the past two years, Dachser Luxembourg has been entrusted with shipping Flowey products. “We are always on the lookout for the highest quality,” says Ricardo Florio, the CEO’s son and manager at the company. This is a challenging proposition: for one, half of the products shipped for Flowey count as chemical products, and some of these are subject to ADR regulations concerning the carriage of dangerous goods by road. For another, deliveries to self-service car washes have to take into account the fact that the operator is usually not to be found directly on site. That means many shipments must stick to an agreed schedule.
It’s all about the last mile
When it comes to the quality and reliability of logistics services, the decision to work with Dachser has really paid off for Flowey. According to Florio, the number of damaged shipments has fallen drastically. The company’s service costs for tracking shipments and answering questions from customers have also sharply declined since the company started working with Dachser.
And picking the right logistics partner is a matter of no small importance for his company, especially over the last mile. “Delivery to the customer is the part of the whole order that makes the final and most important impression,” says Florio.
Last year, Dachser shipped over 2,000 metric tons of “made in Luxembourg” cleaning products, mostly to France. What’s more, Dachser’s list of export destinations currently features more than ten different countries. This list is set to grow steadily over the coming years. Flowey is looking to impress its B2B customers more than ever in the truck cleaning segment, too.
The groundwork for this has already been laid: Flowey is now connected to Dachser through an EDI interface, making manual entry—which is how data was handled before—is now finally a thing of the past. All this bodes well for spotless carwash logistics.
