How Sabella DeCarlo Bet on Herself and Built Happy Laundry Co Into a Family Business

Sabella DeCarlo grew up around small business, working for her mom's company for years before she and her husband got into real estate, flipping and holding properties around Chicago. Laundry wasn't the plan. It just happened to be where the plan landed.

It was her husband who first planted the seed. Tired of being a landlord, he kept hearing that laundromats made a good, mostly passive investment, and the idea stuck. The two kept an eye on business listings without much luck, until their longtime nanny, who had previously spent 13 years working in the laundry industry, mentioned she had heard of a store for sale. Sabella went to see it with her, and not long after, she and her husband owned it.

That was four years ago. Happy Laundry Co., based in Broadview, Illinois, became a family business almost immediately and stayed one. The same woman who helped lead them to the store is still an important part of the business today, working there full time alongside Sabella, who now runs the day-to-day operations.

Jumping in With Both Feet

For the first three years, self-serve grew steadily on its own while wash and fold and pickup and delivery stayed an afterthought. Sabella and her husband weren't running daily operations then, and the business quietly sustained itself without asking much of them.

That changed about a year ago, when Sabella left her mom's business and decided to go all in on the laundromat instead of looking for something new. "I decided I was just going to go all in on the store and see how it goes," she says. And she didn't ease into it. "You cannot just dip your toe in. You have to jump in with both feet," she says. "I gave myself no choice but to make it work."

Turning Instagram Into a Growth Channel

The shift started, oddly enough, with a scroll session. Sabella came across a post telling people to stop watching others make money online and start using the internet to build something themselves. "Why am I wasting time looking at other people's content? I should be creating content," she remembers thinking.

Rather than turn her personal page into a business account, she built @happylaundryco as its own behind-the-scenes brand and treated it like a real channel with a real strategy. She brought in two mentors, one outside the laundry space and one specifically in it, to help her find a rhythm, and committed to posting six to seven times a week no matter what, a cadence she's stuck to ever since. The page has since grown to more than 4,000 followers and is still climbing fast.

The content itself is built around her, not a made-up customer persona. "Everybody said you need to develop a customer avatar. I thought about it, and I realized it's me," she says. "We're a two-income household with three kids and crazy schedules. I don't have time for laundry. I'm always behind." That's the story she tells on camera: a busy parent buried in laundry, using her own service to dig out. She's also started showing the service from other angles, so the page doesn't read as one narrow audience.

Organic posts built the following, but paid is what turned attention into orders. Sabella runs Instagram ads alongside Google Ads, and the two work together: someone sees an ad on Instagram, searches the business on Google to check it out, then converts. She calls the overall approach a shotgun effect, since everything launched around the same time, but she can still see where people are coming from. Customers frequently message the Happy Laundry Co. Instagram directly, and when she replies, she can often match their name to an order already sitting in Cents, real proof that the content and the ads are doing their job.

The bet paid off faster than she expected. Sabella set a revenue goal and gave herself three months to hit it, then got there in two, making it Happy Laundry Co.'s biggest month yet.

What she learned along the way is that awareness, not competition, was her real obstacle. Her stretch of the western Chicago suburbs is saturated with laundromats, but plenty of people simply didn't know pickup and delivery existed. "I didn't know it existed before I bought a store," she says.

How Sabella Uses Cents and Laundroworks Day to Day

Happy Laundry Co. had Cents and Laundroworks in place before Sabella and her husband bought it, not long after Cents acquired Laundroworks. When drop-off and wash and fold were still slow to take off, she and her husband considered stripping things back to a pen-and-paper system. They held off to see how the two platforms would develop together, and she's glad they did.

Cents Business Manager is how Sabella runs three service lines without being on-site every day. From her phone, she checks which self-serve machines are down, how many pickup and delivery orders are coming in for the next day, and whether she needs to call in extra help for folding. On a slow day, she'll use the window to film content or drop off her own laundry instead.

Cents Accelerate powers her text and email marketing to each of her three customer bases, self-serve, in-store drop-off, and pickup and delivery, since she treats them as distinct relationships rather than one audience. She recently went back through the platform's text messaging tools and was struck by how much more dynamic they've gotten, closer to the kind of triggered "your cart's still empty" messaging she associates with a big retailer than the manual texts she used to write herself.

Laundroworks runs the self-serve side of the store through its card payment system and Value Add Center (VAC) kiosk. When a customer's card gets stuck or a cycle doesn't start, she fixes it and issues credit remotely rather than driving in. It's a system that runs mostly on its own now, which is exactly how she likes it, since it frees her up to focus on the parts of the business only she can grow.

What's Next

Sabella's next hire is a driver, so she can expand pickup and delivery windows beyond the current two-day-a-week schedule and rely less on on-demand options. Longer term, she wants a dedicated processing facility so pickup and delivery can scale separately from the current location. She already has a building in mind.

"I love growing the business, and I love working," she says. "But I'm also doing this to be there for my family."

Follow along at @happylaundryco on Instagram, or visit happylaundryco.com to schedule a pickup.