Customized housekeeping service providing startups and related mobile apps are fast gaining ground in Korea as more women join the workforce and single-living households increase.

Everyday duties of childcare and housekeeping were entrusted to exclusive maids before, who were directly hired in private homes for monthly payment, but currently startups provide such services on their apps which let users outsource everyday chores they want on lower pay by hour.

Subscription-based services, for example, guarantee stable revenue for the business owners while maintaining the service quality for the users.

Lifegoeson Company Corp. provides a non-contact laundry service on its Laundrygo app. If users put their laundry in its self-developed collection box and leave the box in front of the house door, the laundry is collected for cleaning and then returned to the customer on the same day.

Demand for the service has grown sharply, enabling Lifegoeson Company’s revenue for the first six months to surge 220 percent from a year earlier.

The increase in single-person and two-member households has also boded well for its business.

“Most of our service users are single-living households. Though not exact, most of newly married couples are considered to be double-income families,” said Cho Seong-woo, CEO of Lifegoeson Company.

Cleaning service startup Lifelab Corp. provides home cleaning service on its mobile app Cleaning Lab. Customers are allowed to call professionally trained cleaning managers anytime, as many times as they want. As of September, cleaning services offered on its app soared by 220 percent on year, and nearly 88 percent of the users returned in three months.

“Families with kids enjoy our cleaning service, and the ratio of single-living households also is high,” said Yeon Hyun-joo, CEO of Lifelab. “They mostly choose biweekly cleaning service.”

Jaranda is one-to-one play and learning sitter for dual-income families with kids. Based on its 110,000 teachers registered, nearly 3,000 households subscribed the regular visiting service as of August, and its monthly revenue jumped to 3.5 times from a year-ago period.

Last year, working parents in Korea spent 203,526 won ($171.81) on household goods and housekeeping services, up 27.3 percent from the previous year. The number of single-living households rose 27 percent to total 6,643,354 from five years ago, according to Statistics Korea.

By Lee Jong-hwa and Lee Ha-yeon

[ⓒ Pulse by Maeil Business Newspaper & mk.co.kr, All rights reserved]