Blink My Car Is Saving Water One Car Wash At A Time

Blink My Car co-founders, Rami Hallal and Ralph Choueiri want to solve everyone’s problems, from app-based car maintenance to addressing water shortages in Lebanon.

One ordinary day full of errands to complete, old Lebanese school friends Rami Hallal and Ralph Choueiri made their separate ways to the carwash to put the shine back into their wheels.

After wasting nearly an hour in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Beirut thoroughfares, they finally arrived at the carwash only to wait in line for their turn behind 18 cars ahead of them.

Luckily they spotted each other and killed time venting their frustrations with the situation. Within minutes, an idea was born.

“It seemed only logical that if you can order a taxi and food through an app then you could also do that for maintaining your car,” muses CEO Hallal. The idea quickly gained speed. Only a month into the app’s launch in November 2015 they locked in a seed fund of $350,000 from Al Amir Holdings.

The app went live in January 2016 and a third cofounder, CTO Joseph Khalil, jumped on board.

Today, Blink My Car has carried out over 4,000 services in Beirut. In June 2017 the founders secured a post-seed fund for $1.2 million from local venture capitalist firm Phoenician Funds, with 80% of this earmarked for expansion into new markets. Testing is underway in Dubai and Doha, which could mean a launch by the end of the year.

It’s not only convenience fueling the growth. The company’s mantra circles around providing an eco-friendly service in its carwashes and using no more than one cup of water to make a vehicle sparkle. “We even have our specialists commute to customers on zero emission electric bikes,” says COO Choueiri.

The outsourced cleaning products used are surfactants and carnauba wax, which the founders claim prolong car materials better than traditional car cleaning products.

Within only 15 minutes of making a request on the app a “specialist” arrives at your car’s location and performs the services you tapped for. The app has acquired over 7,000 registered users since going live less than two years ago.

Coined as a dry wash, the co-founders claim that their technique saves up to 250 liters of water on each Blink My Car carwash. In perspective, that’s the same amount of water used for a 35-minute shower or the drinking capacity of four water coolers. In 2016, they claim to have saved 500,000 liters of water with their carwashes.

But they are doing more than saving the planet; they are addressing the dire water shortage problems Lebanon has been facing for years.

Read full article: Forbes Middle East

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Taxonomy

• Water Footprint
• Integrated Water Management
• Water Management
• Consumption
• Car Wash Equipment
• Water Footprint