Prontowash. A story for entrepreneurs.

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I upload this project of which I was part of the development team because I think it left me valuable lessons that I want to share.

So if you have an entrepreneurial venture in mind, take a couple of minutes to read this story because you will find it inspiring.

In 2001 an Argentine entrepreneur, mainly related to show business, came to Miki Friedenbach y Asociados Studio where I was working with a very interesting idea.

He had observed on a trip to Chile a man washing a cars in a shopping mall parking lot.

His conceptualization was interesting because the value he was proposing to the consumer was not only the quality of the service but the time savings it implied, the customer's car would be washed in the parking lot of the shopping mall while he went to the movies or shopping. Car care would no longer be related to a family member (traditionally men) but rather to an opportune moment.

I was a young designer (I still am!!!) and I had the opportunity to participate in the creation of a company from its proposal, its conceptualization, its realization, its development and its expansion.

The "Auto Wash Bowl" from Chicago - 1924. The demand for car washing was born with the automobile itself.
In the absence of hoses with pressurized water, they decided to flood the square in the center of the business, located in Chicago, to proceed to clean the cars that were rolling at a time of pure economic growth before the Crack of '29.
At that time there were still many horses on the road so the cars were filled with manure on their undersides and this idea that today seems hilarious perhaps at the time was right.
As designers we try to investigate the whole history of the universe in which we want to intervene and understand the needs and expectations of the user.

This concept did not exist in the world and at that time when all the sheets were blank the most important thing was to ask the right questions. I remember that everyone's big doubt was whether this was going to be a cart with an engine to move, but taking that path implied expensive equipment and greater dependence on technical maintenance.

So it was necessary to clearly define what was the most efficient way to wash a vehicle, how much water would be needed and therefore how much weight all the equipment would have.

And that led us to some definitions: the cart would not need any engine to move and would be built in fiberglass, a material that gave freedom to develop shapes and apply a concept proposed by Miki: The cart would configure the brand.

The design development was in charge of Di Diego Arena and myself.

And the brand had to be easy to recognize and remember to communicate and new concept. What easier to remember than an egg? So the cart was going to be an egg.

The sketch by Miki Friedenbach

Everything told in such a linear way and when things already work it seems easy, but at that time we explored many ideas and the work was hard.

The first cad drawings by Di Diego Arena.

Later we added a sign that was above the height of the parked vehicles to communicate the brand name and offers so that if you had the cart you had the whole company!!! 8-))

Vitorio Pili (now an industrial designer) was in charge of the model.

When an idea is good and well-driven it quickly comes to life. Prontowash was born in the parking lot of Paseo La Plaza, a theater complex belonging to the Kompel family. Argentina as a whole was always a field of experimentation for this company, but it quickly expanded to the whole world.

First steps of Prontowash in Argentina.

And for the expansion it was necessary to change the production technology of the cars because the fiberglass took a lot of craftsmanship. What was fine for one scale was no longer useful for another, so the carts were developed again from scratch in rotational molded plastic. This technology allowed for larger production scales and standardized parts, so that if a piece of equipment broke, the part could be replaced with a spare.

The first tooling tests of the rotomolding version.

The first rotomolding piece (we cut it in half to measure the thickness of the walls).

Versions of the cart for other users and environments would follow: consortium and domestic.

Di German Martinez with the first working prototype of the consortium version.

The model of the Homedition, the domestic version, in the same place with the same car (it was the car of Florencia Obregón, the graphic designer).

The first working prototype of the domestic version.

Later on, we designed washing centers with light architecture to strengthen the brand presence in parking lots and in the customer's perception.

Internal or external Prontowash HUBs. Lightweight architecture for any type of demand and situation.

Prontowash Autospa, one of the centers of light architecture.

We had the satisfaction of following the growth of this client for years and they frequently sent us photos of plagiarism that they received from all over the world, including the hilarious version (whose photo I regret having lost) of one completely made in sheet metal with great skill and little sense of design. It looked like something out of the movie "From the earth to the moon" by Georges Méliès.

Prontowash was born in December 2011 in the middle of the Argentinean economic crisis, a convulsed chapter of our history, and became the largest car wash franchise in the world with presence in 30 countries.