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totalcleanz

CLEAN SPACES INVISIBLE WORK

Cleaning is one of those invisible responsibilities that keeps coming back. It is easy to ignore until it starts taking up our time and peace of mind.

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Cleaning Is Never Done

Cleaning is often perceived as a simple, everyday task. But in reality, it requires consistent time, effort, and attention.

In Singapore, individuals spend an estimated 3 to 5 hours each week on household cleaning, amounting to over 150 hours a year.

This highlights an important reality: cleaning is not a one-time activity, but a repeated commitment that accumulates over time.

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Hours Per Year
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0
Days Per Year
Spent on household cleaning in Singapore

Watch our group attempt to clean our rooms

How much of a burden is cleaning in your life?

Rarely Sometimes Frequently
Cleaning may not feel like a regular disruption.

Survey distribution: 74.7% experience cleaning impact at least sometimes

Rarely
16%
Sometimes
75%
Frequently
9%

Cleaning rarely feels urgent, but it does not go away. For most people, it stays in the background and returns often enough to take up time and energy. What seems like a small task on its own becomes more demanding when it keeps repeating.

Our survey found that 74.7% of respondents experience household responsibilities affecting their daily schedule at least occasionally, with most indicating that this happens sometimes. This shows that cleaning is not seen as an immediate problem, but as an ongoing and low-level demand.

As a result, people tend to manage it rather than fully deal with it. Cleaning is fitted into existing routines instead of being addressed directly. Over time, this leads to a gradual build-up of effort that shapes daily habits and decisions.

It is this gradual accumulation, rather than urgency, that leads people to consider external support.

The Reality of the Cleaning Industry

How people try to keep up

As the demands of cleaning grow over time, people begin to look outward for support.

When services are used, they are typically reserved for more demanding tasks rather than everyday upkeep. This points to a clear pattern. Cleaning services are not part of routine living, but something people turn to once a certain threshold has been crossed.

In our survey, 41% of respondents reported having used a paid cleaning service, particularly those managing heavier household responsibilities. Even so, outsourcing is rarely immediate. Most continue to handle cleaning on their own until it starts to take up too much time or becomes physically taxing.

Among those who have used cleaning services:

  • 48% use them more than once a month
  • 52% use them less than once a month
  • 53.3% of respondents with dependents have used cleaning services
  • 60% of respondents whose household responsibilities affect their schedule most of the time

This behaviour is shaped by both motivation and constraint. Convenience is the dominant driver, with 56% of respondents ranking it as their top reason. This points to a clear preference for saving time and reducing effort.

However, this motivation does not directly translate into regular adoption. Usage is limited by key barriers, especially cost at 82%, along with a lack of perceived need at 49.2% and privacy or safety concerns at 37.7%.

Motivations

  1. 1Convenience92%
  2. 2Quality82.7%
  3. 3Physical difficulty42.7%

Barriers

  1. 1Cost82%
  2. 2Lack of need49.2%
  3. 3Privacy / safety concerns37.7%

For those who do engage cleaning services, decision-making is guided by practical considerations. Price (77%), reliability (62%), and quality (59%) are the most important factors when choosing a provider, indicating a focus on affordability and risk reduction rather than brand or experience.

What's in a service?

Functional Factors

  • Price77.3%
  • Reliability62.7%
Price emerges as both the top driver (77.3%) and the biggest barrier (82%), creating a closed-loop where price defines the entire competitive landscape.

Risk Factors

  • Quality of service60.0%
  • Reviews42.7%
  • Professionalism34.7%
Secondary factors rank lower than reliability — consumers outsource trust to platforms rather than build it through brands.

Human Factors

  • Friendly staff13.3%
  • Worker treatment8.0%
Human factors rank lowest. While the service is human-intensive, decision-making excludes these considerations — cleaning is treated as a transactional outcome.

Together, these factors create a clear tension. People are motivated to use cleaning services by convenience, but actual usage is limited by cost and trust concerns. When they do choose a service, they place more emphasis on price and reliability than on brand or experience.

Choosing between what feels the same

The cleaning services industry in Singapore is large, regulated, and essential. There are more than 1,400 licensed cleaning companies and over 50,000 cleaners working across the sector.

However, this growth has not led to stronger differentiation. Instead, the industry remains highly functional and commoditised. When choosing a cleaning service, respondents tend to focus on a very narrow set of factors — price, reliability, and quality — while other considerations fall far behind.

Commoditised

Functional & standardised

Price-Driven

Competition on cost

Low Differentiation

Easy switching

This is clearly seen in our survey results. Many respondents were unable to name any cleaning service brand, with common responses such as "none" or "no idea." Among those who could recall a brand, most mentioned only a few names like Urban Company and Helpling, while others appeared only occasionally.

This suggests that the industry is not driven by brands, but by search behaviour. Services are not remembered, but accessed when needed. Visibility becomes more important than identity.

Brand Recall Landscape

Helpling logo
22%Helpling
Urban Company logo
14%Urban Company
Totalcleanz logo
11%Totalcleanz
Luce logo
6%Luce
Kungfu Helper logo
5%Kungfu Helper
Snappy Home logo
3%Snappy Home
BeMitey Clean logo
2%BeMitey Clean

Size indicates relative awareness · percentages reflect survey recall

This functional perspective also extends to how cleaners are perceived. While 91.8% of respondents say they personally respect cleaners, only 16.4% believe that the industry is respected in society. This highlights a clear gap between individual attitudes and broader social perception.

Do you personally respect cleaning workers?

Be honest — your answer is anonymous

This creates a deeper contradiction. Cleaning services are entirely delivered by people, yet the people themselves are largely excluded from how value is defined.

Where Totalcleanz Stands

A brand within the blur

Opportunity to Build Distinctiveness

Another gap is the people behind the service. While respondents recognize that cleaning work is tough, physically demanding, underpaid, and often exhausting, they don't connect this reality to the Totalcleanz brand.

Right now, Totalcleanz sits in a space of functional parity. It is present and it delivers what is expected, but it lacks the clarity and uniqueness needed to become a preferred choice.

The Limits of Functional Value

The Pattern Emerges

The findings so far point to a consistent pattern. Cleaning services are evaluated through a narrow set of functional criteria, shaped by cost, reliability, and expected outcomes. These factors dominate decision-making across both users and non-users, reinforcing a common basis for comparison across providers.

However, this also reveals the limits of how value is currently defined. When performance is assessed primarily through function, improvements tend to be incremental rather than transformative.

The Gap Between Awareness and Action

Respondents demonstrate strong recognition of the challenges faced by cleaners, including demanding working conditions and low pay. Yet these considerations are not reflected in how services are chosen.

As long as cleaning continues to be understood primarily as a task to be completed, the industry will remain anchored in functional value, with limited room for differentiation.

Understanding the Empathy Gap

Across all three levels, a consistent pattern emerges. At the employee level, the people delivering the service remain largely invisible. At the company level, differentiation is constrained by a focus on functional performance. At the industry level, the work is recognised as vital, but not fully valued.

Employee

The Invisible Workforce

Cleaners are central to service delivery, but their contribution remains largely invisible in how value is perceived.

Company

Present, but not memorable

Totalcleanz meets core service expectations, but lacks a clear and distinctive position within the category.

Industry

Vital work, Unseen Value

Cleaning is widely recognised as essential work, yet the profession itself remains undervalued in society.

Let us hear from some of Totalcleanz's employees on their thoughts

The opportunity therefore lies not in improving service delivery alone, but in expanding how the service and the people behind it are understood.

Redefining What Matters

Four actionable strategies to transform Totalcleanz from trusted to memorable, from generic to distinctive.

What — Reframe the service

  • Reframe cleaning from a task-based outcome to a human-centred service
  • Shift focus from what is cleaned, to how it is cleaned and by whom
  • Position cleaning as a service shaped by effort, skill, care, and professionalism

Why — Evidence and rationale

  • Decision-making is currently driven by functional criteria: price (77%), reliability (62%), quality (59%)
  • Strong awareness of cleaners' realities: low pay (93%), heavy workload (64%), poor conditions (49%)
  • Totalcleanz is seen as professional (70.5%), reliable (45.9%), trustworthy (37.7%) — but weakly associated with personal (23.0%) or caring (21.3%)

How — Implementation

  • Reframe all brand communication to emphasise the effort and expertise behind cleaning
  • Highlight the professionalism of cleaners as service providers
  • Shift messaging from "clean results" to "careful, skilled service delivery"
  • Ensure consistency across brand language, visuals, and tone

Impact — Expected outcomes

  • Broadens how consumers define value, from outcome-focused to process- and effort-aware
  • Creates a new evaluation dimension beyond price and reliability
  • Enables differentiation without changing core service delivery
  • Increases the likelihood of preference by making the service feel more meaningful

What — Make hidden strengths visible

  • Make the existing strengths of Totalcleanz visible to customers, rather than introducing entirely new value
  • Reveal the people behind the service, the effort and process involved, and the care and standards within the organisation
  • Shift from value experienced internally → to value clearly perceived externally

Why — Evidence and rationale

  • Strong functional performance: professional (70.5%), reliable (45.9%), trustworthy (37.7%)
  • Evidence of employee care from interviews and site observations
  • Low awareness of the offering (19.7% unsure) and weak emotional association

How — Strategic direction

  • Increase transparency around how services are delivered and how employees are trained and supported
  • Surface internal practices such as employee care, service protocols, and quality control measures
  • Align internal reality with external messaging

Impact — Expected outcomes

  • Reduces the gap between internal value and external perception
  • Strengthens credibility by showing real, verifiable practices
  • Improves clarity of what Totalcleanz represents beyond basic service delivery
  • Creates a more tangible basis for differentiation

What — Expand discovery

  • Move from passive, need-based discovery → to proactive, targeted engagement through digital and physical touchpoints
  • Target high-propensity segments such as elderly households and families
  • Create trust-building, memorable first interactions

Why — Evidence and rationale

  • 85.2% of respondents have not heard of Totalcleanz
  • Discovery is largely passive, relying on word-of-mouth
  • Respondents with dependents: 53.3% usage; with time constraints: 60% usage
  • Trust remains a barrier at first interaction (privacy/safety concerns 37.7%)

How — Strategic direction

  • Adopt a dual-channel discovery approach combining digital experience with targeted physical activation
  • Deploy location-based activations (e.g. supermarkets such as NTUC)
  • Use tangible entry points: free household items, trial-based offers
  • Reinforce with digital follow-through: human stories and process transparency

Impact — Expected outcomes

  • Increases brand awareness through proactive exposure
  • Improves conversion by targeting high-need segments
  • Reduces trust barriers through face-to-face interaction
  • Reduces reliance on passive word-of-mouth for growth

What — Define the standards

  • Move from competing as a functional cleaning service → to setting the benchmark for how cleaning services should be delivered
  • Focus on defining clear standards for quality, process, and worker treatment
  • Position Totalcleanz as the reference point for the category

Why — Evidence and rationale

  • The industry is characterised by commoditisation: price (77%), reliability (62%), quality (59%)
  • Mismatch between personal respect (91.8%) and perceived societal respect (16.4%)
  • Totalcleanz already demonstrates strong internal practices: structured processes, employee care, training and safety, long employee tenure

How — Strategic direction

  • Translate internal strengths into category-defining standards — establish a clear "Totalcleanz Standard"
  • Educate customers and shift evaluation criteria from price and outcomes to standards and professionalism
  • Use transparency and storytelling to demonstrate operational discipline and employee care
  • Lead industry narratives — position Totalcleanz as both operator and advocate

Impact — Expected outcomes

  • Shifts customer evaluation from price-based comparison → to standards-based assessment
  • Positions Totalcleanz as the benchmark for the category
  • Builds authority and credibility beyond functional service delivery
  • Strengthens long-term brand equity while reinforcing social impact

Final Reflections

Spending time with Cheryl and learning about the cleaning industry helped us see that empathy is not something we can decide once and forget. It is built through small, repeated acts of noticing and understanding the people around us, especially those we tend to overlook.

Empathy can begin at home. When children see their parents doing daily cleaning work, and that effort is talked about and acknowledged, it becomes easier to notice similar effort in cleaners and in others. Over time, this turns appreciation from a one-off "thank you" into a way of seeing the world.

In the context of cleaning, this means going beyond simple respect. It means seeing the labour, care, and responsibility behind the work, and helping the next generation value all forms of work that are often taken for granted.

At the same time, this awareness supports self-empathy. In a world where people are constantly pushed to perform, learning to recognise effort in both others and in ourselves makes it easier to value our own contributions.

A small thank you to the cleaners who keep our spaces going.

The Path Forward

Real differentiation will come not from cleaning better, but from helping people finally see the value of those who do the cleaning.