Emily Strayer is an award-winning, multi-instrumental, founding member of country band The Chicks.
If you catch her on the right day, though, she’ll also be at the counter at her newest project, the elevated laundromat SOAP, smiling and helping customers.
Strayer and her husband, Martin Strayer, opened SOAP in November. It started as a dream for the couple that has lived in San Antonio for 25 years now.
“Initially, it was commercial real estate that I was interested in. My husband and I have been wanting to invest in San Antonio,” she said. “This was something we dreamed up that would be fun for us to do and invest in here in town.”
The Strayers bought a building near the corner of Oblate Drive and McCullough Avenue and spent the past two years turning it into an upscale laundromat. She worked with Urbano Design and Build and Föda, two Texas design companies, to give the building copious natural light, a coffee shop, wide metal folding tables and comfortable seating areas.
“I wanted it to be welcoming colors. I wanted a lot of natural light,” Strayer said. “We really paid attention to the details.”
Now, customers can come in, do their laundry and enjoy a snack. Strayer has set up the laundromat prices to be middle of the market, with prices ranging from $5 to wash 40 lbs. of clothes to $9 for 80 lbs. of laundry.
If it’s successful, she added, she hopes to expand in San Antonio and across Texas.
The San Antonio Report recently sat down with Strayer to discuss the experience of owning a small business in San Antonio.
The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
What’s it like starting a new business in a new industry?
I went from high school straight on the road, so I didn’t go to college. I tell my friends, I feel like the last two years — planning this, preparing for this, dreaming it up, getting all the nuts and bolts done — has been my college.
It’s been a huge learning curve for me, but I’ve really enjoyed learning about putting the business together. The business I’m in is very insulated in that we have managers, business managers, road managers. We have people who absorb all of the day-to-day tasks for us so we can be creative.
That’s kind of by design, so that you’re not bogged down. The creative is the fun part. Whether it’s doing a T-shirt design or practicing a song or getting a stage show ready, it’s always about the creativity.
I wore both hats on this project. It was a creative project for me, because I love refurbishing, I love architecture, I love interior design, I love branding, I love all of those things. It was a very creative pursuit, but to also mom-and-pop it and go get my loan and talk to distributors of washing machines and dryers and go to a laundry show in Houston with my ball cap on me and all the nuts and bolts of it was fun on certain days and not fun on certain days.
A laundry lounge like this one is a new idea in San Antonio. What led you to tackle that?
I’m practical by nature, and I wanted to invest in a business that was recession-proof and pandemic-proof, that was an essential need. The essential services are what are going to stick around.
There’s a lot of things that aren’t going to stick around with new technology and artificial intelligence. People are always going to need to do their laundry.
Why not elevate the task a little bit and get people somewhere to relax and have fun and do whatever they need to do, like catch up on work while they’re doing the laundry or get a good cup of coffee?
Are there parts of your other music and job experiences that you feel like contributed, overlapped or helped get you to this point?
I’ll touch on the creativity. In any business, there’s creativity to be had, and that was attractive to me. The overlap is human emotion.
When people are dealing with music or expressing themselves musically, there’s a lot of getting to the essence of the human condition. Although that might be a stretch, I feel like this is an all-inclusive place for every walk of life. Getting to know people’s motivations and what drives them to want to need to be in a place like a laundromat, to me, it’s just about psychology.
I’m curious if you have any thoughts about what kind of businesses you see succeeding in San Antonio, what some of that growth and future looks like.
My hope is that small business prevails in San Antonio, and the neighborhood corner shops continue to thrive.
I love that kind of feel of San Antonio-branded things and having it feel like a community. I don’t like to drive out by 10 and see the strip malls. I don’t like that part of the [city’s] expansion.
I like neighborhoods to feel like neighborhoods and have sidewalks. I’m hoping that’s the way San Antonio will continue to be.
My sister lives in Austin, and she always makes fun of me? But I feel like we have a lot to offer. I love the standard of living here. I love raising my kids here, and I think the boutique, corner, mom-and-pop store is the way I would like to see San Antonio grow.
