Luxe a Year Later

A year ago, Luxe launched a revolutionary service to address a problem every major city in the world shares: parking. We’re thrilled to share that since we officially launched, we have seen huge interest from folks choosing to park with Luxe. With downloads in the hundreds of thousands, thousands of parks per day and with more than 30,000 miles traveled by our valets across eight U.S. cities — San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Austin, Chicago, Boston, New York and Philadelphia — Luxe is the leading on-demand valet parking and car services app in the U.S.

What’s to thank for this growth? Luxe provides an invaluable service to customers, transforming parking from a stress-filled experience to one of effortless convenience. Luxe customers use our service at least twice per week and make it part of their routine. Over 80% of customers who trial Luxe become repeat customers. And the service continues to grow — currently 40% month-over-month since our launch — with each new market scaling faster than the last.

More rewarding is to learn that we are making an impact on people’s lives. In our first year alone we gave our customers ten years worth of their life back by helping them park and maintain their car with Luxe! We know this by looking at the time it would take our customers to park and obtain car maintenance services compared to the average time it takes our valets to do this for you. And our ability to give back valuable time is only going to increase.

However, solving the parking problem is only one part of a bigger vision. Though we grew this company out of a desire to fix a common problem, we are now in a position to help define the city of tomorrow and define the new way to own a car. Below are some insights I have learned along the Luxe journey. They illustrate why Luxe is positioned to solve much more than parking, and can ultimately help simplify and streamline city living and car ownership.

We’re shaping the city of tomorrow

The city of today is one where parking structures lay adjacent to buildings and areas of attraction such as parks and stadiums. Parking lots are all but a prerequisite for any developer looking to build anything in the city. Yet, there’s a massive migration of people into urban metropolitan areas all over the world with 90% of the population estimated to be living in urban centers in the next decade. And as cities become more densely populated, land is becoming scarcer and more expensive, and justifying spending valuable real estate on land that only gets utilized a fraction of the time becomes harder. So step-by-step, parking lots are rightfully starting to come down in favor of housing and commercial buildings.

Despite this situation there is still the car driver who has to search 20 minutes on average to find a parking spot. And the car is still the best, most direct way for people to get to their destination. The success of ride sharing apps support this fact. But what the ride sharing services don’t address, is the inter city commuters everyday needs.

This is where Luxe comes in. We allow our customers to get directly to their destinations with their own car (not near, but exactly at the location) and we park their cars on the fringe or in underutilized areas during underutilized times. This decoupling of supply and demand of parking is a simple yet revolutionary concept that will continue to transform the landscape of cities.

So, at Luxe we see the city of tomorrow looking very different to the city of today. It will have fewer parking structures taking away valuable land in the heart of the city and instead be replaced by more housing, more buildings, more attractions, and better quality of life. And Luxe will become a key part of the infrastructure to make this a reality.

More than just parking, we’re making owning a car simple

There are only two things you do every single time you get in your car — drive and park. By focusing on the most painful yet frequent component of the driving experience, parking, we have not only created a new habit for customers, but also as a by-product have access to your idle car nearly every day.

With one-click of the button, customers have frequently used Luxe to fill up their gas tanks, get their cars washed, and get oil changes. We have seen many other companies tackle the car maintenance market and why not, it’s a huge market with U.S. households spending 18% of their income in transportation expenses (second only to housing) with car related expenses the majority of that expense. But the advantage we have at Luxe is that the incremental cost of servicing your car is small as we already have access to your car.

Providing car services is a fundamental shift to how customers view Luxe. We are not only perceived to be the best option in parking, we’re able to remove the stress of owning a car and provide on-demand affordable, fast and convenient car maintenance services.

Year two

If year one was about inventing and leading a new category of on-demand services, making car ownership issues a thing of the past, and helping to redefine the city of tomorrow, our second year is about taking those ideas and making them better.

This means investing more in:

• making the user experience the best it can possibly be;
• improving our logistics to make our operations smoother;
• expanding our customer base, the Luxe brand, and infrastructure to create a lasting company; and
• continuing to be bold in our ideas, long-term in our approach and obsessive over our customer’s needs.

Year two officially starts for us now, and I couldn’t be more excited about the future of Luxe. Thanks to our customers for their trust and business and thank you to our hard working employees for making our jobs enjoyable every day!

Best,

Curtis