Troubled domestic cleaning company Boobs and a Mop were forced into administration yesterday with “PERMANENTLY CLOSED” signs appearing on its cross-platform world wide interweb digi-portal booking site. The company whose slogan “No Body Does It Better” attracted hundreds of customers of “a particular bent“ during its heyday when its vans could be seen in and around every major conurbation in Dorset - though often parked “just around the corner” from the premises they were actually attending.
Co-owned by former Stringbonefellows' Executive Dorset Regional Manager Drusilla Likhtarovich [better known today as society hostess Drusilla Parker-Knowles] and her husband Peter the Company launched in 2018 and was, according to its then CEO Bryton Shigny, “going great guns” having captured a niche position in the multi-million pound domestic assistance market created by those “too lazy to get off their fat arses and clean their own homes”. Uniquely, Boobs and a Mop generated its own demand by offering a customised in-house cleaning service unlike any other and one, moreover, guaranteed to put “a shine on your knickknacks and a smile on your face”.
“No-one had tried topless cleaning before” explains consumer export Albye Aynie-Thînck and Boobs and a Mop had the field all to itself. It was particularly popular with single male executives leading busy and highly stressful lives and looking for appropriate relief though “more relaxed” couples also found their way on to the Company’s books.
Trouble came first in the form of CONTRIK-69 when home visits were outlawed [though at least two staff members found themselves locked down with fortunate clients when the curfew fell] as well as later when many employees insisted on continuing to work from home. “The foray into the online market via webcam gained some traction but was never as popular as the home visit service”, Albye Aynie-Thînck opines, “and the business never really recovered. Though some clients continued to gain a level of satisfaction from watching employees clean their own homes online and some even declared themselves well satisfied, most became increasingly frustrated by - amongst other things - progressively dirty floors which undermined the value of any dirty thoughts that might have accompanied a home visit”. Even at its peak some customers realised that full value for money could only be gained by staying in when the cleaner called - a major problem for some though a delight to others. Some will also point to the fact that the contraction of the company’s name to BsM [in a bid to modernise and streamline] caused a degree of market confusion not least amongst would-be learner drivers with perfectly clean homes. Culture watcher and online influencer Kopi Mee - believes changing attitudes towards women’s bodies may also have played its part in the Company’s demise, adding that “watching a relative stranger waltzing around your flat with a Vileda and threatening the integrity of your ornaments with their unrestrained bristols is perhaps no longer everyone’s idea of a the perfect weekend’s entertainment.’
So, sadly yet another practical and entertaining consumer innovation appears to have come - like many of Boobs and a Mop’s more enthusiastic customers - to a premature end. Whether another company will fill the gap remains to be seen, but the abandoned vans of Boobs with a Mop suggests yet another analogue casualty of the digital era and yet another broken service with which the new Dorset Government will have to wrestle.
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