Aunties Laundromat owners Donna Missen (left) and Dave Crone
More than 100,000 Fieldays smart bands passed through Aunties Laundromat this year, marking the Te Kūiti business’ busiest event yet.
It’s the fifth year the laundromat has cleaned, bagged and dried the Fieldays smart bands, an RFID-enabled band visitors wear to interact with Fieldays exhibitors. RFID stands for Radio-Frequency Identification
Owners Dave Crone and Donna Missen washed around 1.3 tonnes of the bands during the four-day event at Mystery Creek.
“It’s always around a ton and this year it’s closer to 1.3 tonnes or just over,” Missen said. “It’s increased every year, but this year’s the best because of the weather.
“We’re farmers ourselves, we’ve always been dairy farmers until the laundromat, and we had visited over the years before moving here, because it’s the biggest of these events in the southern hemisphere.”
In years gone by, the smart bands have either been thrown away or taken home by event goers, but smart band designers and digital innovation company Satellite have taken a clean and sustainable approach in recent times.
The couple arrived in Te Kūiti at the end of 2020 from an East Gippsland dairy farm in Victoria, Australia, after two weeks spent in quarantine during the Covid-19 lockdowns.
Crone and Missen took on the laundromat as a follow-on from the Aunties Laundromat Crone’s parents were operating in Te Awamutu. It led to their gig with Fieldays.
“They contacted my in-laws, but they said we’d be better equipped because we’ve got the big back area to work with in the room, where they don’t,” Missen said.
The couple still set aside the first day to see what’s on offer at Mystery Creek, before getting into their work for the week.
“They put the bands into wheelie bins, and we load up the trailer at the end of each day and then we bring it back here. We load up all the washing machines and wash then dry them, and then we bag them, weigh them, put them back in the bins, and then take them back the next morning… and we do that each day.”
Aunties Laundromat owners Donna Missen (left) and Dave Crone had a busy week cleaning more than a tonne of smart bands for the Fieldays last week. Photo: Dan Tasker
