Spark Car Wash Standardizes and Automates Purchasing as It Scales From 15 to 95+ Locations

The challenge

Spark Car Wash is in the fast lane. With 15 locations already open and roughly 80 in their pipeline, the express car wash brand was scaling quickly across the East Coast. This rapid growth brought with it a challenge that every multi-location operator knows well: keeping the experience consistent.

Whether a customer pulled into a location in New Jersey or Pennsylvania, Spark Car Wash strived to deliver the same dependable experience, down to the little details like the air fresheners, towels, and custom signage. However, with employees buying supplies from whichever vendors had stock, keeping those products consistent grew harder with every new opening.

Beyond maintaining consistency, Spark Car Wash’s existing purchasing process required significant manual work. Sourcing products from various vendors meant logging into individual websites and sifting through email inboxes to understand the status of each order. If items arrived late, damaged, or at the wrong address, staff would need to spend time coordinating with suppliers to resolve the issue. That lift was heaviest at grand openings, where teams needed to completely stock a new wash for customers by a specific date.

To scale without losing the dependable experience that keeps customers coming back, the team needed a purchasing process built to grow with them, cut the manual work, and reinforce brand standards at every turn.

The solution

Spark Car Wash implemented Order.co in January of 2023 to establish standardized purchasing processes and gain control over spend as they prepared to scale. When Kate Marinelli joined as Marketing Manager in the fall of 2025, she learned how to take full advantage of the platform in just one day. “Once we got everything on Order.co, which wasn't even hard in the first place, it's smooth sailing,” Kate shared. Populating the catalog with Spark Car Wash’s approved items is as simple as logging into a vendor’s website through Order.co. Then, teams can shop across all contracted suppliers in one guided, compliant marketplace rather than jumping between various portals.

The outcome

Boosts operational efficiency

With all of Spark Car Wash’s purchases, approvals, order tracking, and payments flowing through automated, centralized workflows, staff can spend their time on more strategic work, rather than manually managing the company’s 160+ monthly orders. “Order.co saves me so much time,” Kate expressed. “I don't have to worry about, ‘Did this get sent to the right address?’ It's all already on Order.co, ready for me to go.”

To keep their items organized by category and use case, the Spark Car Wash team built custom product lists. “I make a product list for just about everything,” Kate said. “I make one for Mother's Day, Father's Day, any type of promotions we're running. All of our locations have different pricing depending on the taxes; it makes it really easy for me to decipher who needs what.” As a result, employees can find exactly what they need without second-guessing or seeking out products from unapproved vendors.

Simplifies local vendor management

Spark Car Wash collaborated with Order.co’s support team to onboard new vendors, including a local small business that the team relies on for custom signage. Rather than submitting requests over the phone or via email, ordering new signs follows the same simple, e-commerce shopping experience as purchasing cleaning materials and office supplies online. With all orders from both local and global vendors flowing through one platform, “Pretty much everything you see on-site at a Spark was purchased from Order.co besides the equipment inside the wash,” Kate shared.

Adding local vendors to Order.co has been beneficial for both Spark Car Wash and the suppliers themselves. Since purchase requests now flow seamlessly through one place, the Spark Car Wash team orders from these partners more often. “The local vendor loves working with Order.co,” Kate emphasized. “It's really helped their business thrive because we give them a lot more business now that we can standardize the process. They're really grateful for our partnership with Order.co.”

Drives spend visibility and accountability

General managers and district managers at Spark Car Wash both gained full visibility throughout the entire purchasing lifecycle, ensuring that they never have to hunt down the status of an order or wonder how much of a location’s budget is left for the month. “[Order.co] makes it really easy to see what everyone orders, what people need more of, what people are using the most of, and monitor spending," Kate explained.

As Spark Car Wash expanded to new territories, the team kept spend under control by configuring custom approval workflows that automatically route all purchases to the appropriate managers for sign-off before an order goes through. "The Order.co approval process is really easy to segment out,” Kate shared. Keeping only the right employees involved in the approval process eliminates the bottlenecks that cause late deliveries and stockouts — the kind of disruptions that negatively impact the customer experience that Kate works so hard to uphold.

Ensures consistent brand standards across locations

For the Spark Car Wash team, following brand standards for everything from replenishing air fresheners to preparing for a grand opening is now as simple as adding pre-approved items from a designated product list to a cart. “We love using Order.co because it sets a standard and makes it super easy for everyone to find what they need in the same place,” Kate highlighted.

That consistency will be essential as Spark Car Wash speeds ahead towards 95+ locations. Delivering the same experience at every location is what builds the brand loyalty that Spark Car Wash is built on — and Kate has made the compliant choice the easiest one to make with every purchase. "It creates a good continuity where everyone's gonna get the same customer experience no matter where they go when they visit a Spark,” Kate said. “We really want to be that car wash that people can depend on. Order.co helps us strive for that goal."