Meet the Bronx laundry influencer spreading love on Instagram

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The state of the internet is no detergent to this local dry cleaner.

When Bronx-born Wally Santos isn’t working at his Pelham Bay laundromat, he’s cleaning up Instagram with his happy antics.

“People think I’m on drugs cause I’m all hyper but it’s a natural high,” the 59-year-old Energizer Bunny, who also goes by Mr. Positive, tells The Post. “They call me the DJ Khaled of laundry, but I like to say I’m Big Pun, cause he became a big star but never left the Bronx.”

In April, a part-time employee told him his antics would do well on social media and helped him make an account with the same name as his business, Pure Organic Dry Cleaning.

“She said, you have to go on Instagram, because you’re fun,” he says. He’s since racked up over 27,000 followers — or what he calls troops in his “Positive Army,” which includes Kevin Jonas.

With so much fanfare, Santos says he has fans trekking to the Bronx just to meet him. Recently, two Minnesotans and a woman from Utah dropped by. However, being a dry cleaning influencer has been better for his bombastic soul than his business.

“Instagram has maybe increased my business by 10 customers. That’s it,” he says, adding that some 30 people have come to take pictures of his store. The human interaction on the platform feeds his spirit, though.

“I got a lot of love,” he says, “I feel God gave me a gift, and I want to share it.” He occasionally visits offices and gives motivational speeches — for free. “I don’t charge,” he says. “The reward is I’m helping people.”

Beyond spreading his energy, he also tries to help people with booze — specifically, Corona. Santos throws biweekly parties at his laundromat, where he invites anyone who had a bad week to join him for a drink.

“What I do is I tell anybody that’s having a bad day, I can’t sell you liquor cause I don’t have a liquor license but you can come have a beer with me on a Friday after work,” he says.

Before he was a laundromat party promoting influencer, Santos was in “direct sales.” A lifelong businessman, Santos has been a salesman since he was 16, when he helped his parents with their Kirby Vacuum franchise by going door to door.

When he was 18, tragedy struck: He and his mother narrowly escaped a house fire by jumping out a window. His father died.

“He was the original Mr. Positive,” says Santos.

After college, he and his mother ran a rental store called House of Video. “There was no video store, no Blockbuster,” in the Bronx in those days, he says. House of Video lasted 15 years, peaking at seven stores before shuttering in the late ‘90s, at which point Santos decided to go into the laundry business. His trick over the past 12 years is to keep prices affordable.

“I’m cheaper than everybody,” he says of Pure Organic. He charges $2 for laundered shirts and $4 for walk-ins, and he’ll meet customers at the train — much to the surprise of his fans.

“People freak out that Mr. Positive is picking up their laundry,” he says, a fact he finds amusing because he describes himself as “a regular guy.”

“I go to my Mets games all the time, I love people, and I love New York,” he says.

He hopes to eventually reach 100,000 followers and become famous — but Santos has already begun to be recognized in public. “I go to Citi Field and they scream, ‘Pure Organic,’ and take my picture,” he says. “It’s surreal, I don’t believe it.”

He hopes for even more recognition, though: “I want people to say, ‘There goes Mr. Positive, the dry cleaner.’”

Pure Organic Dry Cleaning is located at 3166 E. Tremont Ave., Bronx.

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