Textile rental focus

A more positive outlook

1 June 2012



After last year’s cotton shortage forced suppliers to increase their prices, Kathleen Armstrong discovers a more buoyant mood in the UK towels and bathrobe market.


In a year where the economy has caused some businesses to fail and cotton prices soared, the towels and bathrobes market has been surprisingly buoyant.

Richard ?Yates, national account manager at Linen Connect, says it was one of the company’s best years ever.

He attributes this to having good quality towels for both the bottom and top ends of the market and to managing stocks well, particularly during the cotton crisis when the price of cotton doubled.

“Normally when you put prices up, customers say they won’t pay,” Yates says. But he explains that the circumstances last year were so different from normal that both hotels and laundries understood the seriousness of the situation and realised that higher prices had to be met.

Some customers, he says, decided to move to lower weight products in order to cope with the price increase – but they still wanted good quality.

Linen Connect’s towels are all 100% cotton and manufactured in Turkey, which is widely accepted as the source of the best quality towels. For the top end of the market the company offers towels at 500gsm, 550gsm, 600gsm and 650gsm, while its standard towels are 450gsm and 500gsm.

Linen Connect’s best sellers are the 500gsm at the lower end of the market and the 650gsm for the luxury end.

Tonrose currently offers only three different weights of towels – 450gsm, 500gsm and 600gsm – operating on the principle that simplicity is key. “People are looking for better quality,” says sales director Chris Kingsford. “They want as high a quality as possible without having to spend too much money.”

Bathrobes are offered in three different styles – terry, waffle and velour – all at 450gsm. “Still keeping it simple – good, better and best,” says Kingsford. He admits that although Tonrose has not been one of the major players in the towelling and bathrobe sector, this will change. By May. the company will have better quality products on the market, sourced from Pakistan and Turkey.

Tonrose is also investigating the use of RFID in its towelling products to help customers combat the theft of stock and hopes to have completed its trials and be ready to launch onto the market around mid-year.

Security is an important issue throughout the industry and laundries regularly suffer losses, particularly of towels and bathrobes which some hotel customers see as trophy items.

Some hotels deny that it is their products that have gone missing. However, the recent TSA campaign to raise awareness of the issue in hotels and laundries is having an impact.

One company making strides into RFID is Richard Howarth. It has worked closely with Lilliput Services in Northern Ireland to supply towels and bathrobes with RFID chips. Lilliput’s managing director David Griffiths says this has benefited both the laundry and its customers.

Lilliput Services is the largest privately owned linen supplier in the province. It has used RFID chips in high-end towels for over two years.

Each chip is unique so the towels can be traced to the premises to which they were issued, enabling both Lilliput and its customers to keep tabs on the amount of stock they have at any one time. They can also identify which items have been returned and which haven’t and which have been stolen.

By keeping track of stock, laundries can prove which items have gone missing should they decide to charge the customer. They can also identify what stock the hotel still holds so avoiding unnecessary re-stocking. Hotels can also detect towels or bathrooms that have been packed into a customer’s suitcase. “It hasn’t eradicated the problem but it has provided better information both for us and the customer,” Griffiths says.

Lilliput has moved from single-read to multi-read chips that allow packs of towels to be scanned in one go. It uses the chip technology to keep track of hotel stock and to monitor its own.

The company depreciates its towels over a three-year period and the chips can gather data that tells the company whether its towels are lasting that long.

Griffiths says that if towels only last two years then the company would have to replace a lot of stock, creating a situation of double depreciation,” Griffiths says that depreciation is 13% of our bottom line.”

Towel abuse is another big problem for laundries. Hotel staff often use face and hand towels to clean the bathroom and guests may remove self-tanning products and make-up.

“We have a phenomenal spend on replacement towels,” Griffiths says, estimating re-wash of hand towels at around 10 – 12%.

To combat this, the company has installed a system that will photograph stock as it comes off the lorry so that it can provide proof of abuse to customers.

The cost of energy is another challenge. “It has had a huge impact on our business,” Griffiths says. “We spent £160,000 putting in new energy saving kit but our gas bill still increased to over £100,000.” The challenge, he says, is to find towels that dry quickly without necessarily moving to polyester.

Richard Haworth, which supplies the RFID-chipped towels to Lilliput, is investigating different possibilities for quicker-to-dry towels, including bamboo and cotton-rich although currently its range is 100% cotton.

Managind director Raj Ruia says there is interest in bamboo towelling, particularly in the spa sector, but “the jury’s still out on launderability”.

Richard Haworth’s best seller was once the 450gsm Denham towel but now the 500gsm and 550gsm Chelsea and Richmond towels are the most popular. To improve the quality of the product even more, it has recently re-engineered its 550gsm Richmond towel with a non-shrink header so that it presents more squarely, using different yarns and a different weave pattern. The towel is now going into a full trial.

“The main trends are more choice and diversity,” Ruia says. “You will even find two-star boutique hotels wanting to differentiate.”

Ruia says the range of towels it offers may have been the reason it did not suffer from the economic crisis last year. There was not a noticeable change in the number of towels or bathrobes it sold. In fact, its 100% polyester Marbella bathrobe rose in volume over the year.

Another company that had a good year was Hilden. “It has been the best year for towels and bathrobes that I can remember,” says commercial director Rod Nutter, adding that the business had benefited from its acquisition of Lissadell in November 2010. The company was also well placed to ride out the cotton shortage with its offices in Pakistan, India, China and Turkey, managed by Vision Support Services. “Because we had offices in Asia, we were able to manage the cotton crisis and therefore were able to get extra business when there was a lack of towels,” Nutter says.

The company is now looking at offering its customers container loads of towels which can be delivered directly to their location of choice within a relatively quick lead time and this will help them deal with the peaks and troughs of supply.

Hilden offers a range of 100% towels at 500gsm (Picasso and Monet), 600gsm (Renoir) and 650gsm (Van Gogh). It also provides a cotton-rich towel, the 450gsm Da Vinci.

Nutter says that a laundry’s highest cost is energy so the company is looking at introducing higher weight cotton-rich towels this year.

” The company also has other towels in the development stages which may help laundries reduce energy costs.

At the end of February Hilden also concluded a deal with leading US bathrobe supplier Monarch to take on its production sources for bathrobes and sell them in the UK. And on the security side, Hilden is working on a linen tracking system which it hopes to launch very soon.

Another company that is working to develop energy-efficient towels for the market is Hartdean. Paul Balladon says its cotton-rich Ecoknit towel can save 15% in water consumption.

Although more expensive than some other towels, the Ecoknit is popular in the USA, Canada and Europe but sales are still slow in the UK, Balladon says. “Internationally they understand that you get your money back through savings but in the UK the focus is on price.”The towel is 100% polyester in the ground with 100% cotton pile and is woven with a tight knotted loop construction so the loops do not come undone and the towel lasts longer.

Hartdean also has a microfibre towel, which Balladon says has “taken off”, especially in hair salons. It sells the towel through a large salon distributor.

The company is also developing a “faux bamboo” towel from 100% polyester. The Sensitive range was introduced just a few months ago. At first the range was predominantly bathrobes but now it is gradually expanding into towels and face cloths.

The general optimism in the market, does not seem to include the Olympics. Most suppliers have adopted a “wait-and-see” attitude.

Andy Jamshidzadeh of DG Textiles comments: “We were hoping that things would get better after Christmas, especially with the Olympics coming. But we are well into the year and we still don’t see any movement. I don’t know whether they are leaving it till the last minute.”

His experience is echoed across the sector. Nevertheless, DG Textiles is “stockpiled and ready” for orders should they come. The company’s towels are 500gsm 100% cotton from Turkey. It also supplies 400/450gsm bathrobes.

Stalbridge Linen Services currently supplies the Olympic venue at Weymouth, which will host the yachting events. It also supplies a number of the football venues including Wembley.

It hopes to supply many of the other venues, including the Olympic Park, in partnership with its contract catering customers.

David Hill says that Stalbridge supplies the country house hotels market where 500gsm 100% cotton towels are the minimum requirement. The company also offers as standard the Elite range which includes 600gsm towels and bathrobes. Stalbridge has found that the best quality towelling is sourced from Turkey.

Serviced apartments are now a growing market for Stalbridge, which supplies a full range of quality towelling from face cloths to bathrobes to locations in London, Manchester, Edinburgh and Oxford.

All in all, it has been a positive year for both suppliers and laundries and most are confident that it will continue. Richard Yates sums it up well: “I am hoping this year will be as big or bigger than last year.”




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