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]]>Hotel beds have always been the epitome of comfort, and one feature that turns a simple bed into a real slumber experience is its sheets – crisp, cool and clean, and of the highest quality. Now, imagine receiving a delivery of hotel quality linen and towels directly to your front door. LuxeLinen is a linen concierge service based in Cape Town which delivers a freshly laundered set of linen and towels direct to your home, every week.
There’s a reason we live in Cape Town, it’s the lifestyle!
In our high-pressure world we want as much time as possible for the things we love, such as spending time with family or friends, exercising on the mountain or lazing at the beach. We use home meal kits to reduce our grocery shopping and cooking time, ride hailing services keep us on the move without our own car, and on-demand cleaning and gardening services are commonplace. So why spend unnecessary time washing, drying and ironing your linen on washday?
As a supplier of linen to Cape Town hotels and AirBnBs, quality is of the utmost importance to the LuxeLinen team. The linen and towels are high threadcount, 100% cotton and as luxurious as anything you’ll find in 4 and 5* hotels. Each linen package includes all the essentials for a fresh start to your week: duvet cover, fitted sheet, 2 pillowcases, 2 bath towels, a hand towel and bathmat. Delivery is contactless and there’s an optional add-on of 3-layer reusable face masks.
LuxeLinen is an extension of parent company fanute’s successful hospitality service, which delivers over 8 000 bed sets per month to Cape Town hosts. Owner Charl de Beer is confident that many in Cape Town will be keen to utilise the service: “Whether you’re a busy professional who doesn’t want to spend time on laundry, an on-the-go parent, or if you just want that hotel turn-down feeling at home, LuxeLinen is the perfect solution,” says Charl.
In the current hyper-aware world of cleanliness and sanitisation, LuxeLinen offers a superior clean compared with domestic washing machines. “We can guarantee disinfection using an industrial combination of chemicals and temperature which domestic laundry cannot, because domestic laundry machines are simply not equipped to maintain the required water temperatures for long enough,” says Charl. This has benefits for those who are ill or recovering, who suffer from allergies, or who have sensitive skin easily affected by detergent residue. And of course there is COVID-19, a virus that is quite simple to destroy in an industrial laundry environment.
LuxeLinen is the latest first-to-market service to be offered by fanute. “We originally started fanute because we wanted to deliver innovative laundry and textile solutions that would help to streamline the lives of our customers and offer significant and demonstrable sustainability benefits,” says Charl.
“We started with a linen rental service targeted specifically to the growing Cape Town short-term lettings market, offering fast turnaround deliveries of freshly laundered hotel-quality linen to our hospitality clients. As Cape Town approached Day Zero, we then invested in near-waterless laundry systems that reduce the amount of water and energy used in every wash by 80%, and in 2019 we combined textile rental with on-site laundry processing to provide a sustainable garment rental solution for Agri-processing companies. Now that we’ve seen a need for luxury, hotel-quality linen in the residential sector, we’re bringing these solutions to market, fully enabled by technology, to make the washday a thing of the past.”
The service costs R85 per bed per week and includes delivery. Currently, LuxeLinen is only available in the Cape Town CBD and City Bowl, and the high-density Atlantic Seaboard, but will be expanding as customer interest grows.
How does LuxeLinen work?
For more information, contact Charl de Beer at LuxeLinen on 071 681 1165 or at charl@fanute.co.za or visit https://fanute.co.za/luxe-linen/
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]]>There are three main ‘pillars’ of sustainability to consider – environmental, economic and socio-cultural. Environmental is our main focus in this article, but when sourcing consumable and longer-term products for your hotel, you should consider the economic effects (ie, where is the money going? Is it staying inside the country?) and socio-cultural effects (ie, is this going to positively affect the local community?)
When selecting your suppliers, there are a few questions you should ask:
Why ask questions? Any supplier that has made sustainability a priority will be able to answer these questions easily, with details, and provide enough information to back up their claims. It’s also important to not take information on websites or pamphlets at face value – asking important questions is a way of finding out if a company is greenwashing (ie, marketing spin that creates the perception of sustainability).
How sustainable is your supply chain?
So, you’ve spoken to your suppliers and made sure that their manufacturing process isn’t heavy on scarce resources and that they’ve got a sustainability programme in place, but what about the supply chain? Every product that you use is a sum total of every material, resource and process that has gone into its production. Find out more about your supply chain by asking your suppliers the following questions:
Each element of production has an impact on the total sustainability of the final product, so it really is worth investigating your entire supply chain.
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]]>Imported by local company fanute, we can now get the innovative, award-winning Hydrofinity laundry system in South Africa – and that’s a big deal for the hospitality sector. “The near-waterless washing system from Hydrofinity is exciting and can potentially revolutionise the local tourism sector,” says Charl de Beer, manager of fanute. “Saving up to 80% water and nearly 50% electricity are metrics that resonate with South Africans, who are facing rising water costs due to the growing scarcity of these utilities.”
A Hydrofinity system uses up to 80% less water than a conventional washing machine and a single 25kg machine can run 14 cycles a day, saving up to 2 million litres of water a year with just one machine. Energy consumption is also reduced, using up to 50% less electricity than a conventional machine. The energy and water savings don’t come at the cost of performance – tough stains are removed easily with award-winning technology, and linen life is extended due to a lower temperature and less detergent needed to clean. Less detergent also translates to lower costs, and staff won’t have to spend as much time pre-treating and sorting.
So how does the Hydrofinity system achieve its low water-usage? Through replacing 80% of the water that’s conventionally used in a washing machine with polymer XOrbs. These beads gently massage the textiles and, combined with the supplied detergent solution, provides superior cleaning results by attracting the dirt molecules from the linen. The XOrbs are reusable for hundreds of washes and once they’ve reached the end of their lifespan, can be recycled.
There’s no better time to invest in water and energy-saving equipment, especially when the results are this great. The hospitality industry has a great role to play in sustainability, and while Day Zero might be avoided in Cape Town in the near future, water reduction will continue to be important across the board.
CASE STUDY
The Hyatt Hotel in Reston VA showed these considerable savings after one yet with Hydrofinity.
Number of Hydrofinity Machines:
3x 25kg
Total Savings per year:
R510 780
Water savings per year:
5.3 million litres
“The Hydrofinity technology is truly amazing! Equally impressive is the company behind it. Hydrofinity has absolutely delivered on promises of savings and superior performance.” David Eisenman, General Manager, Hyatt Regency Reston.
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]]>That’s no surprise; Charl spent his time in London working as a Chief Financial Officer and Managing Director for high-growth technology businesses and disrupters, supporting the founders in achieving their goals. When he returned to Cape Town, he wanted to focus on his own ideas, taking up a decision-making and strategy role, and working to make his business dreams a reality.
In London, laundries are a part of the city’s fabric, with successful laundries buzzing with activity. Charl noticed this on his daily commute, and after a short stint as head of a digital training business in Cape Town decided to focus on offering laundry services for the growing Airbnb market in Cape Town. There are approximately 18000 Airbnbs in Cape Town, and while some are small operations where bed linen can be laundered easily by the owners after each visit, many owners have multiple properties that are run on a professional basis, making laundering bed linen a much more cumbersome task.
While he originally thought to collect, launder and return the properties’ own linen, Charl quickly realised that this wasn’t really solving the problem, and that he would still have to deal with labour-intensive sorting and separating of each properties’ linen. The solution was to own the linen himself, offering a linen rental service, and in May 2017 he started delivering freshy-laundered bed linen to Airbnb properties ahead of a visitor’s arrival, then collecting the laundry after the guest had left.
At this point, he was using a professional laundry service, but when Day Zero began making headlines in Cape Town, he realised that the water crisis was an existential threat to his business. The industrial laundries that he spoke to were making inroads into using non-potable water, but Charl thought that there could be a better solution. He firmly believes in technology’s power to change and so began to do research into innovation in the field, which was how he discovered the Hydrofinity near-waterless laundry system.
Using technology developed at University of Leeds’ School of Textiles, the Hydrofinity laundry system utilises polymer beads to replace 80% of the water traditionally used in a washing machine. The machines have been used successfully in areas that had experienced drought, such as California and Australia, and, after reaching out to the UK-based owner and later flying to Dubai to meet them, Charl became the official distributor in South Africa.
Traditional washing machines act like a bath – soaking items before the washing starts, and using hot water to open up the linen’s ‘pores’ and allow cleaning chemicals in. What makes the Hydrofinity laundry system such an innovative one is that the polymer beads have been given properties that attract and hold dirt, fat and stray dye in suspension inside each bead. As the beads attract dirt, the water often just needs to be at an ambient temperature; less chemicals are used, and there’s less wear and tear on the linen as it isn’t tumbled around against itself in the machine. So on top of a reduction in water usage, there’s a reduction in electricity usage and linen has a longer life, often of between 6 – 9 months.
The beads themselves last for hundreds and hundreds of washes, but once they’re no longer effective, they’ll be collected by fanute, re-engineered with the linen cleaning properties, and then re-used by Hydrofinity.
The first Hydrofinity machine arrived in South Africa in February, and Charl has received incredibly good feedback from his first demonstrations. The machine is developed for industrial use, and because of its low water and electricity usage, users could start to see a return on investment in 18 months or so. With South African hotels alone using 1.5 billion litres per year of water in their laundry a near-waterless machine can have a significant beneficial impact on the hospitality sector.
Fanute’s motto is ‘Make Something Better’, and as the company’s linen rental service and distribution of the Hydrofinity laundry system in South Africa show, Charl is committed to finding solutions to specific challenges the hospitality industry faces, whether through technology or outside-the-box thinking.
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