11.14.06
At this year's International Hotel/Motel and Restaurant Show, Standard Textile is launching two new offerings for its hotel customers—Room Ready for You laundered with Tide and Centium Core Technology. Both innovations reflect the company's ongoing commitment to deliver an upgraded guest experience while reducing overall operational costs for the hotelier.
According to Richard Stewart, vice president of product management at Standard Textile, "Standard Textile is focused on developing textiles that are engineered to provide the lowest cost-per-use. For more than 65 years, Standard Textile has continuously developed superior management tools and high-quality innovative products and systems that provide customers smart solutions to the industry's many challenges."
Room Ready for You laundered with Tide offers the industry sheeting products that are delivered to the hotel already pre-laundered and "Tide clean" right out of the box. According to Stewart, Room Ready for You laundered with Tide is beneficial to both new and existing hotels.
"A hotel laundry experiences tremendous expense when they receive new linen products. Most sheets and towels need to be unpackaged, unwrapped, shaken out, and put into a special laundry cycle for their first wash. This is an expensive and time-consuming process. The average laundry spends $0.30 for every pound of linen processed, which includes labor, chemical and distribution costs of laundering all the new material," Stewart said. "Sheets that are Room Ready for You laundered with Tide can save the hotelier eight to 10 percent off the acquisition cost by avoiding the first wash cycle. By eliminating the need to launder new bedding and towels when they arrive onsite, Room Ready for You laundered with Tide saves time, energy, and money."
Using clean controlled environment handling procedures pioneered by Standard Textile in the 1980s, Room Ready for You products have been available to hotels since 2003. This year, Standard Textile is working with Procter & Gamble Professional, the away-from-home division of Procter & Gamble.
"We have found that the hotel industry is always looking for ways to bring the comforts of home to its guests," said Merritt Noble, assistant brand manager of P&G Professional. "By providing hotels and companies like Standard Textile access to Tide, a brand people know and trust at home, we believe that we have given them another way to bring the 'home' experience to each hotel guest."
Standard Textile did not stop with pre-laundered sheets and towels -- the textile company has also invented a new technology to make towels feel thicker, yet lighter, softer, yet more durable. This has been achieved through Centium Core Technology. Stewart explains, "Outside of technology improvements designed to speed up the manufacturing process, terry towels have been manufactured in a similar manner for centuries. Our proprietary engineering takes the manufacturing of terry to the next level by reconfiguring the core and pile -- the normal components that comprise a towel."
Standard Textile invented the Centium Core Technology by replacing the traditional cotton core of the towel with a Centium microfilament polymeric yarn that imparts higher strength and tenacity than the typical natural fiber core. Having a filament that weighs less (but is much stronger) in the core allows for additional weight to be redistributed to the pile (or loop), the part of the towel that touches the skin. The strong Centium yarn never touches the skin, but imparts significant strength while making the towel more absorbent and durable. This allows a hotel to upgrade the quality of the towels offered to the guest while simultaneously reducing the replacement cost of those towels.
Standard Textile's dedication to offering its customers innovative textile solutions has translated into Room Ready for You laundered with Tide and Centium Core Technology, innovative new products that increase quality while saving the customer money. Stewart states that this is only the beginning: "While these two innovations are the latest to our product line, we are always searching for new ways to challenge how textiles are manufactured."