The linen partner in the hotel business for fifty years
Innovative Blycolin ready for the future
In 2022, Blycolin celebrated 50 years in business. For five decades, the company has been the linen partner to the hotel branch. “We are rather proud of that, and with our innovative character, we want to remain that sustainable and reliable linen supplier for the hotel world.”
Marc van Boekholt, Blycolin’s CEO, proudly walks through one of the nine industrial laundries Blycolin boasts. In the small village of Renkum, one hundred tons of laundry is processed every week. On this Wednesday morning in November, the laundry is in top gear to ensure hotel guests all throughout the country eat their dinner from spotless white table linen and rest their heads on clean pillow cases. While hundreds of towels and sheets find their way from dirty to irresistibly white along the almost fully automated laundry process, the CEO looks back on the year his company existed for half a century. “Emerging from the pandemic, as of March this year we see a rising demand on our services again. And truth be told, it was rather difficult for the laundries to scale up. The current scarcity on the job market was a challenge.” A challenge that was conquered largely because Blycolin retained employees during the pandemic times. “Because we knew that the moment the demand would rise again, we really needed everyone again to pick up dirty linen, launder it and return it to our customers. A choice of which we now reap the benefits.”
Van Boekholt has been Blycolin’s CEO for almost fifteen years now and has seen major changes in the market and in operational management during those years. “Our company model has always been pretty straightforward: we rent textile to our customers and for laundering it, we cooperate with independent local and regional laundry companies, our laundry partners. But over the last ten to fifteen years, the laundry market has changed significantly. Many laundry companies – some of which had been around for generations – faced problems with succession. Others were taken over, stopped or faced bankruptcy. In the Netherlands and Belgium, the shortage in capacity is slowly increasing.”
Changing course
Blycolin saw this situation developing, decided to change course and set out to increase its own laundry capacity. The idea was to “secure” the laundry capacity to be able to guarantee the future continuity for our customers. Nowadays, Blycolin owns nine large professional industrial laundry companies. Two in Belgium, one in Germany and six in the Netherlands. “We process over 50 percent of the laundry in the Netherlands and Belgium in our own laundries and the remainder is processed by a number of loyal laundry partners with which we have cooperated for many years. The laundry here in Renkum processes over 100 tons of laundry every week. To paint you a picture: that’s over a 1,000 containers filled with towels, sheets and pillow cases. Our largest branch in Heerenveen processes over 200 tons every week.”
Sustainability
“Sustainability is an important issue to us. We have recently invested in a solar panel installation that generates a staggering 250 MwH of energy with 19,000 solar panels for our branch in Heerenveen. We use about 70 percent of that energy ourselves. We are continually trying to retrieve energy, heat and water. For all our branches, we invest in that. The machinery in all our branches is modern and completely up to date.”
Innovation is deeply ingrained in Blycolin’s DNA. The company continuously cooperates with textile producers to innovate and improve the rental textile. “Our circular goals are an important part of that. It started with a vision we developed ten years ago: a towel for a towel. Since then, we are continually striving to make our rental assortment ever more sustainable. We have, for instance, a line that is produced with biological cotton. That vision has led to an increasing amount of products that can be recycled at high quality at the end of their lifespan so they can serve as raw material for a next cycle. So, a towel for a towel.”
Innovation in its DNA is also the reason that Blycolin has been participating in a company that develops robotics solutions for the professional laundry industry for a number of years now. Those solutions help the industry to tackle the job market issues and further improve the efficiency of the processes. “In our branch in Renkum, two of those robots cooperate with our employees.”
Energy
Laundries are major consumers when it comes to energy. Washing, drying and ironing or mangling simply requires a lot of heat. “It will come as no surprise to anyone that the laundry sector is suffering enormously from the current energy crisis and I am really concerned about the continuity of our sector. After the bad Covid years, the sector cannot avoid passing on to customers the enormous price increases for gas, electricity, fuel, textiles and also labour, in connection with the introduction of WML. Not everyone realizes this, but behind the truck that comes to pick up the dirty laundry and deliver the clean laundry every day is an industry that is capital intensive, energy intensive, and at the same time still quite labor-intensive. As mentioned, our priority at the moment is to guarantee the continuity of the service. All of us see the current inflation figures are not at all normal and I understand very well that our customers find sharp price increases from suppliers extremely difficult. At the same time, we must realize that renting out a hotel room without freshly washed linen really is impossible. And ultimately that will have to be reflected in the room rate that the hotel guest has to pay.”
Future
During the pandemic, Blycolin saw the clients’ expertise in the housekeeping department decrease. The routines that were so obvious between the company and its customers before the pandemic had to be partly reinvented. “We all needed to find a new rhythm. We see this as a shared task, and our account managers and customer service teams, together with the laundries, are ready to help our customers. Also when it comes to looking for ways to save costs. I am positive about the future. The demand for our services is as high as ever before. Many of our customers understand the situation in our sector and realize that there is a common interest. With all the investments Blycolin has made, especially during the pandemic, and that are still to come, Blycolin is ready for the future!”
source: Hospitality Management