Lightweight linen, heavy on efficiency

A joint collaboration between flat linen supplier Beirholm, and linen and uniform rental business Testorp, demonstrates just how much impact a close partnership can make when optimising the laundry processes and rethinking the product range.

Testorp is a family-owned laundry with more than 140 years of history and tradition. Today, the laundry is run by Benjamin Testorp, the fifth generation. Testorp’s customers span the healthcare, nursing home, and hospitality sectors. With its customer-centric approach, laundry expertise, and strong focus on high-quality performance textiles in trendy designs, Testorp has been on an impressive growth journey, which the laundry expects to continue.

Around six years ago, facing increasing competition, Testorp knew it needed to grow by attracting new customers. For that to happen, a new product range was needed, and the capacity of the laundry needed to grow, too. At that time, Testorp’s capacity was 15 tons of laundry a day. However, expanding the laundry, which is situated within Berlin, was impossible. So how do you grow when you cannot expand your laundry in terms of square metres? You look inwards to increase operational efficiency.

Testorp and Beirholm began a close collaboration and formed an operational efficiency plan that boiled down to three steps:

1. Understanding Testorp’s laundry context

2. Leveraging BeirTex® textile performance technologies to increase efficiency

3. Deploying Beirholm’s modular design concept based on a small range of laundry-fit textiles to increase laundry capacity and bring in new customers

BeirTex is a performance technology integrated into linen and terry products. It increases laundry performance through reduced processing times and lasts longer than comparable products on the market, says the company. The Beirholm textiles are lighter but still offer the same comfort factor to the end user, meaning the laundry can process them more quickly.

Because the majority of the cotton in BeirTex-infused 50/50 poly/cotton bed linen is actually on the surface covering a core of polyester, it means that the person lying in the bedlinen feels the cotton against the skin as opposed to the polyester and the laundry still gets the benefits of the polyester.

Along with new laundry machinery technology, this plan helped Testorp grow from 15 to 27 tons a day – a 80% increase in output, based purely on efficiency gains in the laundry.

Today, Testorp happily takes on its competition in Berlin, within healthcare as well as hospitality. New and potential customers have shown great interest in the innovative, modular design concept delivered with a high, personal service level. “The journey has just started and Beirholm is looking forward to further increasing performance together with Benjamin Testorp,” says the company.

Danish family-owned Beirholm engineers high performance textiles, creates trendy designs, and leverages its sustainable sourcing platform to bring its laundry partners and customers in hotels, restaurant, care homes, and hospitals an optimal linen solution that fits individual sectors and businesses. It calls the partnership model ‘Context Engineered Textiles’.

Watch this video to see what Benjamin Testorp has to say about the partnership and its benefits to his business. https://youtu.be/ GdA7KqY5J0I