“It’s good to use the same sheets, the same towels, so
that you’re not fighting over yours and theirs. It’s not a
good cultural thing. It’s funny—people will draw blood
over laundry.”
— ELLA KENT
spa: if a customer falls in love with
the sheets and towels used by your
spa, they may be interested in pur-
chasing them through your spa’s
retail.
In addition to providing a sense of
luxury, having quality towels in par-
ticular is part and parcel of delivering
superior results at a spa: Kent notes
that providing a guest with a scratchy
towel after they’ve received a facial
can essentially undo the benefits of
the treatment.
Should I outsource laundry or
bring it in-house?
Kent suggests bringing laundry in-
house if you can. For a small day spa,
this might mean having a few ma-
chines in back. For a large resort, this
can mean a full-scale laundry facility.
Obviously, the upfront costs are huge,
notes Kent, but there’s a key factor driv-
ing her recommendation to bring laun-
dry in house: “When you outsource
laundry, their goal is to make as much
money as they can from you. When it’s
in-house, their goal is to keep cost
down as low as possible.”
TOP TIP Should I have different kinds of
terry and linen?
Be sure to fully rotate your
linens: room to laundry,
laundry to shelf, shelf to room.
Don’t directly replace used
sheets and towels with ones
fresh from the laundry while
leaving the same unused linen
and terry on the shelf. Doing
so will wear out your linens
much more quickly than a
proper rotation. When it comes to material and quality,
Kent favors having the same towels
and sheets across the board rather
than using more luxurious materials
for customer-facing applications and
lower-quality materials for ‘back-of-
house’ uses. This is because managing
multiple kinds of terry and linen is
much more difficult—now you have to
sort out the ‘good’ towels from the ‘bad’
towels and make sure they get to the
right place. It also makes it impossible
to pull linen and terry from one area to
another when necessary.
Kent provided the following exam-
ple: “We had a fitness center that was
separately managed from our spa for a
while. They had different kinds of
towels than we did, and the fight for
hand towels happened every day. Even-
tually, we decided to all be on the same
towels so we could share as needed.
Same thing for if you have multiple
properties: it’s good to use the same
sheets, the same towels, so that you’re
not fighting over yours and theirs. It’s
not a good cultural thing. It’s funny—
people will draw blood over laundry.”
Putting the Matter to Bed
“The joke is that linen is the lifeblood of
spa,” Kent says. “Our biggest panic mo-
ments [as spa directors]—except for a
therapist calling off—is running out of
linens and knowing that you’re not get-
ting a delivery.”
By understanding PAR level—how
to calculate it and use it to manage
your spa’s inventory of linen and
terry—you can make a daily task more
manageable and avoid panic moments.
In doing so, you’ll be freed up to focus
on managing what matters most: your
team and the experiences they provide
to the spa’s customers. n
ELLA KENT is Director of Rooms at Sea Island Resort, where she
previously served as Director of Spa. She has served as Chairman of the
ISPA Board of Directors and has two decades of experience in spa.
APRIL 2020
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