Area company aims to reinvent how hospitality industry handles linens

Several years ago, Sarasota-based hotelier Richard Ferrell attended a National Geographic conference on water. While watching a presentation, a slide with a single statistic stood out: it takes 2,800 gallons of water to make a queen-sized cotton sheet.

The water use doesn’t end there. “As a hotelier, I knew how much water we were using in washing of sheets,” says Ferrell. Plus, sheets require chemicals to wash, and when hotel sheets have to be replaced, it creates a good amount of waste. It all added up to major environmental impacts and heavy financial and workload burdens on hotels. “I had a hotel management company that I started, and I was a hotel owner as well,” he says. “I was looking for something to do that blended my penchant for conservation and being a good steward for the environment with my knowledge of the hotel industry.”