We do embroidery and screen printing work for a Tacoma-area chain of hotels. About five months ago, one of the hotels decided to replace some of the robes in its room. Their first instinct was to go for plush, but inexpensive. Cotton is more expensive than synthetic fabrics, so by the time they had called us, they had already firmly decided to buy 100% polyester fleece robes.
When the robes arrived from the supplier, we were not impressed at all. They were shedding fibers all over our shop and into our embroidery machines. My partner and I shook our heads as we realized our client would eventually come to see that the robes were not a good fit with this hotel’s upscale brand image. But these were what they had insisted upon purchasing, so we cranked them out, delivered them, and were pleased that the client was immediately delighted with the outcome.
I was just visiting this same hotel a week or two ago to look into booking some room-nights for visiting family and asked to see a room. There in the closet was one of the robes we had embroidered for the hotel. It was not holding up well at all. The embroidery still looked good, but it was hard to tell because the nap of the fleece was falling every which way over the fine detail of the text in the hotel’s logo. In truth, the robe looked like a wet rat!
A few days later, I was contacted by the hotel’s Housekeeping Director who had come to the same realization. “These robes are terrible,” she said. “What can we do?”
I explained that the polyester microfiber fleece was just not a good fabric in general for heavy duty use. In addition, it was particularly unsuitable for the fine curving details but empty fill spaces of their logo. I recommended she go with a waffle-weave robe. The waffle weave fabric looks nice as a stand-alone and the embroidered logo will always be prominent visible. She agreed.
We just delivered the first round of embroidered waffle-weave robes this past Friday to our Tacoma client. The Housekeeping Director took one look and exclaimed, “Oh, this is going to work MUCH better! She then thanked us for recommending this style.”
We have written it before, and we will surely write it again — it pays to buy quality.