A year in to Covid and it seems that history is repeating itself.
No not about the Pandemic, but how the Industrial Laundry segments were affected and how they recovered.
Nearly 20 years ago 9/11 stopped the world and things changed for awhile, somethings returned back to "normal" within a couple years, and others things are still staying with us.
Prior to 9/11 the Hospitality segments of our industry where thriving and growing. Laundries could not get enough Route Accounting technology deployed fast enough. Then it all came to an immediate halt when the towers came down. Its was that point in time, focus on hospitality slowed down and healthcare started to gain traction. Over a few years hospitality came back, but during that time software systems needed to pivot to accommodate the requirement for healthcare processing.
Since our lockdown the same results happened again and now just more than a year later we are starting to see the return of Hospitality.
For laundries that were nearly 100% hospitality, it took a few months, but they discovered they could pivot to take on some healthcare processing.
We have observed big growth in ISO Gown and Scrub processing, on a scale we have never seen before. Volume... Volume... Volume... , in some cases ISO gowns and Scrubs seem to make up more than twice the volume of normal item process.
IMD took a couple of months to develop new business models and specialized applications to assist laundries with taking on and speeding up the processing of these materials. It was during this development we realized history is repeating itself. And now here we are with hotels placing orders for linen where the states have removed or greatly repealed occupancy restrictions.