Selwyn Burchhardt from Kannegiesser writes for Laundry & Cleaning Today about Empire Laundry, their history and how Kannegiesser have supported them over the years, to where they are now.

Empire Laundry based in North London, was founded in 1992 by the founding owner/directors, Aaron Issacharoff and Matthew Simon. From the beginning Empire Laundry concentrated on producing and delivering the highest possible quality laundered goods. Initially this was a ‘shirts only’ service but very quickly Empire developed the business to include a ‘full service’ laundry offering flat linen to the rapidly growing market for laundry services.

Some years later, Empire began to offer their laundry services to linen hire rental service companies, thus beginning Empire Laundry’s long journey to becoming one of the premier linen rental laundry suppliers to five star and boutique hotels in and around London and the south east of England.

Despite Empire Laundry’s near 30 year life, the company has never moved far away from its core founding values ‘quality consistently’. And the building blocks within that bold claim lie in the founding principles and traditions of the company to this day. Key to their success, is that Empire offers only services involved in cleaning customers’ own stock or dedicated rental stock. Owners Issacharoff and Simon insist that offering their services in such a tightly controlled manner gives them their only real chance of maintaining their high, self imposed service standards.

Issacharoff and Simon are owners of one of the very few companies in the UK who write into their service agreements, a guarantee of less than one per cent rejects. To commit to such a guarantee is a very strong statement to all their direct and indirect customers. Meanwhi le throughout the preceding decade Empire Laundry owners were keeping a keen eye on the technical systems developing around RFID automation systems and their relevance – if any – to the data handling needs of any business. RFID was being publicised throughout the international laundry world as ‘the latest, newest technology’ enabling the closest control of all activities in business systems control.

For almost a decade Issacharoff and Simon investigated and discussed with many potential suppliers of turnkey RFID computer systems: many were seen but few were chosen. In 2019 the directors entered the RFID world and after closely monitored research and much software development, succeeded in bringing an RFID system to a satisfactory level of performance. After several months of determined effort the particular histor ical dif f icult ies of controlling the location of all items in work by RFID had been solved and the ‘Black Holes’ commonly occurring in early RFID systems,missing stock in unknown locations had been eliminated. This development gave complete peace of mind to all Empire Laundry customers as every piece of laundry being processed is always under control wherever it may be in the process.

As Issacharoff says: “Our system is different – it is very robust and exhaustively tested to provide both Empire staff and management and all our customers what they really wish for and need to know.”

The COVID-19 lockdown has also given Empire Laundry some time to plan for a return to some degree of normality in the pattern of workflow through the laundry process. During lockdown they have continued to support all their customers in their usual comprehensive manner – and frequently at a total loss of revenue.

Both Issacharoff and Simon remain buoyant about the future and have committed to another round of capital investment in the business by purchasing from Kannegiesser, a complete new ironer line as well as two additional energy efficient dryers and a third towel folder. This new productive capacity is estimated by Issacharoff to produce an estimated improvement in shift production of at least 30 per cent above the pre-Covid level. Empire have worked in partnership with Kannegiesser, since 2008 and have made visits to see high quality laundry plants in Europe to understand and develop new ideas and concepts for both bed linen and table linen processing.

They currently have three specialised Kannegiesser ironer lines (with a fourth one being delivered in November) finishing and folding a wide variation of specialised linen to the high-quality standards required by the owners.

Both owners believe that this is the best time to invest in raising standards and continuing to be ultra-efficient in all aspects of production management. Also, as Simon says “In the post COVID-19 world, our customers will be looking to sell their beautiful luxury hotel properties to an even more sophisticated clientele and we need to meet their expectations in the best way we can.”