ETSA News

ETSA Awards:  A profile in innovation: Lindström Oy

The first ETSA Awards took place on 12 May at the ETSA congress. There were many nominees with extremely innovative projects for the award category "Best Innovative Project", but the winner of this award went to Lindström Oy, for their project "Workwear Flex", representing a new digitalized approach to their market. With the RFID tagged workwear to enable traceability, and optimize the workwear inventory levels they were thereby able to increase efficiency. This solves the problem of the traditional workwear rental model, which is based on personalized items with limited flexibility and availability to optimize inventory levels. This often leads to overstocking, and even in industries with strict hygiene requirements there often is a lack of hygiene guideline adherence. The new Workwear Flex, as it was re-branded and improved in 2020, allows for customers to keep track of workwear in stock, in use, and in the laundry.

 Through Workwear Flex, this system reduces the number of textiles needed. Originally the business case was based on a 10-15% reduction but an analysis done in 2021 showed that the reduction rate could be on average 40%. The service that is provided through Workwear Flex helps to reduce the need for excessive amounts of textiles and reduces the need to produce more, which in turn means using less natural materials needed to produce the textiles. This also decreases costs, saves time, and increases workforce satisfaction from all sides. The customers are extremely pleased with the Workwear Flex and there is proof of this through the promotion through customer stories on social media, customer encounters and yearly sustainability reports.

The is a large project that consisted of between 30 and 50 people during the development stage and around 1000 people during the development and rollout phase.  If you'd like to see more, there are two videos linked here, the first on digital services, and the second, on the solution Lindström provides. If you have any further questions please contact ETSA Secretariat.

During the 2022 ETSA Congress in May of 2022, Juha Laurio, CEO of Lindström accepted the award for "Best Innovative Project" on behalf of the company. We at ETSA congratulate them on this historic award. Please see a resource page linked at the bottom of this article with more information. 


Lindstrom Resource Page (546.2 KB)