Towel Colour — Four Questions Before You Order Anything But White

Most properties end up at white eventually, usually after a bad experience with colour. That is not an argument against colour. It is an argument for asking four questions first. ONE: WILL IT MEET CHLORINE OR BLEACH Pool, spa, salon, and any area where housekeeping reaches for bleach on a stain. If yes, the towel must be vat dyed. Vat dyes are fixed inside the fibre rather than bonded to the surface, which is why they hold through chlorine, hot washing and UV. Reactive dyeing, which is correct for guest rooms, will go patchy within a season in those areas. Vat costs more per kilo and the colour range is narrower. There is no third option that is both cheap and colourfast. TWO: CAN YOU CONTROL THE WASH A hotel with an in-house laundry can. A serviced apartment where guests use domestic machines cannot. Neither can a vacation rental. Where you cannot control what goes into the machine, white is the practical answer. It can be bleached, and when one piece is ruined you replace one piece rather than breaking a set. THREE: WILL YOU REORDER THIS SHADE Colour drifts between production runs. Dye lots are matched to a standard, not to each other, and a towel bought two years apart will sit slightly differently on the rail beside the first batch. White does not have this problem, which is the real reason large properties stay with it. If you are committed to a colour, keep a sealed reference piece from the first order and send it with every reorder. Matching to a physical sample is far more reliable than matching to a Pantone reference, because cotton does not read the way a lab card does. FOUR: IS IT FOR IDENTIFICATION OR FOR LOOKS These are different jobs and the second one is optional. Pool towels should be visually distinct from room towels, otherwise guests move them between the two and your count stops meaning anything. That is identification, and a cabana stripe or a bold solid does it. Everything else is aesthetics, and aesthetics in a towel programme costs money every year rather than once. WHAT WHITE ACTUALLY COSTS YOU Worth saying honestly. White shows every laundry problem first — chlorine overuse, hard water, overloading, washing with colours. A grey-looking white towel is usually a laundry issue, not a towel issue, but the property sees it on the towel. If your laundry protocol is poor, white will expose it. Colour hides it for a while and then fails all at once. Kiran Global Exports is a terry towel manufacturer and exporter from Solapur, Maharashtra, India, producing through a partner mill weaving terry since 1972 — OEKO-TEX Standard 100, GRS, ISO 9001, MADE IN GREEN and BSCI certified. Tell us which areas the towels are going to and whether you can control the wash, and we will tell you where colour is worth it and where it is not. Kiran Global Exports Terry Towel Manufacturer & Exporter Solapur, Maharashtra, India 413004 exportskiranglobal@gmail.com +91 99839 11181 www.kiranglobalexports.com