Valorie Tate - Sep 2024
How L’Esprit Schools Ditched the Laundry
Mornings are different now for Holly Reuter, campus director for L’Esprit Schools in the Detroit area in Southeast Michigan. She has time to go to her office, hang up her coat and put down her bag before starting on her list of tasks. As of March, she no longer detours to the laundry room first, still with coat and bag, to switch on the first of up to 15 wash loads of towels that she had to get done each and every day. Nor must she restock the cabinets next to the basins three times a day, sometimes more, to ensure students have a supply of clean, dry towels.
FREEDOM FROM LAUNDRY
This new-found freedom comes after L’Esprit earlier this year took advantage of the newly launched school program from Sustain Beauty Co, titled Future Forward Beauty, which offers sustainably minded discounts and educational support to schools moving towards greater sustainability. As exclusive supplier of plant-based Scrummi disposable hair towels, SBCo is helping lift the burden of laundering that has increasingly fallen on school staff since the beginning of a 10-year dispute between another Michigan cosmetology school and its students over who washes the towels. The $2.8 million settlement earlier this year, awarded to students, centered around claims they were forced to perform unpaid tasks, including laundering towels.
The first step for L’Esprit was to introduce the towels to the Southfield campus in March earlier this year. Students there did not do laundering but still had to help sort and fold towels. So for them it’s not dodging the most tedious of jobs in the industry that’s got them excited, but the towels themselves.
“The students are obsessed because of how well Scrummi works, particularly with textured hair, and how absorbent they are. They are more fit-for-purpose than any cotton towel,” says Holly, who trained at L’Esprit, opened by Pete and Sally Wells with their daughter Stacy Wells in 2004.
“But I’m obsessed because they’ve lifted a huge burden from me while giving us a much more sanitary and eco-friendly alternative to the 13 hours of laundry every day. Even with the washer-dryer going constantly, we still ran out of towels and had to go to the laundromat.”
ENRICHING THE STUDENT EXPERIENCE
For owner Stacy, relieving a valuable member of staff of menial, time-consuming tasks, along with reducing her energy and water bills, made financial sense. Her concerns were less with Scrummi towels and more with enriching the experience of their 300 students.
“We need to set our students up for success,” says Stacy, a familiar face of the American Association of Cosmetology Schools (AACS), having been on the board since 2020. “They need to build their muscle memory of how a successful business thrives so they can face up to challenges in a positive and constructive way. That includes general housekeeping and learning the importance of hygiene.”
Students of another Michigan-based cosmetology school were awarded $2.8 million in a 10-year lawsuit which focused on unpaid labor, including laundry.
Clean, smartly folded Scrummi towels deliver on hygiene as well as convenience. There is full training, supported by SBCo, laid out on the MiLady Cima system, and they are allocated two towels per cosmetology service and a set of three for facials and treatments. The transition happens seamlessly because these students have no emotional ties to cotton towels, and see only benefits. And they are not the only ones.
During their last audit, NACCAS inspectors were intrigued by the Scrummi towels and how much more sanitary they are.
Introduction to Scrummi Salon Towels
“They actually requested samples to take away to show to their colleagues,” says Stacy.
The Scrummi towelling system has now been rolled out to the second L’Esprit campus at Canton with equal success, with the towels delivered regularly on subscription. Its laundry room is now as quiet as the one at SouthField with only aprons and capes making the drums roll, while the students are totally smashing it with the next gen towel system. Now, every morning Holly takes a couple of seconds to relish her new simple pleasure of taking her coat off before she starts the day.
