Innovation

Lindström provides textiles such as workwear for businesses across the world. Their innovation is their circular business model of textiles as a service. Rather than selling textiles, they rent, wash, and repair them, ensuring the products remain in use as long as possible. Producing less means cost savings, which is good for profit and the environment.

Over several decades, Lindström has optimized their rental service and created a digital platform, eLindström. Through the platform, customers can choose workwear according to their specific needs. Lindström seeks to provide simple models that can be used widely and thus promote re-usability. Products are designed for sustainability. For example, garments include replaceable sleeves so that the whole garment does not need to be renewed when only a part needs to be fixed. The quality of the garments is checked during the cleaning process and minor repairs are done quickly and easily. New garments are produced according to demand, not stocked just in case, which would easily lead to overproduction. Used garments that can no longer be repaired and reused are recycled to make fabric for new garments.

Inspiration

Lindström has been investing in and maintaining their circular business model for several decades. About ten years ago, the company started developing a digital platform for renting garments to companies. According to Lindströms’s Sustainability Director Ulla Luhtasela, there were two main drivers for the innovation: financial benefits and sustainability.

Sustainability and care for the environment have always been core values within the company. Additionally, there existed a strong financial driver that played an important role in deciding to create a circular economy model. With offering textiles as a service, financial resources are saved including with lower fabric costs and decreased warehousing costs.

Furthermore, customers nowadays are looking for sustainable alternatives and demand sustainable operations from companies. Thus, Lindström offers a sustainable alternative in the workwear industry. This customer demand further incentivized Lindström to create their circular workwear model and provided a financial boost when they realized it.

Additionally, the repair and care service of Lindström lengthens the life of the textiles, which is positive for both the perspectives of sustainability and finance (Luhtasela, personal communication, 2nd of October).

Overall impact

Sustainability is embedded in the circular economy business model, so it is a real win-win for business and the environment. Producing less means cost savings are combined with environmental savings, which is the opposite of classic linear business models. Where as in linear textile companies the incentive is placed on the quantity of textiles, Lindström focuses on offering quality and durability to their customers. The company designs for sustainability, produces fewer products, and invests in repairing and recycling the damaged ones. They are also investing in improving the current workwear models and creating new models with circularity in mind.

 Making efforts in the extremely polluting textile industry can be described as notable based on its size and emissions. Furthermore, when compared to other sustainability-related start-ups and small businesses, Lindström’s long history and company size show that this is a good business case. It is scalable and has a big impact across the world.

Business benefit

As stated by Luhtasela (personal communication, 2nd of October) there appear to be multiple advantages in maintaining a circular business model. With the help of the business model, Lindström decreases the number of new textiles produced. This is due to the use of premade parts and spare parts and is further strengthened by fact that Lindström retains ownership of the products and intervenes when necessary. Continuous investments and research into innovation and product knowledge help to improve the circularity and sustainability of the business model.

Another factor that plays a role is that now the customers do not need to make large orders to cope with possible calculated damage to their workwear. This helps prevent overproduction and saves warehouse space.

The platform and implementation of the rental service workwear were a financial success for Lindström. First, we can look at the production process. The continuous growth in efficiency and the rental service demonstrates that Lindström can meet demands whilst only needing to produce 66% of the number of garments as would be necessary without the eLindström platform. The company is one of the biggest players in this market and their quality is unmatched (Ulla Luhtasela, personal communication, 2nd of October).

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Social and environmental benefit

Lindström's rental model provides several social and environmental benefits. An important social benefit is that Lindström actively promotes sustainable consumption and innovation with the help of their workwear rental platform. They offer a range of sustainable solutions for their customers while promoting the environmentally positive effects of choosing their service (Ulla Luhtasela, personal communication, 2nd of October).

According to Ulla, the company wants to inspire other organizations to take responsibility and bravely develop their strategies. This is done by spreading awareness about the textile industry, the emissions associated with it, and setting internal requirements. Examples of such awareness activities are that Lindström requires its producers to make certain sustainability efforts themselves before they are able to sell fabrics to Lindström. Another example of sustainability efforts is their investments in developing fabrics from textile waste (Luhtasela, personal communication, 2nd of October).

Everyone within the Lindström family is involved in creating sustainable change. Lindström starts its sustainable process with requiring high sustainability standards from fabric producers before they can sell fabric to Lindström.

Interview

Ulla Luhtasela, Sustainability Director