How well do your customers know their wholesale bath towels?

Educate customers about wholesale bath towels for best-value buying

If you ask someone why they like their favorite bath towel, they may mention things like its softness, thickness, beautiful border details, superior absorbency, or the fact that it was “a nice towel for the price.” Each of those elements evolves from a unique combination of processes that determines what quality category a bath towel belongs in — good, better, or best. Are your customers familiar with all of the factors contributing to their wholesale bath towels—raw materials, quality, design, and cost?

Wholesale bath towel buyers for varying establishments like hotels, gyms, hospitals, nursing homes, prisons, and retail operations have very different expectations and budgets for each place. Take a moment to learn about these production techniques so you can help your customers find the best value for their needs.

How will you ship your bath towels?

Before your customer can choose a towel style, they must consider how they want to receive their products as it impacts the initial cost and in-house labor charges once received. There are two choices: shipping in big bales or shipping in cardboard cartons, and there are pros and cons to each option.

Shipping in bales requires compressing the towels but accommodates a large volume of product in shipping and warehouse storage. Bales are less expensive to produce and create less packing waste than cartons. However, the towels must be laundered, pressed, and folded when they arrive. Bales take up less warehouse space but require special machinery to unload from the container and additional laundering equipment and space. Carton shipping is more expensive, but towels arrive guest-ready. One person can unload boxes and prepare the product for delivery. While that saves time and additional labor, additional space is required to stack boxes and prep the outgoing products. Buyers must decide which options and their attached costs work best for their business.

Towel construction considerations

Just as shipping methods have costs and consequences, so do towel construction methods. All towel construction begins with raw materials. If you think yarn is simple, think again! Ring-spun or open-end, single or double, and 100% cotton or a cotton/poly blend are some of the yarn choices manufacturers make when choosing yarn for towels. Consider these scenarios when deciding between good, better, and best quality towels.

Who buys the best bath towels?

Buyers for posh hotels seek to procure the best wholesale bath towels for their clientele— a thick, plush, super-white towel with an attractive decorative border likely constructed with 100% cotton, double ring-spun yarn. Ring-spun yarn, made from high-quality, long-staple cotton fibers, is uniformly twisted on spindles to achieve a tight core. This process serves three purposes—it makes the yarn softer, it appears whiter due to the tight twist, and it has greater tensile strength than its counterpart, open-end yarn. The terms single and double refer to the process of twisting two strands of yarn together for a “double yarn,” making it even softer, optically whiter, and stronger. By contrast, open-end yarn from fibers may be shorter or slightly frayed, therefore not as sought after for higher quality weaving like the longer staple cotton fibers used in high-end wovens. To learn more about cotton production for the textile industry visit one of our recent blog posts here.

Color considerations

Retail stores may need a range of different qualities and price points and a selection of colors. Wholesale color towels must be made with cotton yarns to ensure consistent yarn dyeing (polyester takes dyes at a different temperature and rate so it’s hard to match poly and cotton colors). Retail buyers are also likely to want decorative finishes or border designs. Border design choices are referred to in the towel world as cam, a simple flat woven border, and dobby, and made with more sophisticated tooling to create textured and creative border patterns. Towels with fancy dobby design borders cost a bit more and usually fall into the best category.

Hospitals, nursing homes, swim clubs, etc., prefer wholesale bath towels constructed of single open-end yarn with a simple cam border. This type of towel will satisfy a clientele that does not expect high-end quality yet needs a product that looks good, clean, and will hold up to regular laundering and wear. On the good-better-best spectrum, these are the better towels.

A lighter weight bath towel constructed with single open-end cotton/poly blend yarn and a simple cam border in whites or colors that will mask slight discoloration from extended use are perfect for gyms, camps, or prisons, and the like. This type of construction is less expensive to produce and replace after too much wear. Many good bath towels are manufactured this way.

Intelligent planning for your wholesale bath towel purchase

Taking a look into the motivation behind your buyer’s request is the first step in educating them on the processes that can ultimately provide them with the best value. To learn more about towel manufacturing processes, take a moment to review some more blog posts by the textile experts at Monarch Brands.

Is there a difference between wholesale white towels?

Why is design important for commodities such as white towels?

Understanding how cotton is produced for the textile industry

Why is towel construction important?