Sheet happens: This Greek start-up is turning old hotel bedding into staff uniforms

Working in hotels gave 33-year-old entrepreneur Emma Efmorfidi a close-up view of the hospitality industry’s waste problem. After seeing first-hand “how many towels and sheets are thrown away”, she says that she began to ponder how worn-out materials might be given another life. “I thought, ‘What happens to a sheet when it’s no longer white enough, soft enough or spotless enough for a five-star hotel room?’” A few years later, that question became the starting point for This Was a Sheet, the Athens-based company that she founded in 2023 with her husband, environmental engineer Odysseas Ioannidis.

The firm works with more than 120 hotels in Greece, as well as select laundry companies, to turn discarded hotel linen into staff uniforms, slippers and laundry bags. “This Was a Sheet” is printed on the back of the uniforms so the clothes convey the message. “When guests read it, they often ask about the initiative,” says Efmorfidi, whose team of eight works in a small atelier in the north-Athens suburb of Kifissia, cutting, sewing and dying materials before turning them into made-to-order uniforms and other hospitality products. “It’s not just a footnote on the hotel website’s sustainability section and hotel owners appreciate that.”

Some hotels send their unwanted linen directly to This Was a Sheet, while the rest are sourced through laundry companies. The cutting, sewing and dyeing process, performed by a team of eight, takes three to four weeks and no two pieces are identical. “Different material compositions absorb dyes differently, meaning colours vary,” says Efmorfidi.

Making luxury hotels comfortable with that imperfection has been a big challenge. “We’re not competing with perfect uniforms,” she says. “We’re connecting two polluting worlds: hospitality and fashion.”
thiswasasheet.com