🇳🇱 Our mission is to achieve local production. Last year, we started testing laundry sheets production in the Netherlands. In this blog series, we share how this journey has progressed. In September 2022, our first laundry sheet test line arrived. The technology and knowledge to make laundry sheets is currently only known in China.
With extended forklift forks and a fantastic landlord Jeroen, who helped us unload, we got all the machines safely on the ground! In this huge crate is the cutting machine to cut the long roll of laundry sheet into the small sheets you are used to.
Problems we encountered:
- No access to a forklift and extended forks
- No suitable space
You might recognise it, it felt like we had bought a bank that was too big. That was the moment we thought, what have we started 😅
Fortunately, we could rent an extra hall from Jeroen and store the machines there. Here you see a water filtration system, mixer, steamer, dryer, and cutting machine. The entire line cost about €50,000 excluding shipping, customs, and taxes. This is the smallest possible line to test our formulations and feasibility.
The next problem we faced was that everything is in Chinese and you don’t get an Ikea-style manual on how to make a laundry sheet 😬 Somewhere we hoped you could just plug it in, press a button, and a laundry sheet would come out.
Our electrician inspected all machines and applied safety measures. Our safety standards are higher than in China. Unfortunately, the steamer required a larger connection of 63 Amps. A cable as thick as a cucumber. We had to reroute electricity from various company halls so as not to shut down everyone when turning on the steamer.
Due to all these circumstances, we only really started production in May 2023. In the meantime, we sourced raw materials from Europe and tested our formulations in the lab.
Here is our first lab-grown laundry sheet. It doesn’t look great 😂 This is because the liquid laundry sheet was dried in a vacuum oven where we only had an oven rack available. Of course, we didn’t let that stop us haha. But - it did work as detergent! A milestone 🎉
Here we produced our first laundry sheet on the machine. Amazing to see the sheet so smooth, satisfying! 😁
In the next part, we will tell you more about the production process and everything involved.
In the video below, Jason explains what a full line looks like and what each machine does. This gives you a good idea of how it works.
