Success that enthralls

Austria-based Proxima GmbH has only been in the textile cleaning business for two years. The relatively young company, which Managing Director Heinz Haberl describes as a "comparatively small laundry business" with a target daily laundry volume of 20 tons, has already been able to establish itself very successfully on the market thanks to careful selection of its customers and high-quality standards. 

Haberl himself looks back on 25 years of experience in the industry and is familiar with the problems that textile cleaning companies often face: "The level of the industry-standard prices per kilogram washed has been dropping progressively over the last 10 - 15 years, which plays a major role, especially when it comes to acquiring new customers. From the outset, Proxima had an agreement with the operator of about 30 retirement homes, whose textile cleaning we were allowed to take care of - from rental laundry, for example, in the form of towels, to residents' laundry, which corresponds to about 6,000 items per day." 

Another important pillar for Proxima are the customers from the high-end hospitality industry. Here, in line with the company's claim, a lot of emphasis is placed on quality, which also allows more economical prices to be realized. Half of the total turnover already comes from customers within the city and seasonal hotel industry, although at the present time retirement homes still account for a large proportion of Proxima's clienteles - a ratio that the managing director believes will be reversed in favor of the hospitality industry in the future.

"At the beginning, a relatively small steam boiler was the appropriate solution for us. On the one hand, the investment and operating costs were manageable, and on the other hand, the steam generator only supplied part of the equipment for the time being, so as not to be completely dependent on steam operation during the trial phase", explains Heinz Haberl. "Due to the nature of the industry, we cannot make any compromises when it comes to reliability, because as a service provider we are committed to our customers through fixed delivery agreements. From the delivery of dirty laundry to sorting, washing, ironing, drying, and dispatching, we have no leeway in terms of time. Since bridging with new laundry in the event of bottlenecks is out of the question because of the costs and logistics involved, we are very cautiously approaching new possibilities here."

At Proxima, the Steammaster CSMG100 operates in gas mode, as do some of the autonomous systems that are also available. These include, for example, the ironer responsible for the smoothing process, which Haberl says is one of the "core components" of the laundry operation. The performance and user-friendliness of the high-speed steam generator have so far been convincing in the Fürnitz operating halls.