The New Generation of Plastic-free Luxury Hotel Amenities

At the beginning of 2017, a close friend who manages a lovely property in Italy, asked us to help him find an alternative to the boring guest toiletries he would find untouched on his bathroom shelves. "No wonder!", we thought. Who wants to use hair-tangling shampoos, ineffective conditioners, and soaps full of harmful ingredients anymore?  We immediately got to work and after 14 months of studying the ideal formula, we came up with  the perfect mix of highest-performance and healthiest ingredients, wrapped in beautifully modern and cool over-sized tubes.

But despite the amazingly positive feedback our amenities received by his and many other guests, we still felt that something was wrong. On a summer evening, while looking at our photo shoot of a trip to Tibet, where we had the chance to see the making of a sand mandala, we suddenly understood what the problem was. Packaging. Plastic packaging.

 

Mandalas are Tibetan-buddhist drawings made with sand. A team of monks  needs several weeks to complete the intricate pattern and shortly after the Mandala is destroyed, symbolizing the impermanence and ephemerality of life and the world. The sand is brushed into a jar, then wrapped in silk and transported to a river, where it is released back into nature.​

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How does this story have anything to do with hotel amenities, you ask?

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Hotel amenities traditionally come in single-use plastic containers. They take weeks to be produced and use up loads of energy and plastic,  only to sit in a shower for a night and be thrown away the next day. A custom in the hotel sector, but highly harmful due to the fact that the container, if placed in nature - be it a landfill or a river - unlike sand mandalas, remains there for hundreds of years, polluting the environment and putting the life of animals, plants and humans in danger. So there we have the problem, whose overcoming -while keeping the same high quality of the product- has become our main goal.

 

Our team at Mandal was born in 2018 with the goal of changing the rules of the hotel amenity game.

Join our revolution :) 

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