How Hotel Waste Becomes Shelter Support (The Hidden Problem) | May Wang Part 2

Welcome to the Legacy All-Stars Podcast. We feature inspirational stories from people who dedicate themselves to helping others. Here is your host, Alan Pavlosky.

Welcome back to Legacy All-Stars. This is Alan Pavlosky, your host. This is part 2 of a special 2-part episode with Mei Wang, co-founder of Linens and Love. I hope you enjoy the show. Yeah. I want to shift into— look, you talked about maintaining the tech stack, being able to afford to provide this technology, and especially with a model that's more focused on contribute what you can for those shelters that do have a budget. How could people get involved in a meaningful way to actually support what you're doing and maybe help subsidize some of the costs that you're incurring in order to make this a reality?

Yeah. That's a really wonderful question, and I have reflected a little bit about this one. The first thing I want to share is that in any sort of, you know, if we're thinking about effectiveness and effective altruism and how we allocate resources and what they bring back, what we found is that through this method, in simply sustaining the technology and the human outreach of bringing in the supply and the service that we provide and the clients that we serve being shelters, We are able to get these high-quality duvets, blankets, sheets for about 33 cents per linen. And that's not something that you'd be able to find on Amazon wholesale or anything else there. So we do really want to find more levels of involvement for people to basically make this tech continue to be possible. And specifically in our nonprofit, I would say for the leaders and the investors who listen, getting involved in a meaningful way is not necessarily about surface-level CSR, but instead really about systemic stewardship. And this is where I really want to give like a shout out to a wonderful mentor who you and I both love and know, which is Stuart Greif. Love him. We love Stuart. And Stuart is, you know, for those listening, he has this executive leadership role, not just in the industry of travel and hospitality, but inhabits a role over at Forbes Travel Guide and oftentimes a role as this a person who is an unsolicited guru who gives me a lot of unsolicited dad jokes, but also deep wisdom.

Oh, dad jokes to spare, for sure.

Yeah. And he oftentimes will tell me— there's a quote that he had given me. He says, "May all of us too, right? You are the tree. You are not the soil." And he taught me that even the strongest mission truly cannot grow if it's not planted in the right environments with the right nutrients. I see so many things like Linens in Love is the tree. We can have the model, we can have the results, but to scale, you really do need a full forest of soil. And we're not looking for more linens because that's the thing is there's so many, you know, large-scale hotel groups that will reach out to say, hey, like, take these off our hands. We're not looking for more linens. We are looking for operational partners and systemic underwriters. I think about Stuart's own involvement. He is the blueprint for this. He doesn't just offer off-the-cuff advice. He uses his level of, you know, responsibility and his influence to open to open doors for people, to facilitate handshakes, like conversations like this one, and to just introduce so many other, you know, young leaders or female leaders or just leaders in general to other titans of that hospitality world. And I also love this other quote that he had once given me when I was feeling particularly naive and demoralized. And he had said, "Mae, like, systems will continue to prevail over goodness." Systems prevail over goodness unless you build enough consensus and the power to change them. And so I think a lot about, for people who are listening and asking, how can I get involved? It starts with using your professional, your nutrients, your soil, your network, the control over resources, the strategic vision to help rewrite that level of industry role. And I think for a lot of people who are thinking, okay, maybe I'm not necessarily working in hospitality right now, but I would love to contribute or figure out what I can do to think about tech for good. We are currently in this strategic window where technology like agentic AI, which you and I have spoken about briefly, but it has so much potential. So much potential to solve a lot of these logistic problems that yesterday's tools just could not, right? Building this DoorDash for Linens, the current iteration of it, has cut down on the coordination time from weeks to minutes. But if we had this level of funding for expansion, we would be able to do so much with not just the logistics bridge, but the level of outreach and partnerships work really just transforms industry waste into community asset. And my last Stewartism, which I loved, I loved looking down one of his most recent texts.

That never gets old for me because he's one of my really close friends.

Yeah. His was, he says, passion burns brightly, but purpose and meaning endures. And so what I think that we most also need is going to be partners who want to build something together that will outlive all of us.

Amazing. Yeah. All right. Well, this brings me to something that, you know, I was thinking about as you were talking and I wasn't listening with an agenda. I was just kind of dovetailing off something you said earlier. Yeah. And I was wondering if while you're scaling, if you've thought about ways to incorporate things other than linens into the mix, like there's waste of other kinds, like you talked about food waste. I know it's perishable and it's much more difficult, but have you thought about ways to connect some of these other waste products that are perfectly okay that could be utilized for shelters or people in need?

Certainly. There are actually several different layers. I think simply because of growing up in this hospitality industry, I can see there's layers of it. Yes, food waste, like post-convention. Conventions are places of great abundance, also great waste. There are a lot of local food rescue organizations that will partner with restaurants, catering companies, hotels themselves to capture this and redistribute it. And what's fortunate is oftentimes we worry and say, oh, what about the liability because of perishables? There is a lot of legislation in the works that really does set out to protect people from being good Samaritans too. The second layer of things I can think of would be soaps and toiletry kits. There are organizations, shout out to groups like Clean the World or SoapCycle, which is also, I think they operate in Singapore and Hong Kong, but they take these elements of used bar soaps. Oftentimes we just wash once or twice. SoapCycle will actually manually shave off these outer layers and reprocess these to be used in developing nations as, you know, soap so that people are not falling ill from hygiene-related reasons. So there's a lot of layers of what can be done. I particularly love linens because of the fact that, number one, they are not perishable. Number two, what's special about this is that the way that we receive them comes in this almost like perfect bridge. Because what's special is it's not just guest pours wine onto sheet and the sheet gets thrown away. It's that the sheet gets industrially washed, sometimes sent to commercial laundromats, not once but twice on high heat, high water. They are professionally treated with stain removal. They are like spot treated and cleaned. And only then, when every single piece has been exercised, every option to try to remove it just is not lifting that tiny little spot, it's time to go. So they pack them all really nicely into these boxes. They get filled up, the boxes stacked to fill the supply room. And when the supply room is finally just bursting, it's time to throw it all away. So what's elegant about this solution is that we don't need to have the overhead for manufacturing plants. We don't need to send and ship these boxes of blankets and towels to a central location to reprocess them. They arrive as is because they would have been amazingly clean, high-quality, boxed, prepared linen. That just die in a landfill. So that's the reason why I particularly love linens.

I mean, such a great environmental stewardship involved there as well. I mean, to prevent all that landfill waste is amazing. Tell me what success looks like over the next 3 to 5 years for you.

Oh, I would say there's so much. There's the, there's the reality of what I think it would look like, but then there's my pie in the sky. So I love this question a lot.

I'd love to know that.

So I would say within the next 3 to 5 years, first of all, I would love, I want to see Linens Love's platform to be this level of gradually accepted and understood and embraced industry standard for hospitality, you know, reverse logistics. I want it to be as operationally inevitable as paying taxes or having a budget line for Wi-Fi or ensuring that you separate your bottles and cans from you know, your standard trash where truly like every hotel's waste will never be outpacing local community needs. And to me, I think I want to see good baked into the operational component as an ethos. So success to me is collaborating with the head of a Fortune 500 COO, signing a lot of contracts that mandate a lot of this linen upcycling or donation programming as just a standard key performance indicator. We are building a model where doing good should be baked into the procurement guidelines and not necessarily as just an afterthought that is an optics component, but really just ethos. And the final component I would say is really important to me is financial independence for the organization. I understand that, yes, we're incorporated as a 501, but I stand firmly against the idea that social impact organizations need to operate by bleeding money. And being grant reliant for the rest of their lives. And instead, what I want to see for us is a self-sustaining process where we are genuinely solving problems for shelters, solving problems for hotels, reducing this friction, and at the same time supported by collaborative partnership with brands. And within 5 years, I see Linens in Love as this self-sustaining system where revenue models, and not just grant can fuel the growth across a consistent 500-hotel portfolio.

Man, took the words right out of my mouth. Cause my entrepreneurial brain's been running, running, running here. I kept thinking to myself, I wonder if there's an online retail option that could support the efforts that you were doing. Yeah. So I'd love to see what you come up with on that. And maybe we have to have another conversation about that once it's started to get some wings. One of the things that crossed my mind again was You know, go back to the question of some of the other organizations that are doing things, really good things to help offset some of this waste issue, some of this unnecessary landfill waste issue. Are you in communication with them? Are you cross-pollinating your ability to support each other in those efforts so that collectively the group of these people focusing on hospitality industry or the land waste that's being in restaurants, etc. Are you working with each other to help make the problem less impactful?

That's wonderful. I would say that right now the level of our partnerships focusing really is on a lot of hotels and shelters and being that bridge. So the outreach and the human component energy is going there. But I agree with you. I think that it is so like fascinating to be able to collaborate and think about who else is tackling this problem from this like bridge perspective. So the answer is yes, we have been able to explore initial conversations and partnerships. So right now I can't name any names yet, uh, but we are talking to some larger hospitality groups that also have a very more vertical level of operations and very fleshed out like logistics in addition to serving as primarily hospitality. And so we are thinking about tapping into the logistics component to use their current fleet and partner with like local companies and what else we can do with this. So for instance, we have also explored different partnerships with upcycling, not just donating them one-to-one, but working with different warehouses, especially since I'm based here in Los Angeles. So we have a fashion and warehouse district. And so there are—

Know it well.

—places that are interested. Yes. So we're exploring what can we do, right? The challenge of this is how can we predict reliably the supply of the category of waste that will come in? Because let's say we decide, oh, like we want to partner up with an upcycling company that can make dog beds for social impact. And these upcycled dog beds will donate also dog beds to local animal shelters. Well, how can we reliably predict and also sort through with the labor costs too of what we receive and what pieces need to be stitched together based on the pattern to make these things? I will say that this is a growing and exciting kind of level of like what we can do with innovation really to solve this challenge at scale because there really is such a large amount of supply. And ultimately the demand is quite niche of what they need to do with it, how much they can pull. So I've seen some different levels of what people have done. There is organizations that have reached out to say like, we can ship this abroad, we can ship this abroad to different nations that will bail them and resell them. But I feel conflicted about that because I haven't done enough research on how these will actually be used. Is it just out of sight, out of mind? Is it actually just kind of exporting the textile waste issue into a different place? Um, or will this actually genuinely be a spot of upcycling innovation, extending life?

Yeah, for that matter, you know, you talk about, you know, the model being more of a local to local, and that in and of itself is better for the environment than to have to ship things all over the world. Ultimately, the transportation cost is not just a cost of money, But the transportation cost is also a cost of waste and pollution and environmental issues that we can't really quantify completely. So I like that you, that your model, I'm particularly struck by the way your model focuses on connecting local to local, same reason I like to shop at the farmer's market, right? I like to source things as locally as I possibly can to contribute to that kind of thing. One of the things that I so much enjoy about working with people of younger generation in mind is that You know, a lot of people complain about younger generations, but I think that our younger generation is on the right path right now. I feel like the younger generations are more focused on making a difference and being purpose-driven rather than being outcome-driven. And, um, I'm really amazed by what I see with some of the people in younger generations. And we're not talking about age. It's not really an age thing. It's just about Yes, generationally there's differences, but it's amazing for me to see what kind of impact people in generations younger than me are having. So I really applaud that. I want to ask another question, and I ask this pretty much of everybody that comes on this show, and I want to know from you, what do you want your legacy to be on this planet? What do you want to leave behind?

Oh, What a beautiful question. I think there are so many things, and it's not just Linens in Love related, but I will start with Linens in Love because that's the easiest thing. Several layers. The first one really is just shifting an industry norm and proving that, you know, and I understand that we have to work within the constraints of capitalism, but I wonder, and I want to co-create, and it's something that you mentioned about the younger generation, is, is there a way and a future in which this concept of value maximization escapes simply top line and bottom line and also includes the element of value maximization in terms of, do we feel good about what we do regardless of what industry we're in? I understand the mechanics of business. I understand the entrepreneurial urge to maximize what we can do by solving a problem, providing a service, creating a good. I understand the importance of how hypercompetitive we are in a world where parting with money is something that requires a lot of thought and competitiveness to achieve. But I would love to see within my lifetime's legacy a constant, ever-increasing shift away from this feeling that somehow we are trapped by the constraints of capitalism determining what we can do. Because in doing so, it's almost like we are self-defeating. If that is the case, then we wouldn't be caring too much about carbon emissions because there's not really much money to be profited out of in doing so, or constraining or limiting our production. In doing so, we wouldn't necessarily think about social impact because that is a very non-lucrative industry to go into. So I want to start seeing a world like that. And I have a lot of optimism actually for younger generations. Because there's this level of almost disillusionment with the standard. And I think that's a beautiful thing. The second layer that I want to see is really also just building that in and how that will be. The question earlier of like what success looks like over 3 to 5 years, the legacy really looks like that is it's not even just about linens. It's about finding really clever ways where we change the entire mindset of how things operate. It would be things like I want to see, you know, the future coffee companies like Starbucks deciding, you know, we are wasting a lot in disposable cups. Are there ways for us to drive retention and create loyalty programs by bringing your own utensils and cups into the program? Are there ways to mitigate concerns of hygiene? Are there ways that people and reasons why they would want to inconvenience themselves? I want to see that every industry gets excited about this idea of just where do I currently spot inefficiency, waste? Where do I see that as opportunity, connection? And I think what's special about that is it is a way to kind of reconcile the tension that we have, the idea somehow that doing good is intrinsically going to be expensive or a loss leader or another expense line with no real return. I think that it's almost like I want to see a generation of COO brains with like the largest heart who can speak the language of both greed and love.

Yeah, I remember a previous mentor of mine that said, you know, money's good as long as the money you make is directly proportional to the benefits you provide others. And I think that's something that I see in the younger generation. I'm really excited to see where that goes. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we've come to the end of the show and I'm just really enthralled at what you're doing. What stands out to me most about your story is your ability to see what others overlook and act on it. And you've built a bridge between excess and need, shown that real impact often starts with awareness and the courage to act. May, thank you for joining us. Love having you on the show. I love that you're making a difference. For our audience, thank you for joining us on Legacy All-Stars. We try to talk to people that inspire you, and I hope this one did, because it sure did me. Share it with somebody that's committed to making a difference. Other people need to hear these messages. Remember, legacy isn't something we leave behind. It's something we build every single moment of every single day. Until next time, keep leading with purpose. I'm Alan Pavlosky signing off for Legacy All-Stars.