🤝 Meet Diana: the silent engine of laundry at Napking!

She doesn’t stand in the spotlight, but without her, everything grinds to a halt. Diana (51) works in Napking’s soiled sorting department and is the first link in the process there. “The laundry comes to me – exactly what is delivered dirty eventually comes back to the customer clean,” Diana explains. And that starts with carefully sorting, counting, checking, and sometimes saving linen before it is even washed.

Diana has been there from the very beginning. She first worked at Lamme, but when Napking got its own location, she went along immediately. Back then, she was on her own: sorting and packing. Things are quite different now. “We are now four people in soiled sorting and four in packing. That says something about how fast Napking has grown. And honestly, that feels good. We really form a strong team now.”

Her work is multifaceted. She scans the laundry, checks the labels, and inspects the contents of pockets and sleeves. What sort of things end up in the dirty laundry? “Everything. From lighters to paracetamol, from pens to cash. Sometimes as many as 30 to 50 pens in four days. If one pen snaps in a drum full of chef’s coats, everything is covered in ink. You can’t get that out.” That is precisely why she emphasizes how important it is for customers to deliver their laundry properly separated and checked. “At home, you also check your pockets before running a load of laundry. Customers should do that here too. It saves time and prevents a lot of damage.”

Yet she makes the best of it, day after day. “Actually, I like everything about my job,” she says with a laugh. “And the atmosphere on the work floor is fantastic. We are a close-knit group and look out for one another. Sometimes teasing someone a bit, sometimes seriously pitching in when something is wrong. That makes the work extra valuable.”

Diana finds it remarkable to see how Napking has grown so much in such a short time. “We started out somewhere in a corner at Lamme, and now we have our own location. We have many more customers, and it just keeps growing. The work is hard, but it is also important work. Without proper sorting, there is no correct delivery. It is that simple.”

And even if laundry is rejected—for example, due to a stain or damage—Diana is involved. She counts the returned linen, processes it in the system, and ensures that it is disposed of responsibly. “Anything that is truly no longer usable goes to sustainable processing via the Cibutex project. That way, nothing is simply left lying around or disappearing.”

Diana might not be the person you get on the phone or who serves at a table in a restaurant, but she is the one who ensures that your table linen is returned on time, clean, and complete. “Check your pockets. Separate the laundry. Then we do the rest.”