A LUXURY bedding company has swapped its usual output of sheets and towels in favour of sets of scrubs for frontline workers during the coronavirus pandemic.

Richard Haworth Ltd is based in Stoneclough, Kearsley, and usually produces bedding and towels for the hospitality industry.

However, the firm was received numerous enquiries about producing scrubs, and teamed with a drop in demand within the hospitality industry, it turned its hand to producing medical garments instead.

With a huge mill in Kearsley, social distancing is not a problem for workers either.

Richard Haworth managing director Raj Ruia said: "We’ve just been inundated with enquiries from hospitals and care providers. Normally we’re a supplier of bedding and linens for the hospitality industry. But we’ve had enquiries from existing customers and new customers.

“The hemming factory in Kearsley typically makes table linen and bedding but we’ve moved over to scrubs now. We had to make the decision to furlough some staff but we kept a core team to do this.

“We’re making around 400 scrubs a week, which is a couple of thousand a month. It’s a safe place for the staff who come into work, it’s large mill of 240,000 square feet.

"We have around 12 to 14 people working there now, so it’s not too difficult to make sure everyone is two metres apart. None of the staff are sharing machines and we’ve got cleaning stations to make sure everything is safe.

“People have been very collaborative too. Our competitors have been giving us samples which are very helpful and another supplier gave us some patterns, obviously producing pillow cases is very different to making garments.

“We’ll also be supplying sheets and towels to some of the Nightingale hospitals. We’re not taking any profit from this at all.

“We will be deciding in a couple of weeks if we will bring more staff to the factory to increase our production.

“The staff have been very committed to it, they’ve put their hearts and souls into this. It’s been all hands to the deck. We discovered that one staff member had made scrubs before so they’ve been helping us. We feel part of the effort to help.”