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Sustainability
Weaving new threads: How Lindström is reframing circular workwear in Asia
Lindström found that expanding its business to Asia required overcoming cultural barriers as much as building new services and infrastructure while adapting itself to local needs.
When Anupam Chakrabarty joined Lindström’s leadership team in Asia, he stepped into a role that went far beyond business development. For the Finnish family-owned textile rental company with roots dating back to 1848, growth in Asia wasn’t just about market share, but about changing mindsets.
Headquartered in Helsinki, Lindström provides circular textile services in 24 countries, offering rental and maintenance of workwear, mats, and hygiene textiles to sectors from healthcare to hospitality. At the heart of its model is a simple but transformative idea: lease, don’t own. By extending the life of textiles through centralized laundering, repair, and reuse, Lindström champions a circular economy model that dramatically reduces waste and water consumption.
This model has found a strong footing in Europe. But Chakrabarty faced a different reality in Asia, where ownership often signals trust, hygiene standards are deeply personal, and sustainability is still emerging as a procurement priority. “Our model challenges long-standing perceptions,” he explains. “We’re not just offering a service, we’re asking people to rethink what textiles mean.”
The question was clear: how do you take a sustainability solution that works in Helsinki and make it resonate in Hyderabad, Hanoi, or Harbin?
For Lindström, the challenge wasn’t scaling a product. It was stitching together a new narrative – one that wove global ambition with local relevance.
The challenge: Building circular momentum in a linear landscape
For Chakrabarty, expanding Lindström’s circular model into Asia, a region that is home to approximately 60% of the world’s population, isn’t simply a matter of entering new markets; it’s a multidimensional transformation challenge. What works in Europe, where customers are familiar with textile leasing and infrastructure is built to support it, doesn’t automatically translate in a region where ownership norms, regulatory frameworks, and operational realities vary dramatically.
The most visible barrier is perception. “Many businesses in Asia still prefer ownership over rental, and this deeply rooted mindset can slow adoption,” he says. Particularly in industries like healthcare and hospitality, where hygiene and quality expectations run high, skepticism around shared textiles can be difficult to shift. For circularity to take hold, Lindström must not only prove the model works but it must also reframe what value looks like for both procurement leaders and end users.
But perception is only part of the challenge. In many regions, basic infrastructure such as collection routes, laundry systems, or water recovery technologies simply doesn’t exist at the scale required. Lindström is often building operational foundations as it grows, shouldering upfront investments while local teams educate clients and regulators about an entirely new way of doing business.
That educational component extends into policy. “We work closely with regulators, chambers of commerce, pollution bureaus, and so on to make them understand the role of circularity,” says Chakrabarty. In some countries, there is no legal precedent for rental-based textile services. In others, sustainability regulation is still in its infancy. Lindström must engage governments as partners, not just to gain permission, but to help shape future standards that enable sustainable models to thrive.
Internally, the stakes are no less high. As the company expands across Asia, Lindström’s teams must localize offerings, balance long-term investment with near-term results, and adapt quickly to customer needs that may differ sharply from those in Europe. Circularity may be at the heart of the company’s identity, but delivering it at scale across highly diverse markets requires a different kind of agility.
Each of these layers reinforces the others. The challenge is not just convincing clients to rent textiles, it’s about showing governments how to support circularity, building the infrastructure to enable it, and equipping teams to deliver on a promise that feels both global and deeply local.
“Partnerships are another essential thread in this strategy.”
The solution: Weaving global principles into local realities
Lindström’s expansion into Asia is about designing a circular economy model that resonates across vastly different cultural, economic, and infrastructural contexts. “We can’t copy-paste what worked in Europe,” says Chakrabarty. “We have to build something that belongs here.” That conviction underpins a deeply adaptive strategy, one that reshapes Lindström’s global model thread by thread, in close dialogue with local realities.
This starts with redefining what value means in markets where cost and ownership often dominate procurement decisions. In a region where shared textiles can still raise questions about hygiene, Chakrabarty and his teams focus on trust, not transactions. “Before we talk about sustainability, we talk about reliability,” he explains. That means investing in education, demonstrating consistent service quality, and allowing clients to experience circularity through pilots and tailored programs, not just presentations.
Lindström’s “glocal” approach (a conflation of local and global strategies) isn’t just a business model; it’s a system of co-creation. Local teams are empowered to assess customer expectations, shape service offerings, and inform regional investment decisions. In markets like India and China, this has meant co-designing rental solutions with healthcare clients and hospitality groups, aligning with industry-specific compliance needs, and making the invisible benefits of leasing tangible: reduced waste, fewer procurement headaches, and cleaner supply chains.
Partnerships are another essential thread in this strategy. Lindström actively engages with government authorities and local regulators, not just to comply with standards, but to help shape them. When provincial leaders or governmental authorities from different parts of Asia, like Jiaxing, Tianjin, and Suzhou, China, or Chennai, India, visit Lindström’s operations to explore circularity at scale, it marks more than a policy conversation; it signals that a new textile paradigm is gaining traction. “If we want the market to change, we have to be part of building the environment that makes that possible,” Chakrabarty reflects.
Technology plays a crucial supporting role. Radio-frequency identification (RFID)-tagged garments and digital dashboards allow clients to monitor textile usage, track washing cycles, and optimize stock. In a landscape where sustainability must also be smart, this data-driven visibility builds credibility and helps shift the narrative from cost to long-term value. In water-stressed areas, Lindström’s closed-loop water treatment systems reduce consumption by up to 56%, offering both environmental and operational returns.
But none of this is simple. The investments are high. The behavioral shifts take time. And the infrastructure challenges – from transport to waste collection – can’t be solved by any single company. That’s why Chakrabarty frames each market entry not as a sales push, but as a long-term relationship. “We’re not asking customers to change overnight,” he says. “We’re inviting them to shape the future with us.”
This relational approach is what makes Lindström’s approach stand out. It’s not about exporting sustainability. It’s about embedding it. Seam by seam, conversation by conversation, Lindström is weaving a new narrative for circular textiles in Asia; one rooted in partnership, patience, and the belief that business, done differently, can change habits as well as markets.
Key takeaways
Lindström’s expansion into Asia reveals what it takes to build sustainable systems in markets where circularity is still unfamiliar terrain. For leaders navigating similar frontiers, here are five takeaways from Chakrabarty’s journey:
Start with culture
Price is important, but trust is foundational. Before sustainability can scale, customers need to believe in the model. Educate, demonstrate, and build credibility and long-term value will follow.
Translate your strategy, don’t transplant it
What works in one market won’t work everywhere. Adapt global goals to local realities. Empower local teams to shape offerings that resonate with regional needs and expectations.
Make technology a trust-builder
Tools like RFID tracking and water recycling don’t just improve operations; they provide customers with transparency. Visibility into impact turns sustainability from an abstract ideal into a measurable advantage.
Understand and engage your ecosystem
Engage regulators, policymakers, and city leaders early. Shaping the ecosystem around your business is long-term capacity building for a sustainable future.
Think in decades, act in weeks
Behavioral change doesn’t happen overnight. But every pilot, every customer conversation, every tailored solution adds a stitch. Progress is incremental, but over time, it weaves systems that last.
At the same time, infrastructure will be a priority.
What’s next?
As Lindström’s circular model gains traction in Asia, Chakrabarty knows the real work is just beginning. Early success has proven the potential, but scaling it across diverse markets requires more than replication. It calls for continued adaptation, deeper listening, and long-term trust-building.
In the coming years, the focus will shift from proving the model to embedding it locally, culturally, and operationally. That means equipping country teams not just to deliver services, but to lead change. “Our teams on the ground are not just selling workwear,” Chakrabarty reflects. “They’re building a new kind of customer relationship, one based on shared responsibility.”
Pilot programs will continue to play a key role. Rather than making the case for sustainability with words alone, Lindström will increasingly rely on lived examples of real clients, real savings, and real impact. These tangible cases, Chakrabarty believes, are the most powerful way to move hearts as well as numbers.
At the same time, infrastructure will be a priority. With investments in water reuse systems and digital tracking underway, Lindström is laying the groundwork for long-term operational resilience. But infrastructure, Chakrabarty insists, is only part of the equation. “You can install the right systems, but without shared belief in the value, it won’t stick,” he says.
That belief is growing. With each partnership, each city visit, each tailored solution, the model becomes more embedded and less foreign. What started as a European export is beginning to feel like a regional movement, shaped by local voices and defined by mutual ambition.
This case series was developed as part of a research project supported by Capgemini Invent.
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