Trends in the restroom space are ever-changing, but one thing is always certain—people want a modern, well-kept restroom that meets their needs. BUILDINGS found these three trends on the show floor at the 2024 ISSA Show North America that can improve the restroom experience for your building occupants and make your team members’ lives easier.
1. Privacy
No matter the building type, restroom users hate gaps between stall doors and partitions, said Mark Wolinski, marketing manager for ASI Group. The industry is seeing an increase in requests for more private stalls.
“People want to be private. They don’t want gaps, and they don’t want people to see them and have that weird eye contact,” Wolinski explained. “We’ve seen that happen across the industry, where privacy has become more and more important.” ASI Group introduced European-style gapless doors to respond to this need, including phenolic and stainless steel options.
Sticking with the old-gapped doors can actually lead to a major source of wasted toilet paper, added Horacio Diaz, field service manager for Bobrick. “Any time you walk into a restroom and there’s toilet paper on the edge [of the door] or on the floor, it’s not because someone purposely did that,” Diaz said. “They put it on the edge of the door, and when someone opens the door, it falls on the floor.”
Bobrick offers five series of private restroom options, from traditional-style partitions that are gap-free to full-blown rooms, Diaz said.
2. Productivity for Staff Members
As the labor shortage in cleaning and maintenance continues, facility teams are looking for ways to increase the productivity of the staff members they do have. Manufacturers are responding with product solutions that are easier and faster to service.
GP PRO aims to take the guesswork out of restroom maintenance with dispensers that are more intuitive to maintain. Its Compact Quad Plus, for example, features a patented lock mechanism that senses when a roll of toilet paper is empty and pops the roll out toward the maintainer when they open the door, said Ronnie Phillips, senior director of restroom innovation for GP PRO.
“What we saw is that with a lot of maintainers, as rolls start to deplete and get smaller, they don’t want to come back to that dispenser as often, so they’re just taking them off and putting new ones on,” Phillips said. “It’s driving waste, it’s decreasing the productivity because they’re doing more work than they need to do, and it’s wasting money for the facility manager.” The maintainer simply needs to swap out the rolls that have popped out, close up the unit, and move on.
The company also introduced a solution to reduce battery changes for further savings. Its enMotion brand now features ECON Mode, which puts the paper towel dispensers to sleep after a period of inactivity. The dispensers will leave one paper towel hanging and wake back up when someone tears off the towel. “By doing that, we’ve taken our battery life from four years to five years,” Phillips said.
3. Easier Specification
Different spaces need different hand products. Some need soaps, while others need sanitizers. Tork showcased a line of dispensers that allow you to swap out different interchangeable refill products in the field, changing the products you offer as the needs of spaces change. Users can also change the dispensed amount in the field easily so that people are getting the right amount of product every time.
“The number one complaint in office settings comes from the restroom,” said Abby Scalise, Tork’s brand activation manager for North America. “To have those solutions that are adaptable to different customer needs is really important.”
