At Ease Restrooms

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Madhusudan Lohia, Director, Merino Industries Limited gives an insight on the company’s restroom business and its strategy to make India better by means of toilets with strengthening their foray into the public toilet business.

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What is it all about?

Merino is in the domain of public toilets i.e. we place partition systems that go into public toilets which allow easy maintenance, health & hygiene, comfort and security. It’s one of the fastest growing verticals we have in Merino. Our endeavor is to ensure these systems are age friendly, gender friendly and that it provide sensitivity towards the same. These systems ensure we remain highly maintenance free and the amount of time, money, energy you need to spend is much easier where you get to make more toilets using the partition systems.

These systems can be placed in any toilet which would involve more than one person at a time. So far, the biggest proponent of business has come through commercial spaces – offices and malls and industry segments such as airports, stadiums, transport hubs and high traffic areas.

Features

The material that we use is an easy to maintain material which is seamless, so there are no fungal or microbial issues. It takes up much lesser space which makes a lot of sense to the developers and users. We ourselves make the core material – Laminate. These laminates are large and are all high performance. Normally these have to be changed every 10 years, but we are in this business since 2004 and have hardly changed it.

[box type=”shadow” ]We are a part of Swachh Bharat campaign which is being led vociferously by the PM that we need to make India with better toilets which is a fundamental right of every Indian whether it is on the private side or in the public side. Whatever we can do we would like to be involved in it, specially keeping in the mind the diversity that we have. [/box]

Women Centric Toilets

At the moment, Merino is focusing on women centric toilets and age centric toilets, because these are things that are not spoken about much. There are times in a woman’s life which brings about changes – periods, pregnancy, age, etc.

For example: a mother with a one year old child wants to use a restroom in a mall, where will she leave the child? Sometimes the cubicle is not clean. So, the challenge is if the restroom is available, is it useable for everyone? Some women don’t drink water when they travel because they don’t want to use the restroom. So, we want to be a part of that to help change that.