Hotel restaurant’s pop-up store lets diners wear what they eat

Marlow Goods has launched a pop-up store at the Wythe Hotel in Brooklyn, which turns meat byproducts from the venue's restaurant into leather clothes and bags for guests.

The hospitality industry is a hotbed of resource waste and unsustainable practices. Bedsheets need washing every night, lights are left on 24/7 for guests coming and going, and leftover food can't be reused and has to be thrown away. In the past, hotel chains such as UK Marriott have aimed to recycle resources by turning its used bedsheets into the Bed Linen Tote as a memento for customers. Now Marlow Goods has launched a pop-up store at the Wythe Hotel in Brooklyn, which turns meat byproducts from the venue's restaurant into leather clothes and bags for guests.

Husband and wife Andrew Tarlow and Kate Huling already own an impressive interconnected portfolio of food and fashion brands — Tarlow runs the hip Brooklyn eateries Diner and Roman’s, cocktail bar Achilles Heel and the She Wolf Bakery, while Huling uses the leather and wool salvaged from the slaughterhouse for her Marlow Goods brand.

Now the pair are joining forces in the same location — the Wythe Hotel in Brooklyn. Tarlow heads up the food and drink at the Reynard restaurant inside the hotel. Until 31 December, Marlow Goods will be selling bags and clothes made from the alpaca fur, sheep wool and leather that's taken from the animals served in the hotel's restaurant. This means that no part of the animals served at Reynard go to waste, while also serving as a profit-maker for the hotel.

The pop-up store is an example of how brands can interact to ensure that resources typically thrown away by businesses that can't use them can be picked by another enterprise than can. Is there a way to help businesses who otherwise aren't interconnected to work together to cut waste?