What Brazilian Towel Shoppers Can Teach Hotels About Softness

By Ana Carolina Nielson, founder of Casa da Toalha

Ask a hotel guest what they remember about a bathroom and the answer is rarely the price of the room. It is the towel. Was it soft? Did it feel generous? Our sales data from Brazil suggests that people think the same way at home.

At Casa da Toalha we sell towels and bed, table and bath linens online from Brusque, in the south of Brazil. This year we looked closely at 21,546 real orders placed in our store from January to July 2026, at two checkout surveys, and at twelve months of Google searches that reached our site. The findings say a lot about what people now expect from a towel, and they are useful for anyone who buys linen for guests.

Softness worries buyers more than price

At checkout we asked shoppers what their biggest doubt was before paying. Among 502 answers, 22.3% said quality: would the towel really be soft and absorbent, would it be what they expected. Only 2.2% said the price was too high. Shipping (16.1%) and not knowing the store (17.3%) also weighed more than price.

For hospitality, this is a familiar story. A guest will forgive a lot, but a thin or rough towel is noticed at once. The people paying for towels at home are telling us the same thing. Their fear is disappointment.

Shoppers now speak the language of the trade

GSM, grams per square metre, used to be a word for mills and hotel buyers. Not anymore. In twelve months, from August 2025 to July 2026, searches such as "towel GSM 500" and "what is the best GSM for a bath towel" (in Portuguese, gramatura) reached our store more than 20,000 times on Google.

The reference point people use is the hotel itself. Searches for "hotel towel" and "five star" towels added up to about 15,000 impressions in the same period. The hotel bathroom has become the benchmark for the home bathroom.

The whole bathroom, all at once

Brazilian shoppers rarely replace a single towel. Of every 100 reais spent on bath towels in our store, 89.70 went to kits or five piece sets, and only 9.70 to single towels. The average order was about 332 reais. People renew the bathroom as a set, much like a hotel renews a room.

Reputation closes the sale

In a smaller survey of 226 buyers, run over one week, 12.4% said what gave them confidence to pay was Reclame Aqui, Brazil's consumer reputation platform, and 7.1% said reviews and photos from other customers. Together, that is about one in five. Because the sample is small, we treat it as a signal and not as a firm result. Even so, it matches what hotels already know from guest reviews: people trust other people before they trust the seller.

November comes first

In our own measurement from October 2022 to July 2026, November was the peak month every year, four years in a row. The second wave comes in the Brazilian winter, from June to August. December to February is the quietest season. For suppliers and hotel buyers working with Brazil, the busy window for towels arrives before the holidays.

What this means for hospitality

Three lessons stand out. First, people now judge towels by feel and by weight, and many know the word GSM. Second, the hotel towel is the standard they compare against, so the towel in the room carries the hotel's name with it. Third, people buy and judge in sets, so consistency across the bathroom matters as much as any single piece.

None of this is new to good housekeeping teams. What is new is that shoppers are saying it out loud, in their searches and in their answers at checkout.

Methodology and limitations

The study covers 21,546 orders placed in the Casa da Toalha online store between 1 January and 31 July 2026; 46 months of transactions measured by web analytics, from October 2022 to July 2026; 12 months of Google Search Console data, from August 2025 to July 2026; and checkout surveys with 502 and 226 respondents, between June and August 2026. Sales figures were checked in two independent sources, with a difference below 2%.

Limitations: the data reflects the customers of a single store and is not a probability sample of Brazil. The survey with 226 answers covers one week and is treated as a signal. The search figures are impressions that reached one store, not the whole market. The data series starts in October 2022, so the earlier history of the company, founded in 2009, is not included.

The aggregated table is open under CC BY 4.0 (Casa da Toalha must be named as the source): https://www.casadatoalha.com.br/pages/estudo-toalha-2026

Ana Carolina Nielson is the founder of Casa da Toalha, a Brazilian online retailer of towels and bed, table and bath linens, based in Brusque, one of Brazil's textile regions. The store has sold online since 2009.