Butters Innovation Wins Innovation Category at LCR Culture and Creativity Awards 2025

The world’s first scalable mattress cleaning machine was designed by Butters Innovation for FRC Group in Liverpool, and has just won a Liverpool City Region Culture and Creativity Award. FRC Group is a charity, and their mission is to alleviate furniture poverty by ensuring households on low income can be provided with beds, appliances, and furniture. Already, the machine has prevented thousands of mattresses being sent to landfill by a multi-stage cleaning process called Ultraclean.

Jonathan Butters helped FRC Group apply for grant funding and his team designed the machine and worked with a number of subcontractors to install it at FRC’s Speke factory. The first machine, named Mattilda, is fully connected to the internet so that it can be monitored during use.

Jonathan said…… “The project is a great example of collaborative, user-focused design. I’m an engineer who also went to art  school (can't you tell!!), so my creative background gave me the skills to work with lots of different sorts of specialists and understand what a good innovative solution to the problem might be. Mattilda has also won a national recycling award and is poised to be rolled out across the country. It’s wonderful that a small company like Butters Innovation can have such a large impact on communities and the environment.”