Steven Molewyk
Founder and Chief Operating Officer

When Towel Tracker founder Steven Molewyk was seven years old, he took apart his father’s lawn mower engine, in an ill-fated attempt to make it run on water. Although his experiment didn’t work, Molewyk successfully put the engine back together and got the lawn mower running again—a feat that developed his mechanical and problem solving abilities, while helping him avoid a huge punishment from his father. During his teen years, Molewyk honed his mechanical and problem solving abilities by rebuilding car engines and transmissions. This culminated in restoring a canary yellow 1965 Mustang, which he took on a road trip across the country and back.

Molewyk eventually channeled his skills into a successful career as a small business owner who purchased, rehabbed, and sold numerous houses and buildings in west Michigan. This included a vacant storefront property that Molewyk converted into a thriving commercial laundromat. One of the laundromat’s customers was a large fitness club whose manager griped to Molewyk about the 3,500 towels that club members were stealing each month. This towel theft was costing the fitness club about $50,000 a year, and Molewyk stated, “I remember thinking, ‘That’s a lot of towels getting stolen, there’s got to be a way to stop this from happening!’”

After mulling over the problem for a few days, Molewyk awoke from a nap one afternoon with a towel theft solution in his head. Leveraging his mechanical and problem solving abilities once again, Molewyk sketched out the idea and pulled together a team that helped him develop, prototype, patent, and launch the product that is now Towel Tracker. His father—whose lawn mower is in excellent working condition—was one of the first investors in the company.

In 2011, the Towel Tracker prototype was installed at the Walker Ice & Fitness Center in Walker, Michigan, where it immediately reduced towel loss, towel usage, and laundry costs, and resulted in a cleaner facility as well. Since then, Towel Tracker’s customer base has expanded to include hotels and resorts experiencing chronic poolside towel loss problems. Towel Trackers can now be found in hotels, resorts, and fitness clubs in 21 states plus Puerto Rico. This includes resorts at SeaWorld and on the Disney World property in Orlando.

Towel Tracker is headquartered in Molewyk’s hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Matthew Cheng
Chief Executive Officer

Matthew has been CEO of Towel Tracker since 2014. He spent the previous decade working as a Management Consultant Principal with A.T. Kearney Global Management consulting firm, where he specialized in financial and operational transformation consulting across the travel, consumer packaged goods, and aerospace industries. While at A.T. Kearney, he helped several iconic companies restructure pricing, reduce supply chain and general/administrative costs, and clarify the costs involved in serving different customer segments.

Matthew previously worked for General Motors, where he administered GM’s $8 billion annual capital budget. He also worked abroad in Shanghai GM’s Treasury department, where he developed funding requirements and business plans to expand GM’s footprint in Asia. Prior to these positions, Matthew worked as a Process Control Manager and Reliability Engineer at the Saturn automotive assembly plant in Wilmington, Delaware.

Matthew earned a masters degree in Finance and Business Administration from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Graduate School of Business, as well as a bachelors degree in Mechanical Engineering from General Motors Institute (now Kettering University). Matthew is also on the Royal Aloha Vacation Club’s Board of Directors. He and his wife Renee have five children, and in his free time, Matt enjoys traveling, playing ice hockey, and spending time with his family.