Roslyn, N.Y.—The 15th annual Award of Excellence competition, sponsored by Floor Covering News and the World Floor Covering Association (WFCA), is a way for manufacturers’ customers—retailers, distributors, designers, installers, specifies, etc.—to honor the companies they feel consistently provide the best service, professionalism of sales force, management responsiveness, value, design, B2B, handling of claims and ease of doing business. In other words, those manufacturers help them do the best job running successful, profitable business operations, whether it be a retail operation, distributorship, design centers or installation workrooms.
To receive an Award of Excellence, readers of FCNews, members of the WFCA and any other industry personnel visiting trade shows like Surfaces—not employed by a manufacturer—voted between October 2010 and the end of February for the companies they felt best met the previously mentioned criteria in the six individual floor covering categories as well as the Best Overall mill. For the second year, the competition also featured an award for Environmental Leadership.
Ballots were featured in full-page advertisements in FCNews (readers could mail or fax them back), as well as on our website and at trade shows such as Surfaces. The WFCA also emailed the ballot to its 3,500-plus members. There was close to 5,400 total votes cast this year.
This was the fifth year that individual category winners were selected in two groups based on their volume, to put companies on a more even playing field. FCNews recognizes some companies’ sales in certain categories are so huge, it does in one week what it takes other manufacturers to do in a year.
Rather than setting some arbitrary figure, FCNews and WFCA used common sense to determine the groupings. The idea was to give every company the same chance to walk away with an award.
Last year was the debut of a new honor as part of the Award of Excellence voting: the Environmental Leadership Award. Like the individual category and Best Overall honors the Environmental Leadership Award puts the focus on the entire company and what it does as a whole to stand out and be a leader in this growing and important movement.
While the category awards were done on a simple, one vote per category/company format, both the Best Overall and Environmental Leadership awards had write-ins for three votes of first, second and third. Votes were weighted so that a first place vote was worth five points, second place was three points and third place was one point. Point totals were added and the company with the most in each was named the winner.
And the winners are…
A total of 15 Awards of Excellence were handed out during the awards dinner.
The winners for were:
•Best Overall: Shaw Industries
•Environmental Leadership: Shaw Industries.
•Carpet, Group A: Mohawk Industries; Group B: Beaulieu of America
•Resilient, Group A: Armstrong World Industries Group B: Johnsonite
•Laminate, Group A: Quick•Step; Group B: Formica
•Ceramic, Group A: Dal-Tile; Group B: Crossville
•Hardwood, Group A: Armstrong; Group B (tie): Boa-Franc/Mirage, Lauzon and Mullican
•Area Rugs: Mohawk
To see more photos of the event, view our Flickr set.