Jan. 6/13, 2020: Volume 35, Issue 14
By Lindsay Gonzalez
Broadlume—the newly established parent company of Adhawk, FloorForce and FlooringStores—has added Creating Your Space to its suite of digital solutions for the flooring industry.
The company—named in part as a tribute to broadloom carpet and the heritage of the flooring industry—was created to help show the flooring industry what Adhawk, FloorForce, FlooringStores and now Creating Your Space are truly focused on—elevating the flooring retailer. That’s according to Todd Saunders, CEO of AdHawk, who explained that the “lume” of Broadlume is an acronym: Leverage data; Understand the consumer; Measure distribution; Elevate the retailer. “We really wanted to show that we are for the flooring industry, but specifically to help elevate retailers,” Saunders explained. “We have one customer and that customer is the independent retailer.”
The acquisition of Creating Your Space, Saunders noted, is in line with its goal of better servicing the flooring retailer. “Creating Your Space has a ton of experience in the flooring industry; industry veterans. They also have some really great customers who are loyal. We looked at their team and our team and together we believe we can transform the flooring industry.”
Creating Your Space’s team will remain on board, with Mike Vogel, president and CEO, and Jay Flynn, vice president, still leading the charge. According to Saunders, everything will stay the same with little to no impact felt by existing Creating Your Space customers. At the same time, Broadlume has hired Dimitar Alexandrov as its first chief product officer. In this role, Alexandrov—previously the vice president of product management at LendingTree— will be in charge of the company’s technology. “We are super excited to have him,” Saunders said.
With the acquisition of Creating Your Space, the Broadlume family of companies has more than 160 employees in offices from California to New York to Sarasota, Fla. This means greater engineering power, more product resources and more advertising resources for flooring retailers. “Although things will remain the same from a customer standpoint today, moving forward, we’ll be able to build much more product because we have way more people on the team and more minds now,”
Saunders explained. “We have executives from [the Creating Your Space] team and executives from our team all getting together to figure out how we can better the industry as a whole.”
In addition to more manpower, the creation of Broadlume and the acquisition of Creating Your Space opens up opportunity to integrate technology across multiple products. For instance, if you’re getting a lead from FlooringStores and you’re a part of Creating Your Space, that data will flow easily, as it will with FloorForce.
“The flooring industry has had a lot of software over time, but what happened is a lot of them have become antiquated and they’re not integrated together,” Saunders noted. “You have one software program over here, another over there and they don’t talk to each other. By having Broadlume as the parent company, although each of the companies will be separate, we’re going to be integrating the technology to make it easy for customers to use one product along with another product.”
