Every two weeks, FCNews seeks out flooring retailers across the country to offer their advice on hot topics of the day. This week, we asked: Has business gone the way you expected to this point?
Here are their responses:
“We expected business to soften, especially retail, but it’s not as bad as expected. We are finding demand for carpet picking up, but hard surface sales continue to be strong.”
—Raffi Sarmazian, Sarmazian Brothers Flooring Cambridge, Ontario, Canada”
“We have experienced growth in both our commercial and residential sectors. We’ve reinvested in our business, upgrading our displays to Retail 2.0, enhancing our showroom and expanding our team to strengthen our commercial offerings.”
—Ben Boss, Boss Carpet One Floor & Home Dixon, Ill.
“Business has been about what we were expecting it to be. We are basically flat for the year, but we did open a fourth location late last year and it seems to be a little ahead of schedule so far. We are pleased with the new location.”
—Brian McCarver, Brian’s Flooring & Design Birmingham, Ala.”
“This year has positively surprised us. We are up over last year, which was difficult to project based on the forecasting from the major flooring outlets.”
—Matt Wien, Marshall Flooring Mayfield Heights, Ohio
“It seems like there is always something to navigate these days. The whole LVP/Customs issue changed our stocking inventory position for the first half of the year. We managed to pivot to other products, but it was just one more issue to navigate that we weren’t expecting.”
—Susan Hadinger, Hadinger Flooring Naples, Fla.
