In an industry steeped in tradition and resistant to change, Flooring OS has emerged as a bold innovator, shaking up flooring business management with a cloud-based software solution that prioritizes user experience, modern technology and customer-first principles.
The platform’s journey began in 2013 with an unexpected leap into flooring when parent company Isogent, an IT firm, was tasked with migrating a partnered software to the cloud. When that company then transitioned to new ownership and ended the partnership, Isogent found opportunity rather than hardship. “Some of their clients called us and said, ‘We’re really worried that they’re going in a direction that we don’t necessarily want to go. Will you help us?’ And we saw an industry with minimal investment in innovation and thought, ‘We can do better.’ So we answered the call,” explained Justin Wirpel, CEO.
A needs-based approach
Unlike traditional flooring software, Flooring OS was designed with input from flooring dealers themselves and incorporates best practices and real-world solutions to common pain points. “The first thing I ask dealers is, ‘What are your problems?’ Because people don’t switch without pain,” Wirpel shared. “Then we built it. The result is a platform that’s as easy to use as Gmail and as powerful as dealers need it to be. It’s modern, it’s intuitive, it’s affordable.”
Flooring dealers like Ryan Kochel, president of Floor360 in Madison, Wis., attest to the collaborative environment of Flooring OS and the potential benefits of the new software. “I came from the tech world—and I started looking around at where we were having internal problems and just found a lot of holes [in our software],” Kochel explained. “Then Justin approached me—who I’ve known a long time—and said, ‘Hey, we’re looking to develop software, and we want you to be a part of this conversation.’ So I met with the development team and told them what we needed. They were able to show me a model-type product very quickly and then started to build that out. So they’ve just been a great partner to work with, and I think, quite frankly, the way they’re developing the software is going to dramatically speed up many, many functions that we do daily—the speed [will be] almost instantaneous.”
Cloud-based does it better
A unique aspect of Flooring OS is its native cloud-based platform, which is built to be intuitive and easy to use. For example, this format unifies the experience for every user. “It’s all the same, everywhere, all the time,” Wirpel explained. “So the in-store experience is the same as the at-home experience is the same as a digital experience.”
The platform’s agility also allows for changes to be made quickly when the need arises—a novel concept in software programming. “When you have an antique software and a user says, ‘Hey, we need this feature,’ that company will listen but not deliver. One of the reasons the resistance is so high is because it’s old software. You have to update a database, you have to update the software, you have to update the client software that’s running because it’s not in a browser. It has to work with all the other code you have in there. It can take eight months to make a change. We can do that in two weeks.”
Matt Cunningham, owner, Cunningham Flooring America in Oklahoma, the first brick-and-mortar retail location to take on Flooring OS, agreed, noting the company’s unique approach to development. “As we started working with Flooring OS, we learned how easy it is to get ahold of people, how quick answers come, their willingness to listen to ideas and take input and not just respond with, ‘Oh yeah, that’s something we’ll write down and talk about sometime later.’ They would come to me and say, ‘OK, here’s the updates or changes we’ve made based on the list of things we talked about last week.”
The cost equation
Cost is a conversation that has grown in intensity within the retail community of late. However, cost, according to Wirpel, is a pillar in the company’s customer-first approach. “A common thing I hear is, ‘We’ve had our fees increased 25% a year for six years, and we haven’t had our features increased at nearly the same rate.’ And that doesn’t sound like a customer-first approach, that sounds like an investor-first approach. We’re not a charity, but everything we do has to deliver for our customers. And that drives our decisions.”
Cunningham noted, in fact, that the software’s affordability was its first draw. “When [our previous software provider was purchased] and started their price increases, we started looking for alternatives,” he explained. “We got word that Isogent had a project going on, and we got on board pretty early. The cost savings are very significant, a roughly 75% discount from what we were paying. But as we started working with them, [we realized there were even more benefits.]”
