Tuesday Tips: Michelle Nix leads GROW Live event

Dalton—The World Floor Covering Association (WFCA) released a new “Tuesday Tips” this week. In the series, WFCA experts present short video tips for improving customer service and optimizing staff performance. In the end, it’s all about understanding the importance of doing 100 things just 1% better than your competition.

In this week’s Tuesday Tips, Michelle Nix, WFCA director of education, continues her GROW Live Event series with part two of “How to Use DiSC to Build a High-Performing Team.” The session explores how the DiSC behavioral model can help leaders better understand communication styles, recognize individual strengths and create a team culture where people work together more effectively.

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The downside to lowering prices to attract shoppers

In 2022, Six Flags made a bold—and controversial—move. Under CEO Selim Bassoul, the company raised ticket prices by 25%–34%. The immediate result? Attendance dropped sharply. Critics were quick to call it a mistake. But the deeper story is that even with fewer visitors, per-capita spending increased. That raises the question for flooring retailers: are your prices high enough?

For years, many business owners have operated under the assumption that lower prices drive higher sales. But Six Flags discovered that attracting price-sensitive customers often meant bringing in guests who spent just enough to get through the gate, but not enough inside the park to generate meaningful profits.

You could argue that The Walt Disney Company has followed a similar path. Higher ticket prices, premium add-ons and tiered experiences have reshaped their customer base. Whether you agree with it or not, the intent is clear: focus on customers who are willing—and able—to spend more once they’re in the door.

In flooring, too many retailers panic the moment a customer says, “You’re higher than your competitor.” Prices get slashed, margins shrink and suddenly the business is busy—but not as profitable. The real issue isn’t losing a price shopper; it’s building a model around them.

Consider the operational reality. A small job—say one carpeted bedroom or a couple of bathrooms—requires nearly the same coordination as a large installation. Your warehouse pulls materials, your installers schedule time, your team manages logistics, etc. Yet the revenue and profit from that smaller job are significantly lower. If your pipeline is filled with these low-margin projects, your business stays busy but financially strained.

Choose your competition

That leads to another critical question: are you competing with the right competitors?

Think about Macy’s vs. Walmart. Both sell clothing, but they serve very different customers. When Walmart introduced fashion-forward private labels at prices 20%–30% lower than similar styles at Macy’s, they weren’t just offering cheaper clothes—they were redefining value for a specific shopper. Many customers recognized the similarities and happily chose the lower-priced option. The Scoop brand in Walmart was inspired by “Devil Wears Prada,” and Free Assembly is similar to Free People only 30% lower in price. My hunch is Macy’s is having a rough time, which will only get rougher if they continue down this road.

Flooring retailers face the same crossroads. But raising prices isn’t about becoming expensive for the sake of it. It’s about aligning your pricing with the value you deliver and the customer you want to serve. Higher prices can filter out unprofitable work, reduce operational strain and create room for better customer experiences.

Of course, this shift requires discipline. You need to understand your margins, track profitability by job type and identify where your time and resources generate the best return. It also means training your team to sell value, not just defend price.

So the next time a customer says your price is too high, resist the urge to capitulate. Instead, ask yourself: Am I pricing for volume—or for profit.

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Lisbeth Calandrino has been promoting retail strategies for the last 20 years. To have her speak at your business or to schedule a consultation, contact her at lcalandrino@nycap.rr.com.

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Award of Excellence: A glimpse behind the winners

This is our annual issue that honors FCNews’ Award of Excellence winners. The recognition has become exceptionally meaningful for manufacturers and suppliers for three decades. Why? While other award programs tend to focus on a particular product introduction or marketing/ merchandising concept, the Awards of Excellence honor companies based on an array of criteria as voted on by their customers. It validates what every supplier strives to do on a daily basis.

The competition has grown over the years to include 28 categories. We try to let the companies compete in their appropriate sandboxes. For example, suppliers go up against companies of similar size as the larger company simply has more resources at their disposal.

With all this said, you’ll find the well-deserved winners starting on page 26. But I always like to use this space to reveal voting nuances in some of these categories. Why? Some companies won in a landslide. You should know how much they are considered the best of the best. And in some instances, a company proved victorious by the smallest of margins, while some performed much better than in prior years, which says they are on the right track. So let’s take a deep dive into some of the categories.

If you’re wondering which companies dominate the voting by the greatest margins, the answer is Versatrim (66%) in the Moldings category, Mohawk (62%) in the Laminate A category and Unilin (62%) in one of the two Technology categories. Versatrim has dominated its competition in each of the four years since we launched Moldings. Unilin is also undefeated since we broke out flooring solutions into its own category. Flooring solutions include technologies that are licensed to manufacturers. A structural change in the Laminate category this year allowed Mohawk to coast. No surprise given its dominate position in laminate.

This year we launched our newest category, Best Distributor, which saw All Surfaces edge Herregan by less than 10 votes. Each commanded 13%. The next batch of distributors were exceptionally close in the voting: UCX, William M. Bird and Big D Supplies. UCX’s recent rebranding has one wondering if it would have garnered more votes if it was listed as Haines/Belknap.

I can tell most voters take the A of E seriously and don’t just vote one company across the board. Case in point: In the Carpet A category, Mohawk defeated Shaw by a sizeable margin. However, when it came to the higher-end Carpet B category, Anderson Tuftex handled Karastan by more than 50 votes.

Two more notes about carpet: Tarkett Home has taken the Carpet C category four years in a row, and Stanton has won the Decorative category in all four years since its inception. Tarkett Home has increased its share of the vote from 29% four years ago to 37% this year. Bearing mention in this category is Southwind, which constantly gets 22% to 25% of the vote.

Speaking of Stanton, they returned to the Area Rug winner’s circle after a two-year hiatus. Over the last 10 years, Stanton and Karastan have alternated victories. I do want to call attention to Couristan here, which increased its number of votes more than threefold from 2025 to 2026. The company has made efforts to be more visible this year, even taking home a Best of Surfaces award, and it’s showing in the voting.

When it comes to resilient, COREtec has dominated Rigid Core A for 11 years, the same number of years Mannington has won for Resilient Sheet. Both seem impossible to knock off. Karndean has taken Rigid Core B eight years running. Another model of consistency, either Korlock or Art Select gets 20% of the vote every year. This year it was 28%. Who finishes second to Karndean these last few years? TRUCOR from Dixie. And in the C category, kudos goes to upstart Canopy. Two years ago it mustered only 10% of the vote; last year the number ballooned to 24%; this year it was 29%. The Dossches are obviously working hard to create a viable brand in their second go-round.

Something I found interesting occurred in the Rigid/Wood Hybrid category. Last year HF Design’s AquaProof defeated MSI’s Woodland Hills by 25 votes. This year, MSI turned the tables for its first-ever A of E victory, winning by 30 votes. That shows the collection is gaining traction with retailers.

Let’s talk about one exceptionally close category every year: Laminate B. Inhaus returned to the winner’s circle after a two-year hiatus, defeating the likes of Cali, Tarkett and Stanton with less than 12 votes separating all of them. Stanton is the company to watch here going forward, basically quadrupling its vote count from 2025 and nearly tripling its share of vote.

When it came to Hardwood, three of the four winners were repeaters: Mirage (ninth consecutive) again garnered 45% of the vote in the Canadian category, while Hallmark (fifth consecutive) in the Asian category and Kährs (fourth consecutive) in the European category are entrenching themselves as the cream of the crop in the minds of retailers.

This year we modified the Installation category to strictly Adhesives, and Taylor captured its first A of E awards by single digits over Bostik. Interestingly, three other manufacturers garnered double-digit share of the vote: Roberts, Sika and Bona.

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Dealers contend with tariff-led hikes on goods

Carpet and other floor coverings ranked highest in price increases among categories impacted by Trump’s tariffs

U.S. tariffs have significantly driven up retail prices, research shows, with carpet and other floor coverings topping the list.

That’s according to research from the Harvard Business School Pricing Lab, which revealed that U.S. tariffs have led to markedly higher prices, with imported goods rising roughly 5% to 6.6% on average and domestic goods increasing 2.5% to 3.5% above pre-tariff trends.

Of note, the category “carpets and other floor coverings” bore the largest increase—with prices surging by as much as 54.6% for imports. By contrast, prices for clothing and accessories rose by 21.9%; and coffee & tea increased by 12.8%. Least impacted were household appliances at 5.3%. To measure the impact of the 2025 tariffs, Harvard Business School constructed daily price indices using online data from five major U.S. retailers. These prices were collected on a daily basis by PriceStats. Harvard obtained detailed information on country of origin and tariff classifications for about 350,000 goods, sourced through UPC lookups or generative AI model. It used a simple unweighted matched-model approach to build the price indices, tracking the products over time and chaining geometric averages of daily price relatives within each group.

That carpet and other flooring products finished No. 1 on the list for price hikes came as little surprise to flooring dealers, who say they have felt the weight of the tariffs since the beginning. “There is no doubt we have felt an impact from the tariffs and the war,” said Pete Rubando, president of Giant Carpet One, Scranton, Pa. “We recognized this would be an issue early on and have maintained an aggressive promotional campaign stressing affordability. This has allowed us to maintain reasonably strong retail traffic, but the price increases have affected margins.”

For dealers like Home Carpet One’s Joel Schreier, the fear is that many of the importers will keep their pricing elevated now that the tariffs have largely been ruled to be illegal.

Several flooring retailers said tariffs have been hitting all products, which in turn has stifled business in some areas. “We certainly have seen costs and, correspondingly, our retail pricing go up significantly over the last 18 months,” said Joel Schreier, president of Home Carpet One in Chicago. “We aggressively purchased inventory of our best-selling imported carpets and imported tile before the vendors raised pricing, which has allowed us to keep our stock retail pricing more than competitive. In part, this has contributed to continued growth throughout this period. Now that the tariffs have largely been ruled to be illegal, my fear is that many of the importers will keep their pricing elevated, and I encourage all dealers to push back against this. We have seen a couple vendors back track already and a couple others trying to maintain those increases.”

In most instances, dealers have been able to navigate around the issue by raising prices or focusing on higher-end goods that continue to sell. “We’re just beginning to see price increases take hold on the carpet side, with most adjustments landing in the 5% range,” said Bruce Odette, president of Denver-based Carpet Exchange, with 17 locations. “So far, we’ve been able to use those pending increases as an opportunity to help customers move forward on quotes before higher pricing takes effect, which has softened the immediate impact. Because of that, it’s still too early to fully understand the long-term impact these increases may have on overall demand and buying behavior. At the same time, the broader issue continues to be rising energy costs. Surging gas prices are affecting nearly every part of the supply chain, from manufacturing to transportation, and that pressure continues to influence costs across all flooring categories.”

While many retailers report slower-than-normal activity, they say sales per square foot and margins continue to rise due to the continued cost of materials. “The consumer is asking for higher-quality goods in a smaller quantity for carpet meaning installation is highly skilled resulting in more pay for the labor as well as the better goods,” said Carlton Billingsley, owner of Floors and More, Benton, Ark. “For now, we will continue to see carpet volume decrease and sales per square foot increase.”

Tom Connell, owner of M&M Carpet Showroom in Houston, said it’s difficult to know the effect of increased prices to his business because his business has been up during this period of inflation. “We have seen periods where we receive multiple price increase notices in the same day or week from suppliers. From that standpoint, it has been much more challenging to keep up with and implement all the changes. It has also forced us to tighten the window that a proposal can be honored.”

While retail owners deal with the headache of fluctuating prices, most flooring consumers have managed to deal with it, according to Tom Heffner, owner of About All Floors, Douglassville, Pa. “I feel like the talk of tariffs has become noise for consumers and they’ve adjusted and accepted them,” he said. “Our retail, builder and commercial business this year has been strong. I suspect that gains in the S&P 500—and the continued rise of home values—have given homeowners/investors’ confidence to push forward with projects. We’re optimistic for the second half of 2026

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Next-level digital innovations raise the bar on visual designs

Hymmen’s Jupiter JPT-C print-to-board lines deliver intelligent and highly precise register accuracy.

Design technology is transforming flooring through advanced digital printing and other innovations. Direct digital printing and 3D technology allow manufacturers to create ultra-realistic visuals and textures that mimic natural wood or stone.

A leader in the digital printing space is Germany-based Hymmen, whose Jupiter JPT-C print-to-board lines deliver intelligent and highly precise register accuracy. This ensures the highest levels of color stability and print quality output while maintaining printing speeds of 25-50 meters per minute.

To expand its presence Hymmen entered into a technology partnership with i4F that includes exclusive licensing rights for all Hymmen digital-printing patents and technologies for flooring productions.

The new patents cover advanced functionalities that enhance the quality of digitally printed flooring products.

Another company that has relied on Hymmen’s digital printing technology is Classen—first for laminate production at its Baruth facility in Germany and later at Kaisersesch for the company’s proprietary Ceramin material, a PVC-free floor covering made from polypropylene.

At Classen’s dedicated design center in Kaisersesch, wall- and floorcovering designs are developed entirely digitally and seamlessly integrated into production. Wood, stone and fantasy motifs are processed in such a way that individual structures can be flexibly adapted, mirrored or rotated. This enables multiple variations to be generated from a single base pattern, efficiently and with optimal resource conservation.

Forbo Flooring Systems leverages advanced high-definition digital printing technology to offer custom, photorealistic and bespoke flooring solutions. This process allows for complex color gradients, large pattern repeats without repetition and highly intricate visuals on commercial vinyl and textile floors without compromising durability. Its new Flotex production facility in Pennsylvania uses digital printing to produce high-performance carpet (see Forbo story on page 1).

When it comes to surface innovation, there’s Daltile’s StepWise technology. Enhancing safety in wet areas is at the crux of StepWise. Because of its waterproof performance, bacteria resistance, low maintenance and versatile design options, tile is the best flooring product for wet areas. Daltile takes this capability in wet areas to an even higher level by featuring its proprietary StepWise technology in many of its best-selling products. StepWise is said to provide 50% more slip resistance than regular tile—making these Daltile products the ideal flooring choice for safety in bathrooms, kitchens and even outdoor areas.

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Portobello America introduces Cristallo collection

Baxter, Tenn.—Portobello America introduced Cristallo, a new porcelain collection inspired by luminous quartzite and the movement of light.

The collection translates fractured veining and crystalline depth into porcelain surfaces designed for contemporary interiors. Portobello America said Cristallo brings radiance, dimension and refined clarity to the built environment.

Cristallo explores how light moves across material. Layered graphics, expressive reliefs and carefully tuned finishes create surfaces that appear to hold light within the stone itself. The result offers a softer interpretation of quartzite.

Collection features multiple finishes and colors

Portobello America offers Cristallo in three finishes: Matte, Polished and Soft. Matte provides a calm, architectural look. Polished offers maximum clarity and luminosity. Soft delivers a satin, silky-touch finish with controlled sheen.

The collection also introduces Concavo, a sculpted relief made in the U.S. Portobello America said the relief transforms shadow into a design element and adds rhythm and dimension to walls.

Cristallo is available as a global collection in Bianco, Oro and Rose. Bianco offers luminous continuity. Oro brings warmer depth and golden movement. Rose is available as a special order in 48 x 48 inches.

The collection includes integrated mosaics, multiple relief expressions and a complete surface system approach. Portobello America said the line gives designers flexibility to create spaces defined by light, depth and architectural sophistication.

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J+J Flooring launches Color Wash collection

Dalton—J+J Flooring introduced Color Wash, a new carpet tile collection inspired by watercolor painting and artistic texture.

The company said the collection combines fluid beauty with nature-inspired movement to create interiors that feel calm and expressive.

“We wanted to interpret the subtle wash of color and movement within watercolor paintings with this collection; that very textural look that is hard to achieve with traditional tufted yarns,” said Laura Holzer, design director of commercial division. “Our technology and construction innovation has allowed us to do more patterning to achieve the desired effect.”

Collection features layered color and texture

Brushlight serves as the collection’s bolder expression. J+J Flooring said the style features large-scale, highly textured design with rich depth and color. The company added that the style creates a refined counterpart across a broader range of settings.

Color Wash launches with 13 colorways inspired by natural elements. The palette includes calming blues, warm rust tones, grays and greens. J+J Flooring said the collection also includes neutral shades inspired by mist, fog and rain.

J+J Flooring offers the collection in 18 x 36 tiles that coordinate across its flooring platform. This new collection also includes optional modular carpet backing options that provide PVC-free alternatives and support sustainability goals.

J+J Flooring engineered the collection for workplace, hospitality, education and healthcare environments. The company manufactures Color Wash products domestically.

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