Article Number : 1316 |
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| Date | 9/7/2006 10:56:08 AM |
| Written By | LGM & Associates Technical Flooring Services |
| View this article at: | //floorbiz.com/BizResources/NPViewArticle.asp?ArticleID=1316 |
| Abstract | Question: What does Floor Covering News have in common with the Carpet One Floor & Home? A month ago I’d have been hard pressed to come up with any semblance of an intelligent answer, aside from the good looks of upper-level management (present company excluded!)... |
| Article | Question: What does Floor Covering News have in common with the Carpet One Floor & Home? A month ago I’d have been hard pressed to come up with any semblance of an intelligent answer, aside from the good looks of upper-level management (present company excluded!). But as I was flying back to New York from CCA’s Global Summit, I realized the group and this magazine have at least one thing in common: the ability to identify the need to adapt to the times. As for FCNews, this issue marks the largest redesign in the magazine’s 20-year history. Why does one redesign a publication? Well, it would be easy to say we wanted to do something bold for our 20th anniversary. (By the way, you’ll never believe our next issue—the official 20th anniversary edition with the Sept. 18/25 cover date. The magazine is twice the size of any single issue FCNews has ever published and is one you will never want to toss.) But more so than that, we are responding to changes in the industry, changes in the world itself. People want fresh, people want color, people want clean. We think we’ve responded. You’re also going to see a litany of new features going forward. (Would love your feedback—fcnews@optonline.net for those scoring at home.) Carpet One is also changing with the times. Management for the last 20 years has provided membership with the requisite tools to excel. No more so than today. Trust me. First there was buying power. Then there were proprietary brands. I could go on and on, but what the group did a couple of weeks ago with the revamped carpetone.com is huge. Members have been pretty much forced to watch as a portion of their business evaporated over the years thanks to the likes of shop-at-home giant Empire Today and Internet retailers such as ifloor.com. In fact, it is estimated that Empire’s flooring empire surpasses $500 million now that it does business in 30 major markets. That makes it the largest flooring retailer this side of Home Depot and Lowe’s. Some say Empire feasts on minorities and elderly people physically challenged to shop for flooring. But busy couples who prefer the convenience of shopping from home make up a chunk of Empire’s customer base. Carpetone.com will soon have a component to allow consumers to log on to the site with the option to request the nearest Carpet One retailer come on over with samples she has already found online. And you can bet she will have a greater selection than she’ll get from Empire, and the credit terms will be better. The new carpetone.com also allows the consumer to shop online, just like she would at ifloor, fastfloors, etc. But Carpet One has an edge. Research reveals 77% of consumers in the market for floor covering are likely to search options online, but only 27% are likely to purchase from an Internet-only source. Consumers also prefer multichannel retailers over pure brick-and-mortar. Eighty percent said they would purchase from an online source that also had a brick-and-mortar store. When the site is fully operational, Carpet One retailers will have been given the greatest tool of ’em all: the ability to compete with two important growing channels. |