Steven Feldman

By Steven Feldman
The annual NAFCD meeting has always been one of my favorite events. You never know who you will run into, you never know what you’ll hear. Some true, some not so. Within a five-minute period, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR) had purchased 75% of Tarkett. Not true. KKR had purchased 50% of Tarkett. Semi-true. Armstrong was buying Beaulieu. Not true. It’s the same every year.

Anyway, walking around the Marketplace on Day 2, I ran into John Himes of Mannington, one of the brightest wood minds this side of the Far East. Except I quickly learned Himes is no longer with Mannington. The Wood Flooring International badge gave it away. Himes is its brand-spanking-new president. Been so for less than a month.

What was Wood Flooring International, or WFI as it is commonly referred, doing at NAFCD? “Before coming out to NAFCD, we made a map of the U.S., figured out where our holes were and who we were targeting,” Himes said. “We’ve talked with every distributor we targeted and set up follow-up meetings.”

I have to admit I didn’t know much about WFI. Now I know a bit more. It has five arms with a philosophy of targeted programs:

1. Wood Flooring International is the company and brand under which it services North America through exclusive distributors, who in turn offer their dealers various residential collections that include solids, unfinished, solid prefinished, handscraped, multi-layer formats, etc.

2. Wood Floor Resource Group calls on the A&D community with a separate staff that tells the environmental story.

3. Eco Flooring is the subset of eco-friendly products. Specialty-dealers offer this selection to environmentally-conscious customers.

4. Cool Flooring offers cabin grades and first-quality discontinued lines of wood flooring through an innovative e-commerce solution. It allows for both wholesale purchase and resale as well as hosted retail sales with commissions back to the entire distribution/dealer channel.

5. Wood Floor Exchange may be the most interesting piece of the pie. It connects WFI’s quality-controlled global sources to North American distributors by acting as their buying agent for overseas sourced container volume purchases. To find the actual current market cost of a product, a distributor simply chooses the species, grade and width it wants. ZIP code is entered and immediately he sees the lowest delivered cost for that product. WFI’s cut of every deal is 7%.

Here’s betting you hear a lot more from WFI going forward.