While some flooring companies aim to be many different things to many different retailers—providing a breadth of product categories from wood to resilient to ceramic—Lux Flooring’s focus is singular: SPC luxury vinyl flooring. A bicoastal importer since 2015, Lux has focused only on this rigid core subsegment of the resilient category because, according to Jesse Woodrow, chief operations officer, this positions the company to stand out in what has become an increasingly crowded space.
Over the last several years, SPC has been driving the overall growth of the flooring industry—FCNews research shows that rigid core/SPC garnered 45.6% of total resilient sales in 2021 and 34.8% of volume. And with such a meteoric rise, the category has attracted subpar players, offering shoddy, commodity-driven product that does not meet high quality, performance and/or environmental standards.
That’s where Lux looks to differentiate itself. All of the company’s SPC offerings comprise 22-mil virgin stone vs. recycled stone, including a new line of embossed-in-registered SPC luxury vinyl. “We believe we have a superior product because of our choice to use virgin stone,” Woodrow stated. “When retailers explain to a potential buyer about the benefits of buying hardwood, you might hear them use the expression, ‘A tree has no repeats.’ I wanted to get as close to that as we could with our new EIR line.”
Additionally, Lux added Diamond Dust to its SPC’s layer coating, which adds to the durability, sustainability and dependability of the product’s wear layer. “A 22-mil wear layer with Diamond Dust sets us apart from everybody else,” Woodrow noted, adding that Lux’s products are backed by a lifetime residential limited warranty, coupled with a 15-year commercial warranty.
Retailers that carry the line attest to both the product’s attributes as well as the ease of doing business with Lux. “Lux Flooring is one of the best lines for the price, the colors and the quality,” said Jimmy Poulos, founder and owner of Flooring 101, based in Oxnard, Calif. “I’ve never had one complaint regarding the quality of the product.”
But it’s more than that. “They’re good people and they sell good merchandise,” he added. “They deliver on time, they do what they say. I’ve been doing business for a long time and that’s very important.”
Chris Drake, manager for Wally’s Carpet & Tile, which has two retail locations in southern California, agreed, noting that Lux Flooring has quickly become the retailer’s No. 1 supplier. “Our installers love it,” he said. “We did a substantial amount of business with Lux last year—about a quarter of a million dollars. Their product is always acceptable. Never had a back order.”
Indeed, Lux Flooring is making sure that its supply of SPC will continue to meet demand. Originally based in New Jersey, Lux opened a West Coast branch with a 25,000-square-foot warehouse in City of Industry, Calif., with a long-term goal to be a national importer with a presence across the continental United States. In support of that objective, the company acquired another 25,000 square feet of warehouse space in the Los Angeles area in December last year to be able to handle the dramatic influx in business. And with a warehouse in Lakewood, N.J., to service customers east of the Mississippi, there are also plans to open another location in Dallas, Texas, this year, according to Woodrow.
Dedicated to specialty retail
Another fact that Lux Flooring’s retailers appreciate is the company only sells direct to retail—which, in some cases, includes exclusive distribution deals for specific territories. “Integrity is everything,” Woodrow noted. “We do not sell direct to the public or to contractors. Our policy is you must have a brick-and-mortar retail store open to the public in order to open an account with us. As our competitors violate the wholesale moral ground, Lux succeeds and earns the trust of our client base by not falling prey to non-integral business practice.”
Enrique Garcia-Puga, administrative assistant at Gonzalez Carpet Supplies in Phoenix, Ariz., has been working with Lux Flooring since July 2021. With Lux he has found price stability in what is often an unpredictable SPC market. “Having to import SPC products since the COVID-19 outbreak has been challenging because prices change from one day to the next,” he explained. “We decided to go with a third-party supplier, and Lux was recommended to us as a trusted company. Lux offers a clean-cut, straight-forward deal, and they have proven to be both reliable and consistent.”
Woodrow said Lux’s “extremely aggressive” pricing gives the company’s partners a great advantage over competitors. “We believe in engineered integrity,” he said. “We are going to engineer the product to be exactly what we say it is as well as doing exactly what we told you we would do.”
The key, according to Woodrow, is “relationship over revenue.” It’s that business strategy he says will carry Lux Flooring soundly into the future. “When you have integrity, the business will come,” he explained. “You may cheat, steal and win for a season but integrity will win for a lifetime.”
