Lions Floor has taken another big step toward building its national supply chain infrastructure with the recent grand opening of a new, state-of-the-art distribution center in Houston. The sprawling, 33,000-square-foot facility, located in close proximity to the George W. Bush Airport, currently houses 80,000 square feet of each color in the company’s expansive SPC offering—culminating in roughly 3.5 million square feet of finished materials.
“Our Houston warehouse has officially launched after a soft opening at the end of June,” said Jerry Guo, president. “The newly established warehouse is stocked deep. In addition to flooring products, we have moldings, transitions and moisture barriers. Sample boards and strap sets are sufficiently stocked as well.”
More importantly, Lions Floor has provisions in place to service customers in the Houston market—a critical region for the company’s growing line of high-quality, exclusive SPC products. According to Guo, the company is taking a two-pronged approach to deliver materials to customers. The first entails the use of its own trucking fleet, which will cover a 150- mile radius. Lions Floor will also utilize third-party logistics providers to pick up and deliver materials to retailers—“all at a simple flat fee charge to retailers,” Guo said.
Beyond the immediate vicinity, Guo said the Houston distribution center will cover Southern Texas and Louisiana. He also announced the hiring of three full-time reps to cover San Antonio, Austin and New Orleans. The company also has plans to open a warehouse and distribution center in Dallas to cover that city as well as northern part of the state and surrounding areas. Projected timeframe for the opening of the Dallas facility is Q2 2023. “This will be our central hub for the South and the Midwest states,” Guo explained.
To ensure customer orders are handled quickly and efficiently, Lions Floor has developed an online customer portal where users can log into a secure system to check the status of their orders, obtain delivery information and follow up on any pending claims. Customers will also be able to pull real-time sales reports of top-selling Lions Floor products. “These features will empower our dealers to work in a timely and productive manner,” Guo stated.
Tailored for Texas
Some suppliers take a “one-size-fits-all” approach in their product development and marketing efforts. Lions Floor is not one of those companies. As it seeks to further differentiate itself in a sea of sameness, the company has introduced new SPC lines specifically geared toward the Texas market.
The custom collections, which are packaged under the Lone Star Spirit XL collection, boast versatile and refined exotic wood-like designs with the latest EIR technology and extra length profile measuring 6 feet long x 9 inches wide and 1⁄2 inch thickness. The line also includes an entry-level tier featuring eight colors in a 6-foot long x 7-inch-wide format with a 5.5mm wear layer.
“The styles are very similar to our popular Indoor Delight collection, but the colors are made in proportion to the Texas demand—in other words, more rustic, more barnwood and more country looks,” Guo explained. “We previewed these colors at Surfaces, and we have received very good feedback on the colors.”
In creating the looks, Lions Floor works with its sister company in China. There, artists take digital camera images of genuine hardwood planks to form the color films that will be utilized to mass reproduce the lines. Those films, according to Guo, are then handpicked by its own designers and shipped back to the U.S.-based Lions Floor design team to see which ones are more viable for the market.
The company files for design/pattern copyrights in both China and the U.S. Not only are the new SPC designs exclusive to Lions Floor, according to Guo, they were also created to provide consumers with fewer repeat patterns in a box. This results in a more realistic and natural visual, especially when it comes to hardwood replications. “We have dedicated two different color films for every single color, making it possible to make eight to 10 repeats [compared to the typical 20 repeats],” Guo explained. “We are creating a look that’s closer to engineered hardwood so customers can have the beauty of wood flooring but in SPC, which offers ease of installation and maintenance.”
All Lions Floor SPC products are tested in U.S.-based laboratories for compliance with industry standards. Furthermore, all products are made from 100% ecological ingredients and are FloorScore, CARB-2 and Greenguard Gold certified.
Future plans
Lions Floor continues to invest heavily in its distribution infrastructure as sales of its products continue to balloon. According to Guo, sales in the first half of 2022 are up 20% over the same period last year. Given how things are trending, Guo anticipates growth approaching 100% when all is said and done in 2022.
In anticipation of this expected growth, Lions Floor will continue expanding its footprint around the country while partnering with different distribution centers in select markets. The company already has a strong presence in its backyard in Southern California, and it is also looking to establish a facility in Arizona by the end of 2022. The company also secured coverage in the central region of the country via Mozaik Surface Concepts, which covers Utah, Idaho, Montana, Colorado and parts of Nevada.
“We have seen tremendous sales growth among our distributors,” Guo said.
