Member Article

Flooring company makes £20,000 investment in store

A North East flooring company has invested a further £20,000 in its first store on the south coast.

Connection Flooring has returned to Havant to add a third brand, Flooring Superstore, to its 3,362 square foot store on the Solent Retail Park.

This means it can now offer shoppers and trade customers carpets and vinyl flooring, in addition to the existing range offered by its Direct Wood Flooring and Grass Direct brands.

The retailer is predicting that the addition of the new brand will result in a 30% growth in sales.

Benjamin Baker, Manager of the Havant store, said: “We only opened the store in September 2017, having started life as a purely online retailer, and it has been a major success.

“Adding our Flooring Superstore brand will mean people can now also buy carpet and vinyl, so we can meet all of our customers’ flooring needs under one roof.

“This is important because whereas carpet would, traditionally, be the main flooring people have in their homes, they are now more likely to have an equal balance, with wooden flooring increasingly being popular for areas of the home like the living room and kitchen.

“And it’s not just flooring habits that are changing inside people’s home; it’s outside too. That’s why we have 25 different ranges of artificial grass because there has been a big growth in this area as people opt for lower maintenance gardens.

“We predict that the investment in the new store will increase sales by 30% which will buck the trend in the flooring industry, with many retailers, including big companies like Carpetright, having to close stores recently.”

Connection Retail has a current annual turnover of £28 million, and this is predicted to rise to £35 million next year, reflecting the company’s investment in ‘bricks and mortar’ stores.

After starting as an online retailer in 2012, the company only began opening physical ‘bricks and mortar’ stores in 2017 and it now has eleven across the UK, including four new stores that have opened in 2018.

Connection Retail Managing Director Dan Foskett said: “It’s an exciting time for the company as we shift from being purely e-commerce to building our physical presence throughout 2019.

“Our success has been based on having a wide range of high-quality flooring products, as well as being able to maintain online pricing in our stores.

“The goal is to become leading player in the UK retail flooring industry.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Neil Shaefer .