Best Practices: Thornton Flooring + Design Center – June 2025

By Jessica Chevalier

What started as five rolls of flooring in a garage bay is now a $50 million business with three locations across South Dakota. Thornton Flooring + Design Center, founded by Richard (Dick) and Dawn Thornton in 1982 and now run by their son Matt, is today a diversified business divided evenly between the commercial, builder and retail markets, with a focus on leaving a positive impact.

GENERATIONAL ENTERPRISE
In the early 1980s, Dick worked in a packing plant and, looking for additional income, applied for a job cutting carpet. From there, he learned installation and began doing apartment work. One of his customers said that if Dick sold product, they would purchase from him, so, in 1982, he invested in three rolls of carpet and two rolls of vinyl and turned one of his garage stalls into a storefront.

By 1983, the operation had outgrown the Thorntons’ Sioux Falls garage, so Dick and Dawn bought a stand-alone location. By 1987, Thornton Flooring needed more space, so it purchased a warehouse in Tea, South Dakota. And, in 1990, a showroom was added to the Tea location.

In the early years of the business, Dick would hold an annual three-day sale at a local convention center. When Matt was 12, Dick told him that he could pocket the money from any vinyl or carpet remnants that he sold, which were usually 5’ to 6’ long pieces.

Directly beside the remnants were 30’ sections of mobile-home carpet. Matt figured that if he could edge his way into selling some of those, he could make $100 a pop rather than $10. He was successful, and customers reported to Dick and Dawn afterward, “I didn’t even need this flooring, but the kid was so cute that I couldn’t say ‘no’.”

In spite of this early success, Matt wasn’t inclined to join his parents’ business. In fact, during high school summers, he opted to work in fast food rather than work with his parents at Thornton Flooring.

However, after finishing college in 1997, where he earned degrees in biology, chemistry and psychology, Matt was working at the store part time and at a hospital part time. Intending to become an orthopedic surgeon, he had eight medical school interviews set up, to take place in seven days’ time, along the East Coast, but something shifted inside him.

“I canceled my interviews and told my dad that I wanted to join him in the business. He was ecstatic,” Matt recalls. Looking back, Matt explains that his mindset shift was due to weighing the unknowns of committing years of his life and a quarter million dollars to training for a career he didn’t know if he’d like versus the known quantity of working in the family business, where he could earn good money and knew that he enjoyed the work.

In 2026, Matt bought the business from his parents, who are now retired and spend winters in Palm Springs, California.

CULTURE
Thornton Flooring’s long-term model was a warehouse-style showroom. However, a little over a year ago, the company opened a third location in Rapid City, South Dakota that was much more upscale and inviting than the warehouse model.

A big part of Matt’s approach with the location is supporting culture. “Good culture means good people,” he says. “And then that attracts more good people. When we built the new building, I made it as nice and feature-rich as I could. The breakroom looks like a gourmet restaurant. We have a grill, firepit and turf putting green outside.

“We hosted lots of tours when it opened. One Shaw employee said, ‘Young people want to work at Google because it’s hip and cool. If everyone designed like you do, we would have young people coming to the flooring industry. You make flooring cool. Working at your store feels like you’re working at Google.’”

OFFERING
The product range at Thornton Flooring has expanded greatly. When Matt joined in 1997, it offered carpet, sheet vinyl and four styles of Bruce hardwood. Today, it offers all the standard flooring categories as well as epoxy coating for commercial jobs. Thornton’s has grown to become one of the largest flooring dealers in South Dakota, if not the largest.

True to its roots, Thornton Flooring remains invested in stocking, with Matt reporting that his operation is the largest stocking dealer in the Midwest. Currently, the operation has around 220 SKUs of residential carpet, 30 to 40 of commercial carpet (divided between broadloom and carpet tile), 200 SKUs of vinyl plank and 50 SKUs of hardwood.

This not only means product is readily available for purchase but also that Thornton can weather storms, such as the potential cost increases wrought by the tariffs, because it has deep inventory on shore.

One of the feathers in Thornton’s cap was a sign posted in Home Depot a few years ago, “We guarantee that we will meet any Thornton Flooring price,” which Matt believes was inadvertently a great advertisement for his business.

In addition to flooring, Thornton recently began offering quartz countertops from Cambria and MSI.

DESIGN TECH
Matt is committed to making his customers happy, no matter the cost. Included in his new showroom are interactive touchscreen TVs. These have numerous uses. First of all, they serve as a directory for customers. If a customer comes in seeking professional design help, Thornton’s sales associates direct them to the touchscreens, which feature the biographies and contact information for partnering interior designers. This is available for both residential and commercial clients.

These screens are included in selection suites throughout the space, where they can be connected to devices to act as large storyboards. Matt reports that the response to this set-up has been positive, with designers calling in to reserve suites.

As Thornton Flooring continues to grow into new markets, Matt plans to continue to roll out this format, tweaking it along the way to make improvements.

IMPACTING PEOPLE
Matt believes that scale has made training significantly easier, as there are specialists across the company who can take recruits under their wing and offer job-specific guidance. Last year, the business brought on a human resources director, who has focused on creating training manuals and other support tools.

That said, there remain challenges in finding good employees, and those have intensified since Covid. “Pre-Covid, you went from a warehouse employee costing $12/hour to now $21/hour, and it’s a guy who really doesn’t want to be here and is job shopping every day. I was recently cutting carpet with a 25-year-old guy who has been with us for a month. I asked, ‘How’s it going?’ He said, ‘It’s been fine, but how do I get to where you are at?’” Matt recalls with a laugh. “I told him, ‘I’ve been doing this for 30 years.’ After six weeks on the job, we hear many new hires say things like, ‘I don’t see a path to where I am going,’ so we are working to find ways to give them paths. They don’t understand there are 50 steps between cutting carpet and being the boss.”

Providing those paths is important to Matt, “I feel blessed to be where I am, but my biggest goal is caring for my employees and making them successful,” he says. “I personally want to have a positive impact on everyone that I touch, which isn’t necessarily giving everyone everything they want but not ruining anyone’s day, treating everyone with respect. At the end of the day, if we positively impact everyone we come in contact with, we will be better people.”

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