Innovation: The Big Three: The bulk of floorcovering innovations flow through three IP firms: I4F, Unilin and Välinge – April 2024

By Darius Helm

Innovation has always been the lifeblood of the flooring industry, and since the late 1990s, it’s been big business, too. The advent of locking systems transformed the laminate industry, and the firms that pioneered them helped create the intellectual property (IP) framework that has driven myriad innovations into the flooring market in the years since. All three IP firms are headquartered in Europe, where the laminate category was born. Välinge Innovation is based in southern Sweden, and both Unilin Technologies and I4F are headquartered in Belgium.

A CLICK HISTORY
Sweden’s Perstorp invented laminate flooring in 1977, but it took a couple of decades for the product, branded as Pergo, to really make its mark in the U.S. market. By 1996, it had just over a 1% share of the U.S. flooring market and was generating a lot of buzz as the new flooring category. That same year, at the Domotex flooring expo in Germany, a Swedish firm called Välinge Innovation introduced the first click system, 1G, which featured an aluminum strip, and soon after, Unilin launched its first version of Uniclic, which was also the first one-piece locking system in the industry. These innovations, which enabled the first glueless floating floor installations in the market, transformed the laminate category, propelling it from $160 million in sales to over $1 billion in just eight years.

It took less than a decade for click systems to be developed for engineered hardwood flooring, and then came click systems for flexible LVT-back then, it was just called LVT. By this time, Unilin and Välinge were expanding their locking system technologies for a variety of installation techniques, including for the growing DIY market. Unilin’s focus was on one-piece locking systems, while Välinge developed a one-piece systems and also continued to refine its two-piece systems, using flexible inserts to take flexion pressure away from the floorcovering itself to protect the product. According to the firm, it also made it easier to adapt its systems to other materials.

Then came 2013 and the first rigid core products-Coretec from US Floors-opening the floodgates. And by the end of that year, there was a new IP player in the market, Innovations 4 Flooring, known today as I4F, and its patented one-piece drop lock system quickly established the firm as a central player in the locking system arena for rigid core products.

In recent years, all three firms have developed locking systems for a range of installation patterns, including herringbone and chevron designs.

Today, the three together account for about 870 click system licensees globally, over 350 for Unilin, over 320 for Välinge and nearly 200 for I4F, which is now the marketshare leader in SPC click systems.

BEYOND THE CLICK
While locking systems were the original engines of growth for these three firms, they’re now heavily involved in all types of innovation in the flooring industry. When asked about how much innovation is channeled through the IP companies, John Rietveldt, founder and CEO of I4F, responds, “I would say nine out of ten comes from the innovation firms, sometimes in cooperation with an industrial partner.”

Floris Koopmans, IP sales director for Unilin Technologies, says, “Of course, there are a lot of innovations from manufacturers too, but they usually don’t ‘open up’ their innovations to the market. If they do, they do it via one of the licensing firms-they are really the pollinators of new innovation in our industry.”

In the years following the introduction of click systems to the market, Välinge developed a range of creative flooring solutions, including its wood powder technology, introduced in 2009, which ultimately led to its line of hardened wood, now sold under the Bjelin brand. It also came out with Hygienius, a treatment that includes titanium dioxide infused into the surface of the product to improve indoor air quality-Lauzon licenses the treatment, which it markets as Pure Genius. It developed the Threespine system for furniture assembly, and it extended its locking systems for floors to the walls with 5G Climb. And to reduce material usage in rigid LVT products, it came out with Liteback, a system for removing strips from the back of the product without reducing performance.

Unilin, which was acquired by Mohawk Industries in 2005, developed lacquered bevels and embossed-in-register technology several years ago. It also licenses Barberan direct digital printing and embossing technology, and a couple of years ago, it introduced Unicoat, a treatment that coats coreboards to prevent moisture penetration between joints and absorption by the board, and FlinTile, a grouting technology for rigid core products in tile and stone looks. And just this year, the firm launched a machine, ClickControl, that enables manufacturers to check the milling of their click profiles with a laser system, obviating the need to cut and visually examine boards, a costly and time-consuming process that also leads to material waste.

It’s worth noting that Valinge and I4F also offer systems for waterproof installation, with 5G Dry and iClick4U, respectively.

While I4F has only been in the business for a decade, it has quickly put together a range of innovations beyond locking systems, including last year’s introduction of CeraGrout, which enables the creation of grouted stone and tile designs on rigid core products through the inclusion of a colored wearlayer between the core and the décor film, which is then exposed in the profiling process for a realistic tile look. Also, the edge of the grout line is at the edge of the tile, hiding the line where the tiles join. Other licensed innovations include wall and ceiling technologies, a new outdoor decking installation system called ClikDek, Be-Lite SPC lightweighting technology, a bio-cork composite board, Hymmen direct digital printing and embossing technology, and patent-pending SRP technology, which is a PVC-free alternative to vinyl flooring products.

While I4F came late to the game, like the other two it has a rich background in flooring. I4F was founded by John Rietveldt, who was global president of Tarkett’s residential business from 2003 to 2006, while Välinge was founded by Darko Pervan, who prior to that worked with Perstorp as it developed the first laminate flooring. And Unilin itself was producing laminates (Quick-Step) and boards long before getting into the innovation of locking systems.

DEVELOPING SOLUTIONS
The fundamental role of these IP firms is to develop technologies, sometimes internally and sometimes through identifying technologies and bringing them into the fold, and to license these technologies to firms in the industry-and that means both supporting its licensees with its expertise and protecting against patent infringement.

Underpinning the operations of all three firms is their partnership with flooring and equipment manufacturers and other stakeholders in the flooring industry. Whether they’re developing an innovation for a target market, working with an independent innovator to craft and manifest their concepts or working with licensees to integrate new technologies into their manufacturing facilities, the success of their ventures relies heavily on their ability listen to their partners’ needs.

“Our biggest advantage is our network, our knowledge of the industry and our ability to play into that to convince people of new technologies,” says Koopmans. He adds that Unilin tends to develop innovations along two tracks: one track is the development of innovations for use on products sold by Mohawk Industries, which are subsequently opened up for licensing, and the other is innovating specifically for its independent licensing business. With its background in technological invention, the firm will often develop patents for key innovations and work with machinery producers, to develop and license technologies, often with other partners in the mix for the various components.

In terms of I4F’s focus, Rietveldt says, “On one side, we’re an innovation platform bringing together firms and on the other side our aim is to make transitional innovations and technologies that could potentially change the whole market, like our one-piece drop lock system.”

He adds, “Of course, we need to have licensing and watch if people are infringing, but the most important task is to make the flooring industry more attractive, because ultimately we all fight for the same dollar of the consumers, so we need to make sure they spend it on flooring.”

Laetitia Kimblad, director of Välinge’s floor locking business unit, says, “Innovators will reach out to us, or we’ll reach out to firms that have an interesting IP.” Kimblad also points out that there’s a lot of cross-licensing with the other IP firms, since new technologies are often incorporated into products that have existing patents licensed through a different IP firm.

Patents typically expire after 20 years, so it’s not like these innovators can sit on their hands and watch the licensing revenues flow in-they have to reinvent themselves in that 20-year cycle. Some of that comes from developing and licensing entirely new technologies, and some comes from improving existing products, like waterproof locking systems, or, as has been the case with the advent of rigid core flooring, adapting products for new types of floorcoverings. The range of WPC, SPC and, more recently, hybrids has helped drive a new wave of patents and licensing.

IP HIGHLIGHTS
Beyond its locking systems, I4F’s most prominent licensing technology is probably direct digital printing through the Hymmen Jupiter line, which has already been licensed to Engineered Floors and CFL in the U.S., HMTX in China, and Tarkett and Amorim in Europe. The Jupiter line, which is nearly 400 feet long, costs about $8 million. Rietveldt contends that in the next ten to 20 years digital printing will be ubiquitous in the flooring market. At Surfaces, Engineered Floors debuted the first domestically produced SPC to use the technology.

Another major announcement at the Surfaces expo was I4F’s licensing of SRP technology through a partnership with HMTX. The thermoplastic polyurethane technology, developed through a collaboration with Texas-based Huntsman, offers a recyclable PVC-free alternative to rigid core flooring using polyurethane derived from PET recycled from drink bottles. While HMTX is producing the flooring, it won’t be able to drive transformative demand on its own, and the licensing partnership will ideally bring other big players into the fold and help mainstream the product technology.

I4F also represents Classen’s Ceramic polypropylene technology, another hard surface alternative to vinyl flooring, as well as Be-lite, an extrusion process that honeycombs the back of a rigid core product to reduce weight and use of materials without sacrificing performance-the technology was developed by CFL. And it offers BeGreen, a bio-based cork composite panel developed by Amorim. Also notable is its licensing agreement last summer with Germany’s Hesse-Lignal for Poreguard, a deep pore coating for all wood surfaces that protects the wood without compromising its visual clarity.

In all, I4F now has over 4,000 patents and technologies grouped in several patent clusters, including drop lock, digital printing, surface finishing, board composition, process technologies, and wall and ceiling technologies.

The last few years have seen the introduction of several innovations from Välinge, including Liteback for dematerialization of LVT products. Its new one-piece Onepush integrated locking system, designed to add flexibility and durability to the installation of the increasingly rigid product offerings, was developed in collaboration with two European firms, Inovame and Kreafin. Inovame is a French research and development firm focused mostly on hard surface interiors, and Kreafin is part of Gerflor.

However, Välinge’s most significant move in recent years has been the development of its hardened wood line. Välinge first introduced the technology about 15 years ago, using wood powder for the top layer of a laminated product, originally called Nadura. And the technology was enhanced into Woodura, which involved pressing a thin wood veneer onto the wood powder surface, using pressure to infuse the powder into the voids in the wood grain to create a powerful bond, yielding a durable, high-performance product. According to the firm, Woodura technology can make ten times more flooring than traditional engineered wood products out of the same volume of wood, and the product is three times stronger.

Back in 2009, Välinge was entirely focused on producing technology for flooring, not making floors, but at that time, Pervan declared that if the market was slow to license the technology, he would simply build a production facility adjacent to the headquarters in Viken, Sweden. And that’s ultimately what he did, building a factory with an annual capacity of over 50 million square feet, and later adding a 160-million-square-foot operation in Croatia.

Three years ago, the firm introduced Woodura under the Hardened Wood name to the U.S. market and created a sister company, Bjelin, to focus on its flooring program and distinguish it from Välinge Innovation. It started off in the residential market and last year was introduced to the commercial market at NeoCon-its performance and sustainability attributes position it well for acceptance by commercial specifiers, though it’s likely to take some time to gain traction.

Unilin has also been churning out innovations in recent years. One of the most important is its Unicoat system for improving the water resistance of laminates. The firm first rolled the product out across its own lines. “Unilin products have been using this type of technology for many years,” says Koopmans, adding that it has started licensing Unicoat, with a couple of licensees already confirmed and more coming this month, including some major suppliers.

The Unicoat treatment, and similar internal improvements by a range of laminate producers, have played a huge role in strengthening the besieged laminate category and slowing its marketshare loss to rigid LVT. And Mohawk’s laminate programs, most prominently its RevWood line, have led the charge.

In addition, the firm has been developing some solutions for developing trends, like its Unizip locking system for herringbone installations. Typically, herringbone planks come in two mirrored formats-left and right-so from manufacture to the end user, they’re packaged in pairs, making an already complicated installation that much more cumbersome. Unilin created a unique profile that allows all panels to be identical-no more left and right-with angle and snap locking mechanisms securing the floating installation. The technology works for engineered wood, laminates and rigid core products, simplifying and streamlining both the manufacture and installation of the planks.

The FlinTile system for tile looks in rigid core constructions also targets developing trends, in this case the increasing demand for stone and tile designs, with grooves along the edges designed to be grouted for a waterproof installation well suited to typical tile applications, like bathrooms and kitchens.

Unilin’s DeepBlue direct digital printing technology uses Barberan machinery and other associated proprietary components for a single-pass process of digital layering, including a masking layer that is brushed away post-curing for the in-register embossed design. It’s already being used by one OEM producer in Georgia.”

Copyright 2024 Floor Focus

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