Looking Back: How Eddy Boucké helped flooring click – August 2026

By Kemp Harr

When Eddy Boucké recently retired as chief technology officer of I4F, he closed a career spanning more than four decades—one that closely paralleled the transformation of hard surface flooring from glued-together planks to today’s sophisticated mechanical locking systems.

Boucké did not invent the original click-flooring concept. That was developed by competing mechanical locking technologies during the 1990s. Boucké’s contribution was helping turn those early concepts into practical, manufacturable products—and later advancing them into the I4F’s original one-piece drop-lock system, delivering faster, simpler installation used globally in today’s rigid core flooring.

A Belgian engineer with a deep understanding of both flooring production and mechanical design, Boucké became the technical co-founder of Berry Floor in 1998. At the time, Berry Floor was a startup operation with roughly ten employees, entering the laminate business just as mechanical locking was beginning to replace traditional glued tongue-and-groove installation.

Boucké helped lead Berry Floor through a period of extraordinary growth. The company expanded from those ten employees to more than 300, and during its peak years from 2003 to 2006, it produced more than 20 million square meters of flooring annually. In less than a decade, Berry Floor developed into one of Europe’s leading laminate flooring manufacturers.

That experience shaped Boucké’s approach to innovation. He understood that a promising technical idea had little value unless it could be produced efficiently, consistently and at industrial scale. At Berry Floor, he helped develop the manufacturing expertise needed to apply mechanical locking technology to millions of square meters of flooring—a skill that would become central to the rest of his career.

His career subsequently included work with Välinge and Kronospan, giving him a particularly broad perspective on the development, licensing and industrial application of flooring technology. He was named as an inventor or co-inventor on numerous patents involving mechanical locking, panel construction, installation methods and wear-resistant surfaces.

Boucké made perhaps his most visible contribution when he joined I4F during the final chapter of his career.

When I4F founder John Rietveldt approached him with the concept for a new vertical locking system, Boucké initially had reservations. The flooring locking arena was already crowded with established patents and powerful intellectual-property positions. But Boucké ultimately recognized the potential of Rietveldt’s idea and supplied the technical knowledge needed to develop it into a viable commercial system.

As I4F’s founding technical leader and longtime CTO, Boucké headed the development of 3L TripleLock and Click4U. The systems introduced a one-piece drop-lock profile that eliminated the separate plastic insert required by many existing fold-down systems. The result was a locking mechanism that was easier and less expensive to produce, while allowing installers to connect panels quickly by angling the long side and pressing down the short end.

The technology proved particularly well suited to the emerging rigid core category. It could be applied to laminate, engineered wood, LVT, WPC and SPC, helping manufacturers use drop-lock installation across a much broader range of products. I4F subsequently expanded the platform with technologies addressing water resistance, herringbone installation and other specialized applications.

More broadly, Boucké helped change the competitive structure of the flooring technology business. Before I4F, mechanical locking was largely dominated by Välinge and Unilin. I4F’s arrival introduced a third major licensing company, giving flooring manufacturers additional choices and accelerating competition and innovation. Today, I4F has nearly hundreds of click-system licensees worldwide and has become the leading locking-system provider to the SPC flooring sector.

Boucké’s legacy is therefore not tied to one invention or one company. At Berry Floor, he helped build a startup into a major European flooring producer. At I4F, he helped build a new technology company into one of the industry’s principal sources of flooring innovation.

Throughout both chapters, his particular strength was his ability to understand an idea, determine whether it could be manufactured reliably and refine it until it worked on the factory floor and in the hands of an installer.