October 7, 2004—Bob Miller, President & CEO, and Don Roberts, Vice President Sales Edge Flooring in the final part of a two-part series talk about this new flooring category that permits the installation of ceramic tile, granite and stone with click-joint the ease of installing laminate. Discussed are the company’s Dalton, Georgiaassembly operation, its D-I-Y program at Lowe’s and the company’s planned launch with independent retailers.
October 5, 2004—Frank O’Neill, Publisher, Floor Focus magazine and Dave Foster Host, Floor Radio discuss: Recent price increases in the hard and soft surface sectors; Lowe’s policy of holding the line on vendor price increases and its new Roll-Back Pricing Strategy; Cuts at a Honeywell nylon plant; The outcome of a Milliken/Interface patent infringement suit; Turner Construction goes green: International plastics firms plans for biodegradable and bio-based products; and CCA/FCIF Golf Tournament yields $120,000 for the FCIF.
October 3, 2004—Jon Dougal, Sustainable Design Associates, looks at energy and the future in light of dramatically increasing oil prices. Dougal discusses the likelihood of petroleum substitutes being developed including an economy based on hydrogen, looking at the strong and weak points of this option. Also discussed are the possible substitutes for plastics derived from petroleum such as nylon, polypropylene and vinyl.
September 30, 2004—From Cersaie 2004 in Bologna, Italy, Frank O’Neill, Publisher, Floor Focus magazine reviews this giant international ceramic tile show discussing the venue, the exhibitors, the attendees and the level of excitement, O'Neill also talks about the colors, textures and new product offerings at this show.
September 29, 2004—Zahir Palanpur, President of the Atlanta-based Azul Arc International discusses outsourcing and the considerable cost savings available to industry companies that outsource tasks such as, digital/ web, CAD, graphic and 3D design services, business application functions and even customer-focused functions such as research, analytics customer support.
September 29, 2004—Mike Barker, Investment & Retirement Management looks at the market over the past few days and its relationship with rising oil prices. He evaluates the 3.3% jump in GDP and other recent economics reports and discusses upcoming 3rd quarter earnings reports. Barker also looks at the market's current focus and talks about when it may break from its current trading range.
September 28, 2004—Kyle Strait, New Product Marketing Manager, Tennant Company discusses ReadySpace, a new technology in carpet maintenance from the company that, promised to return clean carpets to service in typically less than 30 minutes. Strait outlines how the technology works and how he expects it to impact the way commercial carpets are cleaned in the future.
September 27, 2004—FloorRadio regular Paul Friederichsen, Executive VP at the advertising and marketing firm The Hauser Group reports back on a recent mystery shopping excursion where he visited two Carpet One members, an Abbey Carpet retailer, two boutique retailers, two Lowe’s stores, a Home Depot and Interface’s Atlanta InterfaceFLOR location.
September 26, 2004—Dan Hendrix, President & CEO, Interface discusses the company and the economic downturn of recent years, its efforts to expand modular carpet into the retail space, health care, educational, hospitality markets and into the consumer market with InterfaceFLOR. Also discussed, Re:Source Americas and the changes in the service sector and the company’s sustainability efforts and the bottom line.
September 23, 2004—Lew Migliore, The Industry’s Trouble Shooter and President of LGM Technical Carpet Services discusses a unique and sizable side-match problem that occurred in a church installation.