In the following Floor Covering Weekly article by Brittany Walsh, Novalis associates Julie Foster, Angie Alexander and Jim Kups answer the editor’s questions regarding the brand’s focus on Main Street Commercial LVT.
Here is the text from the magazine’s article:
This year, Novalis has focused on diversifying its portfolio with three new LVT collections specifically targeting Main Street business. With Abberly, Birkdale and Davidson, the company aims to arm dealers with specific products and marketing materials to succeed in this profitable growth sector.
According to Julie Foster, product and marketing manager, North America, the new lines are the perfect choice for Main Street because they have been designed and styled to attract that specific customer.
“All [of these products] have a commercial- grade wearlayer that makes them durable with a 10-year heavy commercial warranty,” said Foster. “[They] all have a solid environmental story and are FloorScore certified. And all are available to be sold through our distributor’s dealers.”
With its new Abberly and Davidson collections, Novalis is able to address the trend of various sizes of planks and tiles.
“That creates an interesting environment for Main Street commercial locations. Our colors and designs are hip and cool for both tiles and planks. Trending are the geometrics, petrified wood looks and variegated walnuts,” Foster noted.
In addition to providing collections with on-trend designs and commercial grade wear layers, Novalis also prides itself on the displays and marketing materials it makes readily available through its distributor partners.
“Each of our displays is designed to take up a very small footprint in a retailer’s space. And they can choose to showcase all our collections or only the ones that are suitable for their particular market,” Foster said. “We’ve worked really hard developing our new website to a new, hipper look, very user friendly with an added bonus of our new Room Visualizer (available this month).”
Angie Alexander, national sales manager for Novalis, explained that 
Main Street is an important sector for dealers to participate in because most of the jobs are small and personal, which plays into the wheelhouse of a specialty retailer.
“[It] focuses on renovating existing commercial spaces in order to attract quality commercial tenants and fill vacant storefronts. Because the retailer is part of Main Street, they are part of the town that their business is in,” said Alexander. “The commercial focus has shifted to rebuilding and refurbishing historical downtowns and neighborhood commercial spaces. ‘Rebuilding America’, making the old new and hip again. That is why you are seeing a lot of patterns and colors from the past resurface.”
And, according to Jim Kups, North American technical manager, there are many inherent benefits from using LVT in this sector. “Great visuals in woods and concrete patterns, as well as our geometric designs in Abberly, are very well suited for these types of businesses. Add in the low maintenance features of LVT, easy and multiple installation methods and we have a winning product for flooring,” he said.
While there are different installation options available in LVT such as click, loosely and glue down, certain installation options work better for this sector than others depending on the environment.
According to Kups, direct glue applications with a commercial grade wear layer will handle high traffic scenarios such as rolling loads, which makes these products great for Main Street.
“Floating floors are fine for straight foot traffic areas and medium weight static loads, but if a rolling or more dynamic load is part of the business this might not be the best option,” he said.
When should you glue or float? “The most basic and simple answer is there are three major considerations: temperature, traffic and substrate. Installed environments with non-controllable temperatures are better with direct glue installations. Dynamic loads and very heavy traffic are better with direct glue installations. Difficult to bond to substrates are perfect for a floating floor,” Kups offered.
We thank Floor Covering Weekly for their excellent article and coverage of Novalis Innovative Flooring. To learn more about our Main Street LVT products, visit NovaFloor.us.
