Material IQ Episode 002: “Design: Resilient Flooring in North America”

The following podcast transcript was generated with Whisper AI and may contain errors.

Darius • 00:08
I never have enough of a chance to speak about design. I write about it a lot, I try and cover all the trends and everything, but to speak to folks who are right in the middle of it, who know a whole lot, who can educate me, who can orient me, that’s valuable. And so I really appreciate the opportunity to learn more about the design process and all the technical elements involved.

Kenn • 00:29
Darius, my friend, you’ve come to the right place. This is the Material IQ podcast. I’m Ken Busch, and today we’re going to be talking about design, flooring design, in North America, specifically resilient flooring design, and why it’s so important for North American producers to source their designs from North American producers. Darius is the editor of one of the top magazines in the flooring market, floor focus, and he and I are indeed friends. But I’ll let him take it from here.

Darius • 01:04

• Well, I got into the flooring industry at Floor Focus in 1999. And from the beginning, I came from doing travel writing. From the beginning, I was interested. It’s rich, it’s multifaceted, and that appeals to me. And there’s so many elements. There’s design, there’s technology, there’s innovation. There’s sustainability. It’s international. So as a reporter on the industry, there’s always something to keep me engaged. And if you’re any kind of reporter, you tend to be curious by nature. And that’s my feeling. You wanna ask questions, get answers, and that’s certainly true of me.

Kenn • 01:41

• And here to satisfy Darius’s curiosities is Peter Garlington from Interprint Inc. Interprint Inc. is the North American division of a global supplier of designs for decorative surfaces, whether it’s flooring or furniture materials, architectural millwork. Interprint is one of the leaders on the planet of creating and marketing these designs to flooring producers and of course, other types of materials producers. Peter has been traversing the planet for decades now, hunting the cool stuff, figuring out why it’s cool, bringing these concepts back to his secret laboratory. I guess it’s not that secret. And turning them into marketable, sellable designs for these different categories of materials. Peter, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Peter • 02:37
Sure. I guess I’ve been the design director here for North America the past 15 years. I’ve been with Interprint for 20. My background before that was design-build furniture studio. I came up in the ’80s and ’90s in the contemporary American craft movement. But what I brought to Interprint was my studio. So we do all of our own development in-house from raw board or raw material through to finished. So the studio is materials and process heavy, where we like to explore. We, my team mostly comes from a fine arts background. So we have that kind of mentality and approach when it comes to design and material processes.

Kenn • 03:36
And I’ve been to your studio, it’s been a few years, but there’s a big focus for Interprint and for this industry as a whole on wood designs. Is that correct still, Peter?

Peter • 03:47
Wood is what feeds the machine, sure. We have a deeper interest in other material sensibilities. I think as an industry and as a whole for what we supply the visuals for, we range from the panel to the high pressure to the flooring side. So we have a very holistic approach to our materials and material selection. What traditionally was the realm of the HPL, the high pressure laminate with abstracts and graphic images, kind of opens up for flooring when we moved from residential to commercial, providing images for the thermal plastic side. Residential laminate flooring, the paper product that we print, was traditionally held to the residential market, which was much more focused on wood plank, flooring looks, the occasional tile, ceramic or stone look for, but that was the minority of the design development. Most of it was wood, wood plank, wood visual. Like I said, with moving into commercial flooring with LVT and Resilient, it gives us the opportunity to look at abstract ideas in flooring, whether those are concretes or oxidized metals or terrazos, things like that. So it’s been a little bit of a shift in the past several years as we get into the thermoplastics, which is nice.

Kenn • 05:31
And so in your studio, what I observed you guys doing is kind of prepping these real world material samples for scanning so that they can become printed decorers for furniture or laminate surfaces. There’s an incredible amount of attention to detail there. And Peter, I also know you as a foodie, which also kind of has the same sort of level of discernment and refinement when it comes to just the tiny nuances that other people might not, never pick up on.

Peter • 06:02

• Yeah, I would say I’m quite a process junkie. You know, it’s the thing that interests me about food is usually the process used in making. the technique or uniqueness of it, things like that. So process, process, process.

Kenn • 06:22

• I was afraid you’re gonna say processed food. What do you say that? That’s the antithesis of what we’re here to talk about. So what we are here to talk about though is really flooring designs for the American market developed here in America, which is what InterPrint is really heavily involved in. Why is this an important topic right now?

Peter • 06:48

• Well, I mean, I guess generally speaking, it’s always been an interest of ours. We’ve always used both kind of emerging artists as well as kind of American heritage brands as inspiration for some of the work that we do. We focus a lot on North America here at Interprint because we think it’s a big space. You know, it’s a big territory on the map. We, you know, if you have this conversation with our European colleagues, you know, and ask them what the trend is for Europe, you’ll get an argument that will say, you know, like, oh, we can’t answer a question like that. You know, there’s differences between the North and South of Germany. What Italy wants isn’t what Spain wants. and the Nordic countries are doing something completely different as well. So there is no single trend for the European market. And then I think to them and say, “Now take the American map and overlay that.” And you’ll realize we have the same thing, that there isn’t a single trend for the North American market. But you have regionalities that do things for particular reasons or have a vested history in a material or a species or a look or feel. You know, tile is popular in Florida because it’s cool. You know, hardwood is popular in the Northeast because it’s warm. You know, you don’t wanna come home from a day at the beach and drag your sandy feet across a hardwood floor and you don’t wanna come home in the middle of winter from skiing and lay down on a cool tile floor. So, you know, there’s a little bit of regionality and things like that, but you know, I think it’s a bigger, bigger story about the diversity of culture in North America and applying any single design aesthetic that’s universal doesn’t really make sense.

Kenn • 08:54
So there’s no such thing as the global oak flooring design that everybody’s going to love no matter what part of the world they’re in or what part of the continent they’re in.

Peter • 09:04
I think there are some universals out there You know our elements within a design that that can work globally, you know but You know, I know I don’t think that there’s any singular design that Unless you’re a Panto

Kenn • 09:24
Darius from your perspective, you know, have you noticed over the years? any sort of whatever a need for more focus on localized designs attention to localized trends when we’re talking about North America?

Darius • 09:42
Yeah, we see that a lot. I mean, one of the interesting things is hard work, for instance, has really been a little better at get supplying regional designs like Texas. They like their rustics, you know, North East is somewhat traditional, and then, you know, out West more, or maybe a clean minimal coastal. So we’ve seen that a lot in woods, but I wonder about that in terms of other types of hard surface flooring. I wonder if Peter thinks that we’ve been using too broad a brush and is there a lot more room to serve people’s regional aesthetic needs than is currently in the market now? And I guess that’s mostly a regional,

Peter • 10:30
residential discussion, I’m not sure. Yeah, you know, I think that we run into a couple different things. There’s kind of the commodity side of things where everybody wants to get some real estate in the big box stores so that waters down the the regionality a little bit. You know, I think you’ll get certainly specifications. You know, the coastals are for sure a little bit more sophisticated than the middles. I think certain species have taken dominance. Oak is just, it’s easy. It’s high tanning content. It takes a lot of finishes. There’s a range of raw material from rustic to elegant. It has a nice open pore structure that allows more realistic interpretations of visuals to be prominent. But the problem there is people get lazy about wanting another oak and another oak and another oak. And it’s like, every so often you gotta do something else. And they may not be as easy with plates or the visual, but in the end, the end user really wants a variety, a choice out there.

Kenn • 11:50

• Peter, what role does standing and finishing play as you are prepping these wood species to be scanned and turned into designs for flooring.

Peter • 12:01

• You know, we shy away from using a store-bought stain, right, to us, min wax is a pigment in solution used to homogenize the visual look. And what we want in a flooring set is some board-to-board variation. So by using a reactive stain that’s chemistry reacting with the tannin and the oak, the tannin of any individual tree is going to be different. So the boards are gonna color slightly differently from each other. So they’ll be of the same look, but have board to board variation, where if we took the same set of boards and just coated them with minwax, they’d all look exactly, they’d have the same tonal range. It would be a very flat floor. So I think that you definitely have chemistry going on in trees and from tree to tree that’s different so depending on the finishing that you’re using you can get variation and finish. You know a tree grown by itself on a windy uphill will have lean or could potentially have grain character that was unique to that tree. of those effects that you see in maple, like a curly maple or a bird’s eye maple, is effective conditions of growing. That curl in the maple is compression on one side where the tree’s constantly being leaned into and the grain on that one side is stacking up and creating curl. So, yeah, any of that crossfire or curl in a board. It could be environmental conditions, but how do you know so much?

Kenn • 13:52
So this dear listener is one of the joys and challenges of inviting a fellow journalist to participate in these podcasts. So I’m going to relinquish control at least partially because I’m learning a lot by just letting these two guys riff. So where were we? Oh, right.

Darius • 14:12
How do you know so much? I mean, this detail, talking about wood, it’s blowing my mind. I mean, I could listen to this forever, but how do you know this much? And also, part two of that, now I’m really interested to see how you develop a design from these woods, you know, what the process is, but you know, what’s your background in terms of all this wood knowledge?

Peter • 14:34
This is, you know, 40 years of hand selecting lumber, knowing your material, working with it, understanding tension within a board, you know, more times than I care. I’ve spent good money on on a board that looks great. And as I start to mill it, it starts to warp or bow or twist because there’s an internal tension that’s been baked in in the kiln or, or, you know, reactive from it’s it’s growing conditions. So yeah, we’re geeky. Like I said, we’re very process driven here. So we’re some wood geeks. You have to be right. You have to be. Sure. I mean, it keeps things entertaining. I mean, and we we tend to buy, you know, from lumberyards we know. And we’ve like my years of building for clients and individuals, I’ve gone all over the country sourcing materials. When the rustic stuff was the hot thing, we were down sourcing reclaimed barn material or reclaimed housing material. We’re interested in architecture, so we’re interested in adaptive reuse of materials or systems. So we’re kind of constantly deep diving. We’re happy when we’re learning, I guess. So like that’s, you know, if we get a new project that brings in a new material or a new medium, we dive right in and get our hands dirty.

Kenn • 16:16

• There was a New Yorker cartoon a few years back that basically showed barns for as far as you could see into the horizon and the line was something like, demand for barn board has led to an explosion in the building of barns.

Peter • 16:33

• Yeah, yeah, no, I was pretty sure at the height of that that there were fields in Pennsylvania where they just had wall sides that they were nailing boards on one week and then peeling them off the next and then just renailing and then peeling like, it was just like, you know. If everybody that wants a NASCAR themed man cave in their basement is buying real reclaimed barn wood. Like the shakers just didn’t build enough barns. (laughs)

Kenn • 17:01

• So, and this is why we’ve developed all these different materials to honor the look of wood, but don’t have to actually be wood, which brings us to, really, we’re gonna be focusing on resilient flooring here. And, you know, it’s a growing market. There are so many different varieties of what we can call resilient flooring areas. Can you just give us a snapshot What is resilient flooring and why is it hot?

Darius • 17:28

• Right, so coming into about 2013, it was sheet goods, some VCT and flexible LVT, residential and commercially. 2013, Pete Dorsche with US Floors is in China and he sees a decking product and he sees how this can be a flooring. And he creates the rigid core concept which was originally WPC. And then, I mean, I have a couple of stats. It’s really staggering how much that has transformed the market entirely. The two things that drove it mostly were the click system. Now, Flexible LBT already had a click system and I’ve installed the floor here using it. I thought it was great, but apparently, the rigid click system is an easier install and then the marketing message of the waterproof flooring. And that just combined with also fantastic pricing and it just transformed the market. In 2012, resilient flooring was $1.7 billion, 10% of flooring market share. 2024, it’s $7.5 billion with a 21% market share. It’s pretty much bigger than carpet now and forever carpet was the biggest flooring category. So in 2014, LBT, just LBT was about 850 million. Now it’s about 6.3 billion. And 3.8 of that is rigid flooring. And rigid flooring is almost entirely a residential product. In fact, I’d be interested to hear if it’s getting much traction commercially at all. But I think performance issues or performance weariness and the stakes are higher in the commercial market, you know. So people, you know, contractor, specifiers are going to be more careful about using something like that the same way they don’t use real wood that much. So we haven’t seen a gain much traction there, but it is stunning. And so there’s WPC and SPC and then some other formulations they tried out like using magnesium oxide in the core and stuff like that. We don’t see that much of that anymore, but SPC was the cheaper stripped down version kind of and it took over the market. It still accounts for the bulk of rigid LBT, but there were some problems with quality coming out of China thinner boards, poor materials, poor fillers and that caused a little wave of failures and that has actually been good for this category because it’s boosted WPC It’s also boosted laminate and it sort of pushed the market up just a little bit. And so in the long run, that might do something in terms of the commoditization of SPC. And of course, the vast majority of this is from Asia. And in Asia, still the vast majority is from China. But that’s changing a little bit. And then we have some U.S. production that’s over the last 10 years. A lot of folks, some American firms, some Asian firms have invested in built factories here. And but it only accounts for maybe 15% of U.S. consumption. And I’m talking really on the LVT or rigid LVT side here. With all of the investment in the US, it’s still a very small portion of what’s consumed here.

Peter • 21:02
Yeah, we see that for sure.

Kenn • 21:05
So let’s take a quick glossary break here. I’m getting a little bit behind on the terminology. WPC is wood plastic composite flooring. SPC is stone plastic composite flooring. LVT is, of course, a luxury vinyl tile. Um, Darius, bring us up to speed on this terminology if you would.

Darius • 21:28
Um, okay. The problem is that the acronyms have changed their, their meanings a little bit. Right. I think WPC has, yeah, I don’t know how much WPC really uses the wood dust as opposed to just a foamed core as opposed to that solid vinyl core. Um, but yeah, the original, um, WPC was, was wood dust. And I don’t know if Shaw still makes it like that. Shaw bought US floors not long after they came out with this great invention. But now they are often called WPC waterproof. Using the W for waterproof. But it’s the higher end thicker, beefier product. And SBC Center, there are some other varieties out there. people were experimenting a lot that’s quieted down a little bit. And then we also have some PVC-free options that are being developed in that sort of laminate to LVT arena in general, you know, some very cool hybrids. And some are less successful, but people have been innovating.

Kenn • 22:43
But the basic properties and LVT of course is luxury vinyl tile, but it’s but it’s planks mostly. Anyway, just a skinny tile, skinny, skinny long tiles, right? But the, but the, what, what, what are the universal properties that, that make the, all these belong under the resilient flooring umbrella?

Darius • 23:06
Right. It’s, it’s polymer base. It’s got a polymer core, you know, generally speaking, a PVC core. And it also will have a PVC cap on it with the film on top of that. So I mean, I think it’s the fact that it’s a polymer product one way or another. There have been some other things that have come along the way. Shaw has, I think they still have, a polymer with a real wood veneer on top, which actually the NWFA calls a composite engineered wood. sort of found a way to like make that any any veneer real wood at all on top of this is straight is is is going to be called the wood of some sort by end of

Peter • 23:50
that thing yeah and we’ve seen some other hybrids where you know traditionally the laminate was a hardboard core with a treated paper phase like our other panels and HPL. For the resilient for LVT, we’re printing on a thermal plastic film. So the sandwich that makes it up is all thermal plastics. So you’ve got a non-wood core with a print layer that is on a vinyl or a thermal plastic film, and then a wear layer or a cap sheet that is also in a thermal plastic. So, you know, I mean, historically, laminate flooring was a little noisy, you know, and had a particular tone or note to it when you walked on it or tread, you know, then, and, you know, they put corkbacker on it and different pads helped that, but the vinyls really kind of took that out of the equation, became very nice kind of quiet floors. with a different feel, you know, and that became a popular selling point as well against laminate. I also love the, you know, multi-billion dollar pet industry that promotes the vinyl flooring, you know, as your most pet friendly floor, you know, your pets will destroy the hardwood, they make so much noise and slide around on the laminate, but, you know, the LVTs and the resilience are great for your pets.

Darius • 25:34

• It’s hard to see an ad like a flooring advertisement, hard surface flooring advertisement without seeing a dog in the frame. – Yep. – So they have done a wonderful job of dogging it up and waterproofing it up. I mean, it’s been, that’s been one of the big stories of this category is how they capitalized on that.

Kenn • 25:52

• Yep. – Yeah, but just out of the frame is that puddle of pee, right?

Peter • 25:56

• But water resistant, water holdout. It’s all good.

Kenn • 26:01

• Darius, you mentioned that resilient flooring coming from overseas can sometimes have quality variations or quality issues. Can you elaborate just a little bit on, you know, sort of where some of these products are falling short and why we maybe should be looking more to North American producers?

Darius • 26:19

• Well, the click system has been failing largely just because of the production of the product itself. Again, the poor fillers are a big part of this. And also, though, they were going really thin with these SBCs, like 3mm, you know, and now the SBCs that are trending are a little thicker. So they were just going as cheap as they possibly could and using cheap materials and getting it out to, you know, the stores here. I don’t know if there was any particular country that was, you know, more responsible for the poor qualities. But let me say this, though. The very best of the rigid core products, the very best of them, also come from Asia. So we got the commodity side and then we got the value added bells and whistles. They control both of those markets. And here in the US, what’s being built is largely the bread and butter middle of the market. And that’s where the whole discussion gets interesting. What’s the future of the US market and what’s it capable of? Because we have, it’s a whole lot easier in China in terms of labor, utilities, subsidies. very, very hard for American firms to compete with all that. And especially with those grout lines and bevels and other sort of fancy finishing effects that are labor-intensive. So that’s not happening here. Well, maybe down the road.

Kenn • 28:08
And that’s product makeup, right? The quality of the product, product makeup, the combinations of materials. What about designs coming from overseas suppliers? Is there something to be desired there where the North American producers can gain an advantage?

Darius • 28:24
In my opinion, a lot of folks, a lot of American firms, you know, have really well-established partnerships in Asia. And these Asian partners, they aren’t just churning out where they think the U.S. market wants. They’re taking the design direction from their U.S. partners. So to me, I’m wondering, what does that really mean in terms of the advantage of designing in the US? I mean, aren’t these Asian partners getting the same info? Aren’t they producing the same sorts of designs that an American producer would do if they’re for the American market? I’m interested to hear what you would have to say on that, Peter.

Peter • 29:12
I think it’s interesting. When I started in the industry, there were only really kind of a handful of designers that were providing design into that industry, whether that was for panel for laminate flooring or resilient. And what we would see is even the printers. The printers, at the time, there were three or four big European printers, a couple Japanese printers, the Asian print houses were more production facilities than art houses. So you’d have these few designers go around and if they thought oxidized metal was going to be a trend, they would generate six or eight and then they’d show up at the first customer and be like, “This is a trend. You’ve got to get one and they’d buy one.” And then they go to the next printer and say, “This is a trend. So-and-so just bought. So you’ve got to get on this.” of sudden all the printers are showing up at the flooring guys and each one of them has an oxidized metal and they’re like this is a trend. So each of those then customers picks an oxidized metal. You know it’s the same thing with the oak or gray flooring or white porphylla or sheroosant. You know it’s because there’s such a limited number of of designers at the front end supplying a big vast industry and then when those designers decided that they could go to the flooring customers directly and sell to them, you know, they set up shop in Asia, you know, they’re, those designs are, you know, easy to get your hands on. You know, I think what happens is if those designers are sitting in Europe, they’re going to pick a lot of European oaks, some Elms, you know, things that are easily available. There aren’t a lot of those designers that sit in the North American space. So when you get into those kind of regionalities of nice hickory or ash or oak or oak alternatives that aren’t overly European, I think that’s where a domestic designer does a better job. Whether that domestic designer then sells those designs into the Asian market or keeps them in the North American space is a difference.

Darius • 31:31
Could you elaborate on that in terms of the residential versus commercial design?

Peter • 31:36
Sure. You know, I think a lot of the experience that I’ll talk about is based on residential because the bigger commercial companies, again, are splitting their portfolios between abstracts, materials, non-wood, concrete, stones, you know, and those tend to be a little bit more materials based. You know, on the residential side, you know, I think the other interesting thing is traditional print format. You know, on the Asian side, a lot of the import material, especially on the commodity side, is getting run at a meter, you know, width. So, you know, in a four foot wide layout, if you’ve got eight inch wide planks, you’ve only got seven possible boards. You know, if we’re running at seven foot wide, eight foot wide, you know, our visuals are twice the number of boards. So, you know, I think that that is, you know, one of the other distinctions between, you know, some of the Asian printers and not that the Asian printers are restricted to one meter wide, but a lot of their machinery is in that kind of meter-wide space. So unless you’re doing multiple cylinder sets to get a bigger plank variety, you know, what happens is you end up trying to create a more homogenized layout because you have fewer planks within the install. So if you’re doing a good size room, you know, to avoid tracking, you know, or a visual hiccup of seeing the same plank over and over again, or, you know, my favorite installing the same plank next to each other because your installer isn’t really paying attention or they just don’t have the variety of planks in the pack to pick from. So running at a wider width means that instead of having six to seven boards in an individual layout, we can get 14 boards in a layout. So can I ask you then, are you saying that the

Darius • 33:50
trend toward wide planks is as much driven by the sort of manufacturing priorities as it is for the clients on aesthetic demands? Oh, for sure.

Peter • 34:03
You know, I would say that half the innovation in our industry is not driven by the end user. You know, I get completely frustrated by that very thing. know, where you have a machine manufacturer that adds some bells and whistles to their machine, you know, this was EIR, right, the embossed and registered.

Kenn • 34:28
So for those of you playing at home, a glossary note here, EIR or embossed and registered is the technology whereby the texture that is applied by steel plates onto the finished flooring product is perfectly aligned with every little wood grain detail in the floor itself. So if there’s a little knot or a little wood grain tick, you’re not only going to see it, you’re going to be able to feel it in the texture of the finished product.

Darius • 34:58
Does that apply to, let’s say, the white oak trend, which, you know, as you know, it’s like, you know, it’s been everywhere for many years. Is that another example of folks aligning

Peter • 35:12
in this way? Yeah, it’s easy. You know what I mean? Like, my favorite was a flooring customer of ours that, you know, was like, well, I need more, I need more oak visuals. I was like, okay, but like everything you’ve been adding in the past X number of years has been oak. Well, Oak accounts for 90% of our sales. I was like, well, that’s a problem because it’s 98% of your portfolio. Yes, I get it, it’s safe for you to make those decisions. The idea is that the interface between the end user and the design creator is like a game of telephone because there’s three to four stops in between that. It’s the distributor talking to the flooring company who says something to their flooring designer, who then sends a request to us. But now that’s four interpretations of what the end user really asked for and how the other people interpreted that based on what they had available and who they could work with.

Kenn • 36:21
So Peter, how much of your design is driven by what clients are asking for and how much of it is just developed by Interprint in-house to show to clients and hope they’ll bite?

Peter • 36:34
I would say 50% of our design development is what I would consider open development. It’s material that we source, that we find interesting, and we process in a way that we think is going to be easy to place. Then 50 percent of our development time is spent working with customers based on a brief being given a direction and asked to create something in the studio to a brief. Those are two different ways that we tend to work. We can show about a customer with a stack of Princess stuff we’ve created and we can show up with a range of ideas that are based on a design brief that they’ve submitted of ideas that they’re working on for their future launches, how they see trend go.

Kenn • 37:21

• Are there differences in design tastes, scale, color, lightness, darkness between different commercial markets like senior living, healthcare, hospitality, multi-family is really a commercial market in most specifiers minds now. Are there distinct differences in the kinds of flooring designs that they are attracted to that they are buying?

Darius • 37:47
Well, I would say, first of all, there’s some sort of practical needs. You know, like let’s say, you know, senior living has specific needs, not only in terms of the performance of the flooring, but in terms of the design. So there’s no weird depth perception issues or whatever. So you’ll have a certain sort of design aesthetic specifically for senior living that is calming and doesn’t mess people up. Beyond that, I mean, I think that when we look to progressive design the commercial market, we’re usually looking at the workplace, the corporate sector where we see, for us, we see a lot of architects and designers being able to really fulfill their visions. So like for instance when we run photography, we’re oftentimes looking at the corporate market for where the important trends are. Now hospitality is its own dramatic animal and in hospitality we’ve seen in rooms have been changing and hospitality moving over to hard surface sometimes with an area rug to soften it up. And those hard surfaces that I’ve seen tend to be wood looks and stone looks. But what I would say is that commercial design in general has so much variety. It is, Peter, you must have felt this when you stopped focusing as much on residential and had a chance to immerse yourself in commercial. It’s so rich that once you start talking about design, it’s hard to move out of the commercial market because this is where all the important trends are happening. On the residential side, there are trends. They move much more slowly. And now, thanks to Peter’s insights, I’m wondering a lot more about how they’re moving and what is guiding them. But the commercial market is where we really see a turnover of trends and developments.

Peter • 39:41
Yeah. I mean, I would add that, I think that there’s a kind of a generational thing too. I see younger designers in the field that, you know, are just don’t care about species as much. You know, if it’s the right scale, the right movement, if it’s colored properly, you know, it doesn’t matter to them so much that it’s oak or walnut or ash, you know, even on the Barnwood stuff. You know, once you got a weathered patina, we did several board sets that were mixed variety. You know, you could put an oak board and a bircher beach board and a pine board. You know, they were all grayed out and weathered in a similar way. You know, it didn’t scream oak floor or pine floor. As a printer, when things get interesting for us when we’re combining materials, right, that I can scan a concrete slab that we’ve poured and then combine that with a graphic or a secondary texture. The problem with laminate, with resilient is it’s always been sold as a durable imitation of a real thing. And when we create something on the commercial side, that’s maybe abstract based, that has a material sensibility because we’ve included a layer in that design that is a concrete or a wood or a stone. But we’ve combined that with a cloud movement for variety or for texture or a painted or drawn abstract. Then the laminate floor, the printed thing comes the real thing that it’s, you know, what we would say laminate for laminate sake back in the day. But, you know, when the architect or the spec rep comes down to it and says, oh, well, we got plenty of money in the budget, why don’t we just use the real thing, you know, as opposed to this imitation of the thing because that’s a cost saver. Well, if you’ve created a visual that’s only achievable through the printing process, because it’s a combination of things or because it’s a sensitive material that wouldn’t hold up. You know, like on the barn stuff, if you had peeling or flaking paint on a reclaimed board, that works great in laminate, wouldn’t work at all in real material. You just have lead paint chips flaking all over the place post install. So, you know, when we get excited is when we can get away from that, this is an imitation of something or this material is less than because it’s a copy. So for us, creating visuals that maybe play with scale, that we can take an exotic that in the veneer sets are big and don’t work, we drop that scale by 200% and it becomes a nice looking wood visual. That becomes unique to our process. So we’re always chasing ideas that we can do in our process that make it unique and move us away from that idea of only ever being an imitation. – That is fascinating.

Darius • 43:15
And one other little thing, let me just add to one other little thing is, obviously you can do species that would never survive, you know, like pine. – Yep. – You know, you can get beautiful looks. That pine is beautiful. You can never put down a pine floor unless you’ve been storing it for 100 years. So we can only find it in these sorts of products.

Kenn • 43:36

• Peter, if you would, I mean, this is a perfect segue into talking about how you do develop designs for flooring, right? So the idea that you’re interpreting nature, I don’t know, perfecting nature is not the right way to put it, but you’re bringing the best out of the species, out of the samples that you’re gathering for inspiration. But you mentioned scale, contrast, glare, I think all of these things are part of the creative interpretation. Tell us, especially if you have like a specific example of a flooring development that you can share, that’s not top secret. How does this work? There’s a few different paths.

Peter • 44:18
It’s either kind of our own geeky research of getting out there and shopping, right? We’ll go to the local lumber yard, you know, depending on what they’ve been sourcing lately. know, it’s going to be oak, it’s going to be hickory maple, soft maple, hard maple, cherry, ash. And we’ll have them pull out a bunk, you know, a big, you know, 1000 square foot pile of wood and we’ll put a couple skids down next to it and we will flip that entire pile, board by board. When we find a board we like, we put it aside and then our job is to find 14 brothers, sisters for that board. And as we go through that pile, we find another board we like that isn’t like that first board. So we put that aside, then we find sisters, cousins for that board, you know, until we get, you know, five or 10 board sets that we like. And then we take that raw material back to the studio and start processing. And like I said, there’s a range there. On the other material side, we’re happy to get our hands dirty. We’ll pour concrete, we’ll pour terrazzo, we’ll wet polish it back to expose the aggregates. We’re working on an interesting project now that’s a collaboration with a customer who wanted a terrazzo look, but wants the chip to be a wood look. So, you know, our first thing was like, okay, well, now we’ve got to get wood chips that, you know, are not, you know, we can’t just take a square stick and cut it on the bandsaw because all of our chips will now be square, you know, we can’t just take a dowel and do the same thing, they’ll just be round. You know, so what we ended up doing was taking some big four by four oak, thin slicing it and then snapping it into, you know, and filling up a bucket, you know, and of shapes and then laying it out in a nice pattern. That seemed a little blah. You know, we combine that with some branch sections, some natural materials until we got a good mix and feel. And then, you know, we did samples, then scale that up, pour bigger slabs, and then multiple slabs to get enough original copy to get across the web and get the look. So there’s all different approaches to how we do the design development. And again, that’s a combination of our research of where we see things going, or a process that we want to tackle, or a new material that we’ve come across that we want to explore and then manipulate. So there’s always a long list that we have of projects we’d like to work on. Of course, by the time we source that material, we play with the material enough that we feel comfortable and have an understanding of it and then kind of push that to where that’s going to fail so we find its limits. We don’t get to make everything we want because you know most of our days are spent milling oak you know and processing oak.

Darius • 47:37
Could I ask you a little bit about the films and the papers themselves like I’m just kind of wondering what’s you know how you create the design and the you know how the resolution of it and if that’s something that has that has evolved in recent years could you tell me just a little bit about that looking at when we’re looking at one of your papers or your films? Sure. When I had started

Peter • 48:05
years and years ago, the industry was paper focused, right? The laminate flooring and the industry had pretty much self-calibrated. You know, the paper is a particular paper that can be saturated with resin, so it’s absorbent, which isn’t great for printing ink because your ink wants to flow into that paper. So the engraving specification for the cylinders, the grind of the pigments, the coarseness of the pigments, and the flow out in the paper had kind of self-calibrated. To get the best print quality we could with the paper that we had to deal with, that could still get resin penetration so you didn’t get blocking or rejection from the customer. If you put so much ink onto the paper over four print units that you seal the paper, then you have issues with resin penetration. So you have to be aware of what your ink load per each unit is, how you’re affecting the resin penetration.

Kenn • 49:14
So that’s printing on paper for laminate flooring and furniture panels. What happened when you started printing for resilient flooring? – When we started printing on thermoplastics,

Peter • 49:25
that was an advantage because all of a sudden you had a surface that the ink just wanted to sit on. There was no absorption into the paper, so you could put down a different cell shape and a different resolution and that ink would sit there and not bleed into the substrate. So you could get a little bit crisper, a little bit nicer visual with the thermal plastics. And we had to use a different ink system because we’re a water-based printer and getting water-based inks to stick to oil-based materials was the first learning curve for us. And we weren’t going to go to solvent printing. So through cross-linkers and things like that, we were able to get our inks to stick. But at that point, we created a new ink system so we could get a slightly finer grind to the ink. So the finer grind to the ink with the finer resolution and the lack of absorption meant that you could get a much better visual on a film than you could on a paper.

Kenn • 50:27

• It’s such a cool collision of art and science and then just backing up sort of just the philosophy of flooring design, somebody had to explain to me once, you know, Interprint, you guys print, yes, flooring designs, but you also print designs for furniture panels, furniture surfaces, and somebody is saying, Well, we can use the same, you know, let’s say we’re shooting for the same sort of species for these two different materials. Maybe they’ll never be in the same room together, but we still have a different scale approach to the floor versus a furniture surface. Just if you could, Peter, just explain that for us.

Peter • 51:02
No, no, no. If we’re working on an abstract design for an HPL company, a high pressure laminate company, a Wilson order from Micah, who’s going into the office furniture environment. you know, those task desks or the presentation room desk where you’ve got 30 of them lined up in the space with seating, you know, you’re sitting, your eyes are 16 to 18 inches away from that pattern. So that pattern can be smaller, you know, you wanna maintain some interest, you know, but it has to be, you know, what’s the phrase that all the HPLs like an optical solid, you know, they want a pattern, but they want it to read like a color from a distance, but you know, have something when you’re sitting up close to it. Same thing with flooring, you know, you’re not doing a space that’s only 18 inches away from your face. For me, it’s about five, eight away from me at the closest. And, you know, if I’m looking out across a 30 foot room, the visual has to read from 20, 30 feet away. And again, that comes down to managing your knots and the strength of your knots, ’cause you don’t want this one black dot to just show up, you know, in this big field installation and stop your eye. On the flooring, you want two layers, right? You want it to be balanced over a large install, but it also has to have enough realism when you’re up close to it, I guess, installing or cleaning, you know, that it’s not just a kind of absence of detail when you’re up close. So, you know, elements that make up a good design are just that. It’s scale, movement, color play. You know, these are kind of the universal design elements that you wanna make sure are balanced out in any layout.

Kenn • 52:51

• So Peter, how do you feel when somebody comes up to you and says, “I just need the trends.” What are the trends in flooring? I need to check those boxes.

Peter • 52:59

• I gotta say, I’m no longer a believer in trend. like trend is just too difficult these days. It’s marketing, you know, like it’s, and if you’re quoting a buzzword in trend, whatever that is, biophilic, scandy, you’re buying into somebody else’s marketing. It’s Pantone’s color of the year. You know, like Pantone releases color of the year because they wanna sell chips. They don’t give a shit what people think about their color of the year, but it’s a marketing scam to sell more chipsets. You gotta be careful as to, is it a trend? Is it marketing? Is it the buzzword of the day? For me, because we deal with materials that go to create interiors, exteriors, I like a bigger umbrella. Like I like the idea of sense of place, of place making is what we’re doing. The internet has gotten too savvy and too quick, and what we used to call fads are now called trends. And in an industry that takes 18 months for a launch cycle, you can’t possibly be looking at trends that don’t last more than three to six weeks, or three to six months as your inspiration for your collection that isn’t gonna come out for another 12 months. So you gotta take a step back and have a bigger understanding of what it is that you’re doing. Good material is good material, a good design is a good design. How the marketing people wanna market that, if they wanna say that it’s scandy, if they wanna say that it’s biofilic, they have at it. But that’s not where we get hung up on material selection or design creation here. Those are categories that we can apply the structures to post. But the idea is you find good material, you do interesting things to it, and it’s gonna be good.

Darius • 55:10

• One of the most fascinating things in this whole discussion is talking about trends with you. And it is fascinating. And I wanna know, somewhere in there, there are legitimate, maybe they’re just overarching trends and therefore they don’t really change things at the ground level, But are there some important trends, like let’s say away from lux or toward earthy or towards minimalist or away from, I mean, are there any broad trends that you can hang stuff from?

Peter • 55:48

• Yes, all of them. And again, this comes down to the scale of the market. Some of those things would be perfectly acceptable on the coasts, right? New York, the big cities, New York, Chicago, LA, San Francisco, Dubai, London, it doesn’t matter. If you’re in a certain, let’s talk capital D design versus little D design. If you’re capital de-design, you’re at a top end social economic, you’re probably not shopping for us, you know, for laminate or for LVT or whatever. But if you’re spending a million dollars on your kitchen reno, you know, it doesn’t matter if you live in Dubai, Hong Kong, London, New York, you know, Pittsfield. If you’ve got that money, there’s three or four manufacturers that you’re looking at for your kitchen, you know, by the time you get to us, your little de-design, your regionalities are showing, and it’s a broader market. You’ve got to be able to cover some rustic, you’ve got to be able to cover some elegant, you’ve got to feed the masses. I think that, again, for me, I can go shopping and find a really beautiful board set of some rustic oak. I’m not going to leave it behind because I don’t think rustic is trending right now if it’s good. If the knots are nice and tight, if they’re the right size and scale, we can make it look good.

Darius • 57:21
So are you more guided by then regional aesthetics? Is that a more important sort of design direction than these trends?

Peter • 57:32
It is. And like I said, a lot of it is dictated from the material. Like, we spread out and shop in a variety of places. And, you know, we like to see what each place has to offer. Some, you know, like some mills special specialized in different things, you know, and when we’re shopping that mill, you know, we want to see what they have to offer that’s that special or nice, you know, like I said, we don’t want to leave good material behind for the sake of it answers a a trend or it doesn’t. So we probably hold more at the studio as a kind of bank of materials so that we have something to do on a daily basis, but also when we get that request from a customer, this is the balance between open design development of what we’re going to choose to do on a certain day because we can do anything we want and we have a cache of nice material and a customer-driven direction where they say, we’ve got a launch coming up for 20, 27, there’s gonna be six ad drops to the line. We know three of those at least are gonna be oak just because they have to be. What else should we be looking at? So then that’s on us to be like, oh, well, we have these oak alternatives are open-poured, can take a plate treatment or a finish similar to Oak. So you’ll get an Oak visual without having to call it Oak. Or here’s another species that’s completely off your radar. We’ll look at what our customers have done on the past five or six launches. Like, well, you’ve added walnut, you’ve got two good ones in your line, You’ve certainly added oak. You’ve done some other domestics in the past, but man, you haven’t touched exotic since, Jitoba went away. Like 10 years ago, everybody had to have Jitoba, constantly, constantly, constantly. We had to source as much Jitoba as we did oak. We haven’t picked up an exotic board in a decade. So what happened? Like there’s a spot that people can refresh. And in that ensuing decade, you know, stuff moved from European and African sort of exotics like Mahogany or Alessander to a whole bunch of South American exotics opened up, Palsawa and Mboya, you know, things that weren’t typical five years ago. Australian blackwood, I can get those veneers in and make an interesting layout. So maybe it’s time you look at an exotic again. The easy default to that is teak, and we can get people to put teak in line because it’s familiar. You can tell them the story of mid-century modern and how popular that is, and that was the predominant wood in the Scandinavian mid-century modern stuff. So it’s partially storytelling, But our storytelling all comes off of the material we find. Like I said, we’re kind of quality material first, and then fit the story second.

Kenn • 01:01:02
And storytelling is so important in this world. It helps the design community kind of envision where they might use something. It adds value. And in the case of a conversation like this, it adds a lot of credibility. and I think respect for how much work goes into sourcing the inspiration and actually executing a design that will work in the flooring market. I just really think this is something that our industry needs to maybe do a better job of.

Peter • 01:01:33
Yeah. You know, I think for sure in the past several years that kind of storytelling aspect, you know, again, fine line between design and marketing. But it’s always interesting for us. I mean, we’ve worked with reclaimed water tanks out of Manhattan or distillery beams out of burnt down Jack Daniels distillery that we get the building material out of. It’s always interesting to have a story. I think the ones that are mattering most now to our clients are the ones that we built with them.

Kenn • 01:02:17
So I think this is a perfect place to kind of pat ourselves on the back for bringing this whole thing full circle. Because maybe the most American thing, North American thing about North American produced flooring are the stories we can tell about where the designs come from and really make it relatable and in some cases directly relatable to the customers own manufacturing us. We’ve kind of hit our time limit here guys. Darius, thank you so much for co-hosting. I had time to get a haircut and a pedicure. No, I appreciate it. I really love the energy between you guys. Any final thoughts before we sign off and go to print?

Darius • 01:02:59
I just want to say, damn, you, I feel like you’ve educated me. I love it when I speak to somebody and I come out knowing more, understanding more, changing the way I was looking at something. And I got all of that from your conversation about design development and everything like that. So to me, I’m going to chase you down because I got to learn more from you at some point. But I mean, there was just a lot, you noticed it was a rich conversation thanks to you. And I’m really grateful to have had the opportunity.

Peter • 01:03:36
Well, I appreciate that. Same. And love to have you up, you know, if you’re not far away. So anytime you want to make some time to come up, see what we do, see the studio, see the manufacturing facilities, it’s great. It’s a nice place to be. It’s a nice place to visit. So love to have you guys come up and spend some time. I’ll be there.

Kenn • 01:04:09
Thank you so much for joining us. We hope you can prove your material like you by a point or two. This has been a production of Material Intelligence LLC. All rights reserved.

Darius • 01:04:25
I never have enough of a chance to speak about design. I write about it a lot, I try and cover all the trends and everything, but to speak to folks who are right in the middle of it, who know a whole lot, that’s valuable. And so I really appreciate the opportunity to learn more about the design process and all the technical elements involved.