FCW’s Amy Rush-Imber and Charlton Calhoun met with the Karndean team: Jenne Ross, Noah Fulton, Bill Anderson and Kat Caringola
Karndean Designflooring honors its past while planning the future
[Export, Pa.] As Karndean looks to 2023 and its 50th Anniversary milestone, it will honor the values it was founded on and unique culture while investing in things such as inventory, design creation and its people to make sure it both services its retail customers and lays the foundation for the next 50 years.
“We are proud of the energy we put in our designs,” Bill Anderson, CEO, said. “We have to keep being the leader in design. The LVT market is here to stay and will continue to grow. Where we can be different is design.” Design, he asserted, “is the foundation of who we are and how we operate. That’s never changed.”
Investment & Expansion
Here in Export, the company currently has about 100,000 square feet of space that includes warehousing and offices. Karndean’s other two locations, in Dallas and Las Vegas, are roughly the same footprint giving the company about 300,000 square feet of space in the U.S.
Like other companies, it faced supply and freight challenges over the last couple of years, noted Anderson. But that has changed for Karndean and a walk through its storage space proves its impressive inventory position.
“We were healthy with the freight rate coming down and not having the constant fluctuations — that said to us we’re ready,” said Anderson. “In September, the warehouse was half full; October, November to December, we got two months of back-to-back double receipts. We were able to clear the back orders and get healthy with what is on our shelves. We are in a better position for early year launches.”
But having this level of product on hand wasn’t a reaction to the current market environment, it is simply the way Karndean has historically run its business. “The value we hold on to is high services level to fill orders quickly,” shared Noah Fulton, vice president business strategy.
“We are getting back to circa 2019 before everything went crazy,” emphasized Anderson. “Having stock to us is getting back to what we used to do so it isn’t a changed strategy.”
Servicing its customer is a key tactic of the company’s and Anderson noted, for example, that his office is adjacent to the customer service department allowing him to hear what is happening day in and day out.
With an eye on growth and being the right partner for the retail community, the company will be taking on additional space across the street from the current building adding another 15,000 square feet of warehouse space.
Sustainability is another area the company will put focus on in the coming years. A new sustainability lead was named for the global organization. Anderson said that they will look at what sustainability means to Karndean and “the whole supply chain,” noting that one component will be EPDs.
Global Design Direction
Right from its start, design was core to the company’s mission. And while it sources from five different plants around the world (a large majority of product is tariff free), according to Jenne Ross, marketing director, the company has newly formed a global product team that together are able to establish core principles around design.
“It allows us to branch out to other areas and analyze product and take calculated design risks,” explained Ross, adding that there are 10 people on the team across all business units around the world.
What it does, offered Anderson, is create a library of 100s of designs.“It allows us to lean on what we do very well — design,” he said.
What is powerful about this design catalog, he noted, is that it allows the company to go back and rework a design they may have passed over earlier. And because of that, he added, “The warehouse is all original product.”
The company creates the designs “the old school way,” he further explained. It might be a fallen tree, a plank from an old barn or a unique looking stone.
The company then scans and perfects the visual to replicate the original piece. “We feel there is a benefit to the old school way of developing design,” shared Anderson. “We’ve been doing it for 50 years.”