Following a recent meeting of the Floor Covering Leadership Council in Dalton, we sat down with Mohawk Industries’ Tom Lape to get his take on the characteristics of the installation situation.

Several years ago, I was a witness to flooring conversion that took place in an elementary school that was carpeted throughout. The guy that personally oversaw this elementary school remake was Fritz Rench, chairman of Host-Racine Industries, a man that has also championed the dry side of the wet versus dry flooring maintenance debate over the years.

We had an opportunity to sit down with Brian Carson, the recently-named president and chief executive officer of AHF Products, which formerly had been the hardwood flooring unit of Armstrong Flooring.

At the Shaw Network Convention and at Surfaces, Piet Dossche, executive vice president of hard surface of Shaw Industries and president of USFloors, introduced COREtec Stone.

The multilayer flooring category is overrun by acronyms—LVT (luxury vinyl tile), WPC (wood plastic composite), SPC (stone plastic composite) and the like. Philippe Erramuzpe, member of the board at Multilayer Flooring Association (MFA) and chief operating officer at USFloors, has agreed to help us clear up the confusion.

Consumers no longer visit multiple stores to get acquainted with floor covering; they go online. Understanding and reacting to this new and different approach to building traffic is central to life expectancy today in the retail sector.

Dave Elyachar, the founder of Big Bob’s Flooring Outlet, has been an extremely successful and imaginative floor covering retailer, an innovative businessman, as well as a shrewd and visionary entrepreneur.

For years I've watched an industry where scores of seats in educational seminars aimed at retailers have been left vacant.

In June, the Supreme Court changed the landscape of online shopping in a 5-4 ruling allowing state governments to oblige retailers beyond their borders to collect sales-tax revenue from consumers in an effort to level the playing field between online and brick-and-mortar retailers.

We sat down with John Stephens, vice president of marketing at Shaw Contract Group, immediately after NeoCon to get a much-needed update on developments at Shaw and in the commercial arena.