While 2023 hasn't been the easiest year for the residential retail, remodel and replacement business, there are opportunities for companies who are willing to pivot and try a fresh approach. Metroflor President Russ Rogg offers insight into the resilient business and how multifamily, deep inventories, and innovative solutions are helping sales in 2023. 

Floor Trends: How is the resilient business? 

Russ Rogg: I'll admit I think that 2023 is shaping up to be a reasonably difficult year. I would imagine that's probably not something out of the ordinary from what you've heard from other people that you've talked to—and I don't have a magic ball to predict percentage up or percentage down or maybe how long it's going to be challenging—but I think it's going to be with us pretty much throughout this whole calendar year. 

It varies a little bit by segment—multifamily seems to be holding up pretty decent. Commercial also seems to be stronger, and that could be a combination of hospitality and corporate—to an extent. The residential retail remodel replacement business seems to be the one that's struggling the most. And unfortunately, for at least our company, and I'll speak specifically for Metroflor, that's where the majority of our volume comes from. While we have some strength in certain segments and we do participate in those segments, that's not where the lion's share of our business is. It's been a tough start to the year, and I think we're going to have to hunker down for the remainder of the year.

Floor Trends: What are you telling your customers? 

Rogg: One of the big focuses for us this year was an SPC launch product that we call Inception Reserve. We've put out a couple thousand displays in the first quarter of this year. I know our distribution partners are focusing on it, our sales team is focusing on it. We envision launching a spiff on that product line as a way to continue the momentum. 

If you only have one or two consumers walking through the doors at a retail showroom, we want to try to inspire and motivate and incentivize that the retail salesperson to take them to our Inception Reserve products and have it be top of mind. 

On the commercial side, we have multiple products that can be used commercially, but one that we focus on quite heavily is a 20-mil dryback product we call Déjà New. We have deep, deep inventories in that product line, both at Metrofloor and our distributor partners. We’ve been promoting that to contractors, such as Fuse. 

On the multifamily side, we introduced some new colorations. Our designer Natalia Smith met with multifamily contractors that excel in that space and showed countless new designs and honed the selections. This effort took place last year, and now we're launching those designs this year, and we're starting to see some traction there.

In the multifamily segment, inexpensive SPC products gained quite a bit of popularity, yet they haven't necessarily performed all that well. And so, we're seeing interest in five-millimeter loose lay products for that segment. But ironically, they're not being installed in a loose lay fashion. They're being glued down in those environments by the contractor. In the Southwest, specifically where we do a lot of multifamily business, we recently launched a five-millimeter loose lay product to take advantage of that. 

Floor Trends: How important is domestic inventory today?  

Rogg: Inception Reserve and Déjà New—those two collections are available nationwide, meaning that every single distributor in our portfolio carries those products, promotes and supports those products. We as Metrofloor back up those products from an inventory perspective. We have product that we inventory in Calhoun, Georgia, on one of our primary campuses that services the Southeast, Midwest and the Northeast, but we also have inventory of both of those products in California to address West Coast needs. There's no faster way to kill momentum than not being able to service those needs, and we’re in an exceptional position on both of those parts.

Read a recent case study featuring Metroflor's Déjà New SPC.