Thirty years ago, three industry veterans—Howard Brodsky, Sandy Mishkin and the late Alan Greenberg—got together and put a business plan together for a retailer-owned cooperative designed to give the independent dealer a chance to level the playing field against the larger, national players in the industry.
The year was 1985 and the notion of a retail buying group—be it a franchise or co-op—was a pretty foreign concept but 13 forward-thinking dealers liked what they saw and signed up. Thirty years later, Carpet One Floor and Home now has more than 900 members representing approximately 1,000 locations across the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand.