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Who sells LVT, PVC, vinyl or design floors for the project market
ENDLESS OPTIONS PROJECT RANGE IS ALSO GROWING STEADILY Robert Siewes (Egger Benelux) ‘Egger floors are housed in a durable and decorative total story.’ The Egger family business started in 1961 as a chipboard factory in St. Johann in Tyrol, Austria. At the end of 2021, we see a big international family company with 60 different nationalities in 20 factories and 25 sales offices worldwide. Wood was the core product from the very start and this is still the case today. Egger continues to be a total vendor of wood and wood products for the whole interior. Floor Forum International spoke to Robert Siewes, sales manager of EFP Benelux, about the range of floors. We discovered that Egger has some big plans for the immediate future. In particular, they want to establish a better connection between the decorative products and the range for the floor. One consequence of that is that they also want to be increasingly active on the project market. More from wood Our interviewee comments: ‘Our company slogan “More from wood” summarises perfectly what our company is about. Everything that we make is produced solely with wood, so you won’t find items such as PVC or vinyl here because that would contradict our philosophy. Our philosophy also states that we work only with ecological products and give priority to durability in the entire pro-duction chain. We also strive to be the market leader in everything that we do.’ In the floor range, Robert Siewes refers particularly to the Design Green Tec and Comfort floor sorts. ‘If you look at Comfort, you notice that it’s based on cork. That is a product which has been used in the past in flats and deck floors. For us, Design Green Tec is mainly important as a floor which forms an equivalent to PVC and vinyl floors. One of its great strengths is that, despite the fact that it is based on wood, it is waterproof and can be fitted in wet rooms.’ ‘A central thread in the development in recent years is how strongly we’ve committed ourselves to waterproof floors, in combination with design. In that respect we are now a leader in the sector, as proved by a Nalfa study which we recently had carried out. After extensive tests, this big and inde-pendent organisation in the USA gave us the label of 72 hours of waterproof quality, something which is unique in comparison with similar traders on the market.’ Towards a thickness of 7.5mm ‘In recent times, we’ve refined our floors with product improvements. What’s particularly worth mentioning is our Design Green Tec, which went from 5 7.5mm thick. We opted here for an under-lay in cork and a somewhat thicker panel to make the floor more stable. We also tackled the top layer, so that we now meet class 33, whereby the floor is suitable for intensive commercial use.’ In the context of this dossier we want to know mainly how Egger responds to the needs of the pro-ject market. What we do know is that the company was particularly active in the residential seg-ment, but that is changing fast. ‘We’re moving more and more towards the project market. For that purpose we’re increasingly stressing the link to our decorative products, with which we’ve been working on for much longer with architects and buyers. What it comes down to is that we’re increasingly matching our products to each other and offering them interactively in a total concept. And so, we connect our decorative panels, which are not end products, to our floors, which are such an end product, so that architects can contact us for all elements.’ ‘We’ve tested this approach over the last year and launched it for the first time during the Pro Wood show in Ghent, Belgium. Reactions were highly favourable, and that has further convinced us that in the near future we can do a lot of good business by offering our total story! We were known in the project sector for the decorative, but not for the floors, and now we’re changing that per-ception.’ www.egger.com
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