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Record breakers
Tony Griffin (centre left) and son Anthony (centre) with some of the Woolton team
Woolton Carpets is marking a major milestone after a record year Woolton Carpets celebrated its 60th anniversary In March, six decades after the Incredible Hunk debuted and the Beatles made their first radio broadcast. It’s a fitting anniversary, on the back of a record performance for the 18,000sqft Garston, Liverpool retailer, which started out selling rugs and whipped carpet. Tony Griffin, Woolton md, joined from school in 1975, before taking control of the business in 1992 as its founder retired. His son Anthony joined in 2018 after serving the company as a fitter. ‘We’re backed with about a thousand rolls of carpet. So from the corner shop, this is where we have ended up. We are powering through, going from strength to strength: last year was the best we’ve ever had. It wasn’t the norm – we broke the norm – but lots of others also had a good time,’ says Griffin, describing the 25% increase in turnover It was not without problems. ‘When we were allowed to re-open, we simply couldn’t cope. We had to take a step back. We closed again for about 10 days to catch up and when we re-opened the next wave of customers arrived. It was relentless. And, something we’ve never done before, on 16 November we closed the fitting diary for the year. We’ve never had to do that before.’ The exceptional performance has continued into 2022, ahead of the
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Interiors Monthly April 2022
business’s financial year-end this month. ‘Where will it end. Will it end?’ says Griffin. With the cost of living increasing sharply and further tax increases in the pipeline, the timing of any slowdown ‘is the million-dollar question. I’ve asked people and no one knows. Let’s make hay while the sun shines. We don’t see any let-up. We deal with a couple of big housebuilders – they are usually a good benchmark and they are just building, building, building. Every piece of land in the north-west seems to be under development. They can’t build houses fast enough.’ Cormar and Abingdon are Woolton’s major carpet suppliers. ‘We changed our policy pre-Covid to try and use production in the UK. Satin Touch from Abingdon
and Sensations from Cormar are massive for us. The biggest increase has been in LVT. We were one of the first retailers to put in Invictus – that’s been a tremendous success for us. I think we had the third display stand when it was launched and we went all-out with the display. That’s part of the reason for the increase. On the back of that you look at other LVTs and laminate. The last time we went to Domotex you could see the amount of halls devoted to hard floors, so it was: “It’s obvious where this is going, we need to do something about it.” ‘Before lockdown we’d just embarked on splitting the showroom. We devoted about a third of the back end to hard floors. I feel that’s where the big increase has come from. Young kids now
