Karndean Designflooring Celebrates 50 Years in the Flooring Business

FLOOR ED

Bill Anderson, Karndean Designflooring CEO

Karndean Designflooring Celebrates 50 Years in the Flooring Business

As Karndean Designflooring celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2023, we move forward with the same passion to craft beautiful, innovative flooring designs that inspired young entrepreneur and former flooring installer Mike Walker to found Karndean Designflooring in 1973.

The Early Years

In the early days, Mike created a small business from his family home, with the home serving as the office and the garage as the warehouse. A very small team worked the phones, fax machine and lone computer to run the day-to-day business — all alongside the family’s trusty dog Smokey, the Great Dane who is still present on our logo today.

Mike traveled the world seeking inspiration for what are now the most realistic luxury vinyl flooring products on the market. He found a way to create more than just a floor, he created a flooring concept. With inspirational designs replicating wood and stone in endless combinations of planks, tiles, borders and design strips, customers were no longer getting just a floor. They were getting a designed floor that was unique, customized and personal. A Karndean Designfloor.

Seeing Luxury Vinyl Differently

Our original US facility was established in Pennsylvania in 1998 with 10 employees. In 2005, we relocated to the Pittsburgh suburb of Export, the location where our US Headquarters still stands today. We continued to grow and thrive, leading to the opening of our West Coast distribution center and showroom in Las Vegas in 2011, followed by our Dallas location in 2013. Since 2015, we’ve doubled the size of each of our distribution centers, and today we have 185 full-time employees nationwide.

Our global product design team travels the world in search of expressive and intriguing forms in nature to influence our floor designs. Every design is unique to Karndean Designflooring, and our network of retailers, each with its own story. This gives dealers a competitive edge against big box stores and homeowners a personalized high-end look. While design development requires significant time, research and investment upfront, we have visuals in our portfolio that were introduced when we started in the US 25 years ago and remain top sellers today.

We possess a level of experience and expertise in luxury vinyl flooring that only comes with time. This extends to the materials used in each layer of our products, from the clarity and soft touch of the wear layer to how light reflects off the floor, to the inks used within the print films themselves.

As technology has advanced, we’ve expanded from gluedown to loose lay and rigid core, making us a “go-to” supplier for premium LVT. From the success of our Van Gogh 20mil gluedown range, which put us on the map in the US, to being among the first to introduce the loose lay format to the market in 2011, to our first rigid core range, Korlok Select (one of the few to feature a 5G™ locking mechanism) in 2017, today our portfolio spans more than 300 products, from entry-level to premium. Our products not only offer the stunning aesthetics of natural materials and the practical benefits of luxury vinyl but also contribute to a green built environment.

Looking to the Future

Our products not only offer the stunning aesthetics of natural materials and the practical benefits of luxury vinyl but also contribute to a green built environment.

Karndean is a member of the US Green Building Council, our flooring and adhesives meet the strict indoor air quality emissions standard of FloorScore® by carrying a low Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC) test certificate, and our rigid core products are Assure Certified™ by the RFCI and SCS Global Services.

We feel so proud to have inherited this legacy from the Walker family. It’s our hope that we continue to move the industry forward in a positive, innovative and exciting way that keeps our customers, colleagues and communities at the center of all we do. ■