Greenline Carpets from Condor

Condor Carpets are launching an interesting new collection of carpets to be known as the ‘Greenline’ collection. Why do I say interesting you may ask? well, it’s kind of made from corn. Corn? corn??

I’ll let Condor blind you with their science:

“Condor Carpets uses the processed polymer Sorona®  from DuPont in its new Greenline collection. Sorona®  consists of 100% PTT polymer of which 37% is extracted from corn sugar.

During the production of Sorona®  30% less energy is required and the pollution emitted is 63% less compared to polyamide.”

Ah, so it’s down to DuPont, the masters of nylon. Good quality nylon carpets are very much missing in the UK market and if this new fibre/fiber has DuPont’s name on it, then it’s likely to be top notch.

There is a great video on the Greenline website in which a jolly Belgian-accented chap gets all excited by his wonderful new product. I shouldn’t scoff, it’s bound to be better than the endless identikit polyprop twists we see season after season. One of the things I notice when I head Stateside (okay so I’m weird and I go into carpet and flooring shops when I’m on holiday) is just how superior their lovely nylon carpets feel to our tired old polyprop – somebody really needs to address the lack of nylon carpets in the UK.

Anyway,Greenline promises softness, easy care and durability and let’s hope it delivers. I can’t wait to see some sampling.

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Campaign For Real Underlay Feedback

I often get a respsonse from people from flooring companies from my posts on here. It surprised me at first, but then there is virtually nothing else written about flooring in the UK outside of the trade magazines. The whole point of this blog is to offer my opinion rather than rehash press releases or just plug new products. Anyway, Interfloor’s Marketing Director, Steve Woodhead explains a little more about The Campaign For Real Underlay:

“I’m glad you like the Campaign for Real Underlay web site. It’s been very popular so far with hundreds of visits from the UK and overseas. An increasing number of customers have been returning to rubber over the last few months due to its popularity with consumers, its performance and its innate “sellability”. As you know there are a lot of people out there promoting PU underlay so we thought it was about time that the case for rubber was also heard so that customers can make an informed choice.”

And he does have a point of course. There are a lot of wholesalers in particular pushing PU underlay to independent shops, so why not promote and re-vamp the idea of rubber underlays? Interfloor have dominated for so many years now with Tredaire and Duralay beating all-comers.

So powerful is the Tredaire brand that it’s almost become a generic term for rubber underlay. Many of our customers will refer to their rubber underlay as ‘Tredaire’ even though it’s another brand (a little like Hoover did with vacuum cleaners) – now that’s a successful brand for you!

Whereas Interfloor/Tredaire have attempted to compete with their own PU underlays in the past with brands like Seventh Heaven and its Softwalk and Dreamwalk underlays, perhaps their focus is better served reinforcing what they do best. Not that there is anything wrong with Seventh Heaven and we used to sell a fair amount of it until our Headlam Group suppliers dropped it.

Let’s see how it all pans out…

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