More Stripes, By Popular Demand

There’s been a vast upward surge in people viewing this blog since I posted about stripes in my last post. Far be it from me to deny you some more lovely striped carpets to gaze at! Here are some more:

Montana Stripe by Bajong is a revamped range that was previously a heavy, plain saxony. The thick, luxurious pile always sold well and with it being available in 4 metre and 5 metre widths, it was always a good seller.

A 60oz 100% polyprop carpet with an action back, Montana has now been relaunched with some new colours, but of course we are interested in the stripes and there are three of them in the range. Here is the best seller:

A lovely feel to this thick saxony and quite a bold stripe on both senses of the word. You should be looking at £18-£25 per square metre for this one.

Berber Ridge by Victoria Carpets is a very different animal – a sheep basically! It’s a 100% wool berber available in 2 metre and 4 metre widths. There is also a co-ordinating range of plains within this range that are available in 2, 4 and 5 metre widths.

Pretty much anything with the Victoria Carpets logo on it is a very well put together carpet and this is clearly no exception. It’s certainly a major competitor to Beach Hut and Mississippi and will go out between £20 and £30 per square metre.

Funky Stripes by Balta Carpets is one I’ve metioned numerous times and it gets the most hits of anything on the entire blog, so here is another image of a natural shade for you to admire:

It sells okay too and realistically you should not pay more than £10 per square metre for it. Carpet Right do promote this one and seem to be calling it ‘Trendy Stripes’ – looks the same to me though. They say the RRP is £23.99 per square metre – well you learn something new every day. I do wonder just who recommends these prices to Carpet Right sometimes because to be honest, I would be asking them to look carefully at them. Just saying… Of course I only want the best for them and I’m sure they constantly review their pricing. All I do on here is offer opinions and in my opinion this carpet is worth no more than £10 per square metre.

Another option, and always a cracking value solution, is to buy a wool twist stripe that a manufacturer has created using surplus wool. A lot of large carpet warehouses buy full rolls of this surplus stuff and the price is brilliant. You can very often buy a 40-50oz 80% wool twist for about £12 per square metre and that is just a wonderful deal.

The downside to these is that the exact colour combination is not repeatable and you can’t order exactly what you want. Mostly they are very narrow stripes made up of browns, creams and beiges and here is a cracking example of the ‘art’. This one was made by John Lanham Watts:

I love to sell this because the customer gets a great deal, we make a handsome profit and also the manufacturer gets rid of surplus stock. It’s win/win/win. I would strongly urge landlords to consider this kind of thing ahead of out and out budget carpets, especially if you are trying to create a slightly more upscale rental.

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I Got Stripes: Striped Carpets Saturate The Market

As I walked along my street the other day, the temperatures had soared and many of my neighbours had chosen to leave their front doors open and let some air in. Little did they know that as I am something of a ‘carpet trainspotter’, I would be peering in as I walked – not for any reason other than to see what flooring they had fitted. I realise this behaviour is not normal, but I do it in shops, pubs, hotels, airports – I probably need therapy.

Anyway, I digress. What I wanted to say was that within 20 doors, 5 of my neighbours, whose floors I could see, had striped carpet in their halls or on their stairs. Now that’s an especially high percentage for my totally unscientific survey, but I use it to illustrate my point – stripes are now everywhere.

I’d better review a few then:

Beach Hut by Kersaint Cobb is a good place to begin. It’s a high quality, jute backed, 100% wool berber available in 6 striped colours, as well as 6 co-ordinating plains. This gives you the opportunity to combine the two on say, landings and stairs and create an attractive staircase.

As soon as you handle this carpet you cannot fail to be impressed. The wool used in its construction feels great to the touch and is firm and very heavy wearing. It really suits a staircase and I would definitely recommend it for that use. The colours are absolutely spot on and this range, together with Crucial Trading’s Mississippi are very big sellers nationally. I prefer this one, but that’s just a personal preference – both are excellent.

You will find Beach Hut priced between £35-£45 per square metre and you can order samples online here very easily.

Mississippi by Crucial Trading is very much in the same vein as Beach Hut. Again, this is a lovely 100% wool stripe, available 4 metres wide off the roll, but Crucial offer 17 colour combinations (though no plains).

The carpet itself feels a little more coarse than Beach Hut and that coarseness lends itself to a carpet like this – a lot of people prefer that feel underfoot on a carpet of this type. Again, I would expect you to be buying this carpet at £35-£45 per square metre, although Crucial say £54 per metre on their website. Either this or Beach Hut will do the job beautifully, look the part and certainly bring some admiring glances from friends and neighbours!

I’d recommend getting some brochures – Crucial make the very best brochures I’ve seen from a carpet manufacturer, complete with perforated pages so the customer can place them on the floor and the print quality of them is perfect. Top marks for that.

Tripoli by Georgian is considerably different. It’s a bog standard 80% wool, 20% polypropylene twist with the distinction of it being striped rather than plain or speckled as most wool twists are.

This one is not in the same class as Beach Hut and Mississippi, but that is reflected in the price. At £12-£18 per square metre depending on the weight, it is less than half of the price of the other two and if you feel that your striped stair carpet is more of a ‘fashion statement’ than a long-term proposition then this could be an option.

The standard weight is an underwhelming 27oz and the (surely someone at Georgian has a sense of humour) ‘Supreme’ weight comes in at a colossal 36oz – ahem. The 36oz would probably just about do the job and save you some pennies and it does look and feel fine. It’s good to look at, rather than great but it does do a job for a price.

It’s 4 metre wide only and is widely available. You can find samples here.

Okay so we’ve had a look at two nice ones, one mid-range one and are there any cheapies? Well, yes of course. Balta’s Funky Stripes is a wild and wacky one on a felt back, but it is pretty garish. Probably better suited to the bedroom and not really destined to last that long. Still, it’s sold for under £10 per metre, so that’s not too bad.

There is a newish similar, though slightly more subtle stripe in the Headlam Group’s new ‘Lifestyle’ collection, called ‘Cosmopolitan Stripe’. It’s quite shaggy and best suited to bedrooms and a fair few of the colours within the range are ….. weird. Just my opinion. You can get this one for around £8-£12 per metre.

Timzo have come up with a felt backed cheapie, a little closer to Beach Hut style with ‘Inca’. It’s a narrow stripe in more subtle and natural tones than the last two I mentioned. It’s selling okay for those on a budget and like most of Timzo’s carpets it offers decent value for money. You should be able to pick it up for under £10 per square metre and of the three cheapies, I personally prefer this one.

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Altro Invent Retailer’s Dream Safety Floor

Sometimes sales reps will wind we retailers up a little with an amusing anecdote, a joke straight out of a 1978 edition of ‘The Comedians’ or even a tie that their wife bought them for their birthday. However, every now and then they will try to pull your leg about a product.

When I saw Altro’s new safety floor, Xpresslay TM, I was definitely suspecting the worst…..

Very briefly, if you don’t already know, commercial safety floor has to be fully adhered to a prepared subfloor. Damp measurements need to be taken and great care must be taken with the preparatory work. The vast majority of problems on jobs like this seem to occur because of poor, or non-existent preparation.

What Altro have come with here is a new safety floor that does not have to be fully adhered in the traditional way. Instead the idea is that you use Altro’s double sided tape around the seams and perimeter to stick it down….and it works! You would still need to fully stick it if very heavy items were to be rolled across it for example, but generally speaking, taping will work on the majority of applications.

More intriguingly though, Altro have developed a product here that can be fitted on top of old vinyl floors, so you don’t need to hack up the old flooring. This is because there can of course be no ‘plasticiser migration’ as they call it. There is no adhesive used that will interact with the surface of the old tiles – genius!

Also you can fit it on top of underfloor heating without even turning it off and also you can begin to weld it immediately. Add to that the fact that you can fit this product on fresh concrete that has a RH (relative humidity) of up to 97% and you have a wonderfully flexible solution that will solve a lot of problems quickly and easily.

Let’s step back from the technical stuff for a moment though and think about what this means. To me personally, it is a great addition because we aren’t specialist safety floor/commercial contractors – we get a handful of these jobs every now and then and this product will now be our first choice to show customers.

It means we don’t have to worry about costly and time-consuming preparation, moisture testing and it is quicker for us to install, so our fitters are tied up for less time. All this will translate into a better experience for our customer and a more competitive finished price. Sure, there are many cheaper safety floors around, but Xpresslay TM is not especially expensive by industry standards and its features and benefits make up for any price differential. If a comparable safety floor is £3 per square metre less, then that is going to be easily eaten up (and a lot more) in prep work. Xpresslay TM wins hands down for me.

For the specialists, it will be one of many solutions they offer, but to the many many retailers who do the odd job in safety floor, this is a dream product. Full marks to Altro.

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Sparkle by Associated Weavers

One of the most interesting new ranges we have seen lately has been ‘Sparkle’ from Associated Weavers.

This is a felt-backed shaggy twist with what appear to be pieces of silver foil in the design, used to create a speckled effect.

It has been received well by customers in our shop and we have been selling it, even though there are only two colours in the range ‘Black Sabbath’ (shown below) and ‘Average White’, which is more cream than white, but there you go.

I’m a little disappointed in Associated Weavers not trying to push the boundaries a bit and launch a full range of colours. Just think, they could continue the band names theme and have ‘Simply Red’ and ‘Deep Purple’!

Our samples say 4 metre wide only and expect to pay £10-£15 per square metre.

Realistically, it’s going to be a bedroom carpet and you’ll be buying it on how it looks and feels, rather than how long it’s going to last you.

A welcome departure from the norm – so well done Associated Weavers.

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