Striped carpet has become very popular over the last year or so, particularly in the higher end carpet world. Kersaint Cobb’s lovely ‘Beach Hut’ and Crucial Trading’s ‘Mississippi’ and ‘Audrey’ have defintely made their mark.
The lower end has been starved of anything fun and funky like that until now with Balta releasing an intriguing looking new range called ‘Funky Stripes’ in a lightish weight poylpropylene (around 18oz I beleive) and on a felt back:
As you can see, it’s vibrant and has a clear accent on ‘fun’ to help the limping ‘funonthefloor’ campaign. It looks like a dead cert seller to me for kids’ bedrooms and at a retail price of £8-£12 per metre, it should find a healthy place in the market.
We are selling a whole lot more in the way of colour this year, with ranges like ‘Fusion’ by Balta and ‘Carousel’ by Condor doing especially well for us – noticeably in kids’ rooms.
Interestingly we are also beginning to notice that customers are coming in to carpet their ‘games room’. Often youngish couples who buy a house with more bedrooms than they need seek to turn one of them into what is essentially a play room for adults to Wii, XBox or generally pretend they are still kids! Nice work if you can get it and I’ve already recommended some nice carpet to customers who use Wii Fit (laminate may well prove harsh on hips and knee joints in the long run!) extensively – oh how the trade has changed!
Anyway, back to this carpet. We are still waiting to see the full colour bank, but let’s hope the promotion material supplied so far is just a taste of better things. Well done Balta I say.
Harrogate Show is now on by the way (biggest national flooring show) and I’m not there. To all who are attending, have fun and don’t forget to bag enough free pens to last you through the year.
UK Flooring Blog 