Printing flooring offers huge scope – but not just for printers. Flooring specialists too can see opportunities and are getting in on the act, so are there lessons you can learn from them?
Twenty years after it was founded, German-based laminate flooring business Falquon has been revitalised by a management team with an innovative business model that revolves around the purchase of an Océ Arizona UV flatbed printer from Canon.
Directors Martin Prager and Alexander Grafenauer, who took over the company three years ago, saw potential to revolutionise the commercial and domestic flooring industry by developing more niche products and taking a more bespoke approach. The result – an online bespoke flooring offering (at www.falquon.de) that allows clients to incorporate a library image or one of their own.
“In just a year since we launched the service, the take-up of personalised flooring products has been phenomenal,” observes Prager. “Right now, private clients probably only make up one fifth of our business, but the desire to individualise home design has huge momentum. We definitely see this segment becoming far more significant as more private clients embrace the Internet as a tool for commissioning bespoke elements for their homes.”
Falquon’s first step was to focus on high gloss floor coverings to attract a client base of high-end interior designers and architects looking for a floor with the ‘wow’ factor. Having seen the positive impact of this specialisation on the business, they then set themselves the goal of introducing a range of unusual single colour laminate flooring. Anticipating growing demand for more personalised interiors, the pair also wanted to give clients the option to create floors featuring individual images or logos.
“Our mission was to make personalised flooring a reality for areas as small as 15m2, making them achievable for domestic clients,” recalls Prager." To help realise this, he and Grafenauer looked at various wide-format print solutions before opting for the Océ Arizona because, as he explains: “Regardless of the design, we expect the total effect of any of our floors to be immaculate. This is particularly challenging for floors using a single photographic image across the whole area. Because of the way the individual flooring panels are cut and joined together, we needed to develop a very sophisticated software solution that would take the original image and prepare it in such a way for printing across the component floor panels, so that the individual pieces of the image ‘puzzle’ join together seamlessly and without any compromise to the image. Happily, the optical quality of the photo floors we can deliver using the Océ Arizona is extremely good.”
With the ability to reproduce well in excess of 200 specific colours digitally on the Océ Arizona printer, Falquon’s Colorita range of flooring has put the company at the forefront of the trend. “It’s not only a domestic design trend”, emphasises Prager. “Single colour flooring is also a hit for commercial clients, for example for showrooms or exhibition spaces, where the scope to reproduce a corporate colour across a large floor area is appealing. This product is driving notable growth in our corporate client base, and with stand builders.”
The company is also using the Océ Arizona to produce its Magnus range, a clickable, laminated tile, which comes in two formats (wood and stone) and is optimised for wet areas, giving customers a customisable, printed floor that is water resistant, but warm underfoot.
From its production facility in Pritzwalk in north-east Germany, Falquon is now sending digitally printed laminate floors to customers in 28 countries, balancing the needs of individual clients with volume orders for household names in the DIY sector, such as B&Q.? Two years after its installation, the Océ Arizona is now printing 2,000m2 (the equivalent of more than 10,000 Colorita tiles, for example) a week at peak times. And under its new management team, the Falquon workforce has expanded by 20% to meet the growing demand, and adding further production capacity has become a priority for the business.
“Though the learning curve may be steep we’ve learned just what is possible with the right technology and the right partner. Over the last two years, digital print has helped us to achieve a unique position in the premium laminate flooring market,” concludes Prager. “We’re so excited about the potential of this business.”