At a GlanceName: Gaylord Hardwood Flooring |
HF’s Andrew Averill spoke with Greg Gaylord, co-owner of Gaylord Hardwood Flooring in Tweed, Ontario.
You’re not a traditional retailer, correct?
Right, we do the actual manufacturing part of it, too, which gives us over 400,000 options that we can make. Our main showroom is in Tweed, Ontario, in the middle of nowhere. People are driving one to three hours to reach us, which is sort of nice since it means they’re serious about buying hardwood. We have a really nice location in Ottawa, which is a smaller showroom but higher traffic, and an outlet in Kingston. We also have an online store.
Greg Gaylord, Co-Owner
Where do you sell?
Generally within Ontario, but we’ve shipped a floor to Barbados once and I had to go down and supervise the install. Way back we did the Olympic village in Barcelona. We did a floor a few months ago in Nunavut, by the North Pole. Our business is about 50-50 between builders/designers and retail homeowners.
How are you different from other retailers?
When you go around to flooring stores, you’re forced to pick your floor based on an 18-inch sample. All of our showrooms have really big displays. In Tweed, we use vignettes so customers can see the wood floor with wall colors and furniture and things like that. We have a really good sales process for customers to choose a color and a species in a way that’s not overwhelming.
How does the process begin?
We have three big samples on the wall in our reception area of the different grades you can buy. It tells us the type of look they want—rustic, modern, whatever. Whatever they pick, it eliminates a whole bunch of options that we don’t have to show them anymore. If they like rustic, then you don’t show them the clean stuff. And then we ask what colors they had in mind. Next is species of wood, and we have sections with one stain color on all different species, so you can say, “Here’s the Toffee on hickory, oak, maple, ash.” They see the grain, and then we go through the sheens.
You have that kind of space?
Our showroom in Tweed is like Ikea, where they have the little yellow feet to guide you around, except we don’t have yellow feet. It’s about 12,000 square feet. We have all the different woods in sections. Everyone goes through our process because if they would just wander around the showroom, they can get lost.
What are your vignettes like?
Generally it’s a 4-by-6-foot area. The walls are painted and there’s art hanging. We usually have a piece of furniture in there—we have a really good interior decorator in-house. The furniture is small enough where we can take it into another vignette if someone says, “Oh, that’s what I have at home,” but they’re looking at a different floor in the showroom. They really help people visualize what their floor will look like.
Which store is more successful?
We find Tweed is more successful. People are driving far; we wanted to have something for them when they get here, so they don’t say, “Oh, that’s it?” They’ll tell their friends how cool our Tweed store is. These people are driving and have bigger projects and are serious. Whereas in Ottawa, there’s a Home Depot and Lowe’s around the corner and 10 flooring stores within a kilometer. In Tweed, people can be there for two or three hours. We have 15 smart TVs in Tweed to pull up our website and show pictures. We do a lot of educational videos. We have a pretty cool room with a comfy chair and a big TV, so we can throw videos on for someone building a new home about hardwood and new construction. In Tweed, people are going to give us half their day.
And in Ottawa?
In Ottawa, someone is at Costco and they’re on their way by, or they’re getting their car fixed so they decided to stop in. It’s faster paced and people just aren’t as interested.
How do you compete with the flooring stores in the area?
We try to be different. Everyone around is a carpet store, and they sell vinyl and tile and carpet and hardwood and everything. We pretty much say we’re only smart enough to do one thing, and that’s hardwood. If you want to go to someplace like that and buy everything, by all means, but if you want the absolute best for wood, come here.
What do you do to serve the customer?
For one, if you come to Tweed and go to the pub next door for a bite to eat, we’ll call ahead and put you on our tab. As soon as people walk in the door, we get them a coffee, bottled water or pop. People are blown away as soon as they walk in the door and get that kind of hospitality. We also have a lounge upstairs for our contractor friends with a pool table and a bar. We want to give people the experience that we’re different as soon as they get here.
How do you handle complaints?
Obviously hardwood flooring has its issues, so we really educate people on all that stuff. We never want to oversell anything. We don’t scare them about moisture issues, but we make them aware of it, so if they get a little bit of cupping, they’re not surprised. As soon as someone orders, we send them an email with a list of different videos we made. One is called “Are you ready for your hardwood flooring?” It features a little puppet that tells you everything you need to do before the wood is installed.
Tell me about your website.
My brother does it. He’s part time here and works full-time at Shopify, which is the website platform we use here. Shopify has a lot of add-on widgets, like our review widget.
How do you get reviews?
When someone says they love their floor, we reply and ask them to review it online and provide them a link to the review widget. We should probably send the review out to everyone who buys a floor, but usually we only invite those who give us good feedback. I’m not sure how effective the reviews have been.
Do you do any type of marketing?
We basically do zero advertising. Everyone who comes in here heard about us through word of mouth or a designer or builder sent them.
What about your social media?
We have someone internally who does posts with product info and things like that. She focuses on being professional and getting the relevant information out to people. Any of the stupid stuff is usually me. We want to show people we’re a serious company and we take what we do seriously, but we’re also real people. We did one silly thing last year. You know on Jimmy Kimmel, the mean tweets? We did a video like that where we read mean tweets about us because our last name is Gaylord.
