COOL Flooring (Pennsauken, N.J.), which stands for Close Outs and Odd Lots, officially re-launched at the Surfaces 2013 trade show last week in Las Vegas. The company was created by TW Flooring Group CEO and longtime industry veteran William Jopling to help retailers compete with liquidators and big-box stores while helping manufacturers and distributors sell their clearance inventory.
COOL offers tools that can aggregate value-priced inventories from manufacturers, distributors and dealers that enable retailers to then easily offer those inventories to their customers.
At the time of its launch, the company simply offered closeouts from suppliers to its distributor customers, but demand for this sort of service quickly grew.
"It was a year ago that we showed the base COOL platform to our distributors in selling off our clearance items. We were then overwhelmed by requests by distributors to add their clearance inventories and to also incorporate the clearance items from their manufacturers as well," Jopling said. "It then took a year to incorporate all the requested features and tie-ins, and we are ready to service the entire channel's clearance needs."
Joining Jopling in this endeavor is COOL Director of Sales & Marketing Jim Claypool, who said that response to the re-launch at Surfaces was "tremendous." "Everyone saw the value in the program, including some retailers that stopped by. They were asking when their distributors would be able to offer this," Claypool said. More information about how COOL works can be found at www.COOLFlooring.com.
