Greg Wagner, a fixture in the wood flooring industry for decades, retired from his role as sales manager at Cascade Pacific Flooring in Seattle at the end of 2020.
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Greg Wagner, a fixture in the wood flooring industry for decades, retired from his role as sales manager at Cascade Pacific Flooring in Seattle at the end of 2020.
Wagner’s career in flooring began in 1974 when he took a job with Congoleum after graduating from college; then in 1976 he went to work for E.L. Bruce Company. At the time Bruce was owned by Cooke Industries based in Memphis, but the following year it was sold to Triangle Pacific. “Back then they were almost exclusively solid prefinished flooring with a couple SKUs of alternate widths and some SKUs of random widths,” Wagner recalls. The flooring was almost all red oak. “A couple products that were very successful then was Cathedral Plank, which was 3/5/7 with walnut plugs in the ends, and Westminster Plank, which had a heavy wire-brushed effect with hobnails that took the place of the walnut plugs in the ends of every board.”
In 1981 Wagner went to work as an outside salesman at a company that had been one of his customers, distributor Kelly-Goodwin, and he was the sales manager there until the company went out of business in 2012. Wagner finished his flooring industry career when he was hired by Enos Farnsworth as the sales manager at distributor Cascade Pacific Flooring.
Wagner notes that his longtime Kelly-Goodwin co-worker Keijo Hyvonen was a founding member of the National Wood Flooring Association, and he says some of his fondest memories in the industry are of those early years of the association. “I had a lot of exposure to a lot of the old timers; some of the early conventions were pretty special,” he recalls.
“I’ve been around this industry a long time and I’ve seen a lot of change and a lot of growth,” he says. “Instead of rail cars full of unfinished strip flooring, the business has moved more to the prefinished side; it’s less dependent on the flooring contractor and has become more involved in the retail side of the industry with style and color.”
Wagner had hoped to say goodbye to many industry friends at the NWFA Expo in Milwaukee in 2020, but the pandemic derailed those plans. “There are just some absolutely terrific people in this industry—when you run into them it’s like you just saw them the day before,” he says.
In retirement Wagner plans to spend time with his close-knit family, including his wife of 48 years, Carla, three children and seven grandchildren; travel and play plenty of golf. He can be reached via email.
Taking Wagner’s position at Cascade-Pacific is Sean Geoghegan, who can be reached via email or at (503) 867-0089.