We have sat on both sides of this order
Three of us are building this, from inside the trade rather than alongside it. The platform exists because all three kept hitting the same wall from different directions.
It started with a pad and five phone calls
A shop needs one roll. That means ringing round five wholesalers, writing prices on a pad, chasing whoever went quiet, and taking whatever date the last one offers. It is a normal Tuesday in this trade, and none of it is work a retailer gets paid for.
One of us runs a multi-branch flooring retail business and has lived that morning for years. One of us has spent a career on the supply side, watching demand stop at the edge of whoever happens to hold an account. The third builds the systems, and turned what the other two described into something that runs.
Retail, supply and the platform
The retail floor
A multi-branch flooring retailer, run day to day. Cuts, claims, fitters, margin and the customer standing in front of you. The product is specified from how that business actually works rather than from a workshop.
The supply side
A career on the supply side, and the economics of a wholesaler who wants to sell more without adding reps or opening more accounts. That is why the wholesaler side of the platform is built to remove admin rather than add it.
The platform
Thirty years of enterprise technology, including a $1bn cloud practice and $80m of regulated-industry delivery. A Chartered Fellow of BCS. The routing, the money handling and the compliance trail are built to the standard that regulated work demands.
The platform runs. It is not a slide.
Search across wholesalers, routing that picks who fills a line, stock reservation that will not oversell, the VAT split between goods and fitting, supplier scorecards, and provenance that follows a roll from the mill to the despatch note. All of it working, and covered by more than nineteen hundred automated tests that run on every change.
It is an MVP. It runs, it is tested, and it is not yet carrying anyone else's money. We would rather say that here than halfway through a demo.
The trade has no shared language
Routing stock between companies, and carrying its paperwork with it, needs everyone to describe a floor the same way. The American trade has fcB2B for this. Britain has nothing equivalent, which is a large part of why ordering here still runs on phone calls and PDFs.
We are drafting an open UK flooring data standard and running as its reference implementation. It is published for anyone to use, including people who never trade with us.
Pre-launch, and saying so
We are not open to public sign-up and nothing is billed. What we are doing now is signing wholesale supply in the North West and North Wales, so that the first retailers to order have enough behind them for the routing to mean anything. Delivery reaches the whole country from day one.
Names, photographs and roles will be on this page shortly. If you buy or sell flooring and this sounds like your business, we would like to hear from you before it does.