Evidence that comes off the order, not out of a filing cabinet
Flooring is a construction product, and the paperwork behind it is getting heavier from both London and Brussels. We hold it as data against the roll, traced back to the plant and the dye lot.
We are rarely the regulated party
Manufacturers and suppliers carry product compliance. Retailers carry the consumer-facing duties. A marketplace in the middle carries almost none of it directly, and any platform telling you it makes you compliant is selling something it cannot deliver.
What a marketplace can do is hold the evidence where the transaction already is. The order knows the product, the batch, the supplier and the delivery. Attaching provenance to that record costs nothing extra at the moment of trade, and answers the question months later when a tender, an auditor or a complaint asks it.
That is the whole claim. Compliance as infrastructure rather than compliance as a service.
Where a cut came from
No industry standard exists for this. Single-company systems track it proprietarily, nothing crosses a company boundary, and that is why a complaint about a carpet fitted last spring usually ends in a conversation nobody can settle with evidence.
Every roll and every cut is identified by its canonical product, its batch or dye lot, and a reference to the roll it came from. Cuts inherit that genealogy. A complaint traces back through the stockist to the plant and the batch that made it, and two cuts for one room can be proven to share a dye lot rather than hoped to.
Identity on GS1
GTIN for the product, the manufacturer's batch or lot for the dye batch, SSCC for logistic units. We are not inventing identifiers where a global scheme exists and manufacturers already print it.
Origin of the roll
Manufacturer, plant and date produced, held against the mother roll rather than looked up later from a supplier who may no longer stock it.
Timber due diligence
An EU Deforestation Regulation reference against wood products. The rule is per material class: wood cannot reach certified conformance without it.
Resin origin
An attestation against vinyl. Same rule, same consequence: vinyl cannot certify without one.
Environmental declarations
An EPD reference on the roll, so a carbon figure for an order can inherit a real product declaration rather than being estimated from a category average.
Absence is reported, never papered over
Where provenance is missing, the record says provenance: unknown and the conformance check counts it as a gap. A platform that quietly fills blanks is worse than one that has none.
The demands are getting heavier, from both directions
None of this binds a business our size directly. All of it lands on our counterparties, and their obligations cascade down the chain as data demands nobody in flooring can currently answer.
- EU Deforestation Regulation. Wood and laminate need an origin trail. A reference held against the roll at the point of supply is the difference between answering and starting an investigation.
- Digital Product Passports. The EU's ESPR regime lists construction products among its priority categories. The genealogy above is substantially that passport data already, which makes the regulation a deadline rather than a rebuild.
- Scope 3 reporting. Large distributors, buying groups and commercial-tender clients need product- and delivery-level environmental data. They are asking their suppliers for it now, and most of those suppliers cannot produce it.
- Chemical restrictions with dates on them. REACH (EU) 2023/2055 bans polymeric infill for synthetic sports surfaces from 17 October 2031, and composition is held per product so the question is answerable before the deadline rather than after it.
The one that lands on the retailer
Most compliance in this trade sits upstream with manufacturers. Making Tax Digital is the exception, and it is live. Since 6 April 2026 a sole trader with qualifying income over £50,000 has had to keep digital records and report to HMRC quarterly. The threshold falls to £30,000 in April 2027 and £20,000 in April 2028. A large share of flooring retailers trade unincorporated, so this reaches a lot of our customers directly.
Floorfilment is not accounting software and files nothing to HMRC. Anyone telling you their marketplace makes you MTD compliant is overselling it.
What the platform does is keep the purchase side as digital records from the start — every order, every invoice, the goods and fitting split, each reconciled against what was agreed when the order was placed. That hands cleanly to whichever MTD-compatible package a retailer files with. The alternative is retyping a shoebox of supplier invoices four times a year instead of once.
Provenance only travels if everyone uses the same words
Chain of custody is a cross-company problem, and cross-company problems need a shared vocabulary. The American trade has fcB2B for this, governed under the World Floor Covering Association, with messages for stock, price, order status and reservation. The UK has no equivalent body and no equivalent message set, so every integration here is bespoke and every integration is paid for twice.
Floorfilment is drafting an open UK flooring data standard and running as its reference implementation. It covers product identity and the arithmetic this trade actually uses (linear-metre cuts, roll width, pattern repeat), along with stock and reservation messages, the documents from order to invoice, the certificates behind a product, and the roll genealogy above. Custody moves as EPCIS 2.0 events, so each party publishes its own without exposing its systems to anyone else.
It is published as JSON Schema, an OpenAPI description and webhook contracts, under a permissive licence. A wholesaler integrating with Floorfilment is, identically, adopting the standard. We are aware that hands something to competitors: a rival adopting it strengthens a category we already operate in, and a standard nobody else can use is a proprietary format with better marketing.
fcB2B standardised the pipes and never operated anything over them. We intend to do both, so the standard is proven on live trade before anyone else is asked to adopt it.
A standard whose author claims to follow it is worth nothing. The platform runs a conformance check against the published rules on live data and reports what it finds, including what it fails. Today that check reports real gaps and says so rather than rounding up.
What is built, and what is specified
Everything above this section describes what the platform holds today. The rest of the compliance map is designed and scheduled, and has not been built. We would rather you read that here than discover it during a tender.
Declarations of Performance
UK construction products rules require a DoP for harmonised flooring under EN 14041. The intended behaviour is to require one per product and refuse to list without it. Specified, not built.
Fire classification
The EN 13501-1 class that decides most commercial and contract work, as a structured attribute you can filter on, with commercial orders flagged when it is missing. Specified, not built.
Certificate registry
Formaldehyde class, VOC limits, REACH restrictions and FSC or PEFC chain-of-custody numbers, held with expiry dates and chased before they lapse. Specified, not built.
Per-order carbon statements
The EPD reference is on the roll today. Turning that plus the delivery leg into a statement a retailer can attach to a tender is the next step, and is not yet there.
Packaging EPR reporting
Generated from order and shipment records, and close to free once the logistics data exists. It only becomes our obligation if we place packaging on the market ourselves.
Building against it, or want a say in it?
We would rather hear from wholesalers, software vendors and trade bodies now, while the draft can still change.
Get in touch