The carpet industry has gone soft, but that’s a positive development for American homes.
“The new nylons that are very silky in touch have taken off like gangbusters,” says John Marr, vice president of marketing for Minnesota-based Carpet King.
In fact, these new “soft” carpets are the hottest trend in carpet today, reinvigorating the flooring that was overshadowed in the 1990s with alternatives like laminates and ceramic tile.
“At a national trade show for the industry earlier this year, about 85 percent of the carpet products introduced were the new soft fibers,” says Matthew Spieler, managing editor of the New-York based Floor Covering News. “The industry tried soft fibers many years ago. They were great and cushiony and you wanted to sleep on them, but they were not durable. Now, technological advances have made them possible. They are soft and velvety, but durable. They stand up to traffic and when you get up from lying down on them, your body image is not still there.”
The soft fibers include Shaw’s EverTouch, Mohawk’s Liss’ and Dupont’s Tactesse. In the Twin Cities area, for example, soft carpet prices start around $19.99 a yard and can reach about $40 a yard, with an average price of about $27.99 a yard, according to Carpet King.
The soft fibers came along at a good time for the industry. Carpet has been struggling with an identity crisis in the last several years, thanks to the huge popularity of alternative flooring choices, especially laminates, such as Pergo.
Laminate flooring is a material that resembles hardwood, stone or tile. In today’s busy world, consumers like laminates because they are less costly than the real thing and never need polishing, waxing or refinishing.
“We are seeing more growth in the ceramic and hardwood and laminate flooring, which has been a trend over the last five or six years,” says Julius Shaw, executive vice president of Georgia-based Shaw Industries, which manufactures carpet and hard surfaces. “Carpet and rugs are still by far the largest single flooring category, but they’re growing at a slower rate than others.”
The shifting popularity in floor coverings is apparent when studying new homes today, says Marr.
“Carpet is still the No. 1 choice, but it definitely has been attacked from all sides,” Marr says. “If you go to a model house, you don’t see a lot of carpet on the main floor. The public areas–the living room, den, kitchen and dining room–often have hard surfaces. But people often do want carpet in the bedroom, and in the lower level.”
It wasn’t so long ago that carpet was the flooring choice. By the 1950s, thanks to broadloom technology and the advent of nylon fibers, carpet became widely available and affordable, compared to the pricey wool carpets of the past. Carpet received a further boom by the building boom of post World War II.
“Everyone wanted wall-to-wall carpet,” says George Davies, manager of marketing and communications for Shaw. “We couldn’t make it fast enough.”
In this new age, carpet manufacturers have had to get creative when it comes to marketing. Lately, they’ve been turning to designer names like Laura Ashley and Liz Claiborne to boost carpet’s profile.
After all, if consumers are asked to give the brand name of a soft drink or car, they can easily do so. But that has not been so with carpet, says Kate Maselis, vice president of marketing for Beaulieu of America, a carpet manufacturer that distributes Laura Ashley and Waverly carpets. Yet if you know and like the name, says Maselis, “you will trust that brand.”
Of course, that approach can backfire. Shaw joined forces with Martha Stewart, the domestic diva who is now under fire for insider trading allegations.
Besides soft fibers and designer names, hot trends in the style of carpet today include Saxony, a plush-looking, luxurious carpet, and Frieze, sometimes called the new shag. Frieze styles are typically longer than the nubby, low-maintenance Berber that hit big in the 1990s and is still popular in many markets.
“You could almost call it a return to the shag, but better,” says Marr. “It’s not as long as your mother’s shag, but two times as long as what we’ve been selling. The fibers are very tightly twisted, so the yarn doesn’t mat as much as the old shags. It’s a very popular texture.”
“It’s a casual look,” says Vickie Gilstrap, director of color and design for the Georgia-based Mohawk Industries, “and we think it’s doing so well because the casual look is so big right now.”
Gilstrap says that besides seeking the casual theme, Americans have become more adventurous when it comes to carpeting their homes.
“A big trend is more patterned products,” says Gilstrap. “People want to personalize their homes, not have it look just like their neighbor’s home, and patterns are a form of self-expression.
“We find that consumers are generally more savvy as far as decorating now,” Gilstrap says. “With magazines, the Internet and the media, people are learning a lot more about decorating.”
Still, Americans have a long way to go before they become as adventurous about carpet as Europeans.
“In America, we tend to design with the floor as the canvas and the sofa as the artwork,” says Gilstrap. “In Europe, the floor is their artwork. They’ll use patterns and florals and they’re not afraid of using pattern on top of pattern on top of pattern. We’re a little calmer.”
That’s why, even though carpets now have a variety of flecks of color in them, beige is still king.
