Guarddog Mats Q & A

Guarddog Mats Q & A

By now, you should have received two A la Nood Guarddog Mats portfolios for Rib, Berber, Dotz, and Solidz. Being able to customize the mats, pardon the pun, “opens a lot of doors” for questions. We are starting to get a lot of positive response about this option and want to address some the questions we have received thus far.

How do I find out the lead time for a custom mat?
The mat’s layout has to be qualified along with the receipt of the completed purchase order and 50% deposit before the lead time can be determined. Standard lead times for custom mats range from 3-6 weeks. (All sales are final and non-returnable.)

What does the qualification process require?
• Artwork must be submitted to Rick Holsomback via email (rholsomback@noodfashion.com). The artwork may be drawn from hand, a jpeg file, or a pdf file. Once Nood receives the artwork, the layout will be determined along with the colors.
• The manufacturer’s recommended layout will then be submitted to client for approval and must be signed off on before production begins.
• The qualification process should be completed within 3 business days.
• Complex logos have to be qualified with the manufacturer. Any logo with more than 2 colors is considered complex, and would need to be evaluated and signed off on by the manufacturer and the customer/end user before production would begin.
• Not only will complex logos have to be qualified but they will also require special pricing issued based on the complexity of the logo that the design requires.

What are the edging options?
• For Rib & Berber mats, the only option is vinyl edging. The vinyl comes in two colors: brown and black.
• For Dotz & Solidz mats, both vinyl and serged yarn edgings are available. The standard color yarns used for serged edges are black, tan, and gray. This is determined usually by which Dotz pattern is chosen.

How do they make the logos into the mat?
These designs are cut using a precision water jet cutting device. They then inset the logo in before backing it.

Do these mats have a warranty?
Yes, they have a limited-time 6 year warranty. Please see all the limitations and exclusions on www.guarddogmats.com.

Who do I contact for sales positioning and coaching for Guarddog Mats?
Please contact your Guarddog Coach, David Sides at 415-533-1275 or davidsides@noodfashion.com.

Who do I contact for order placement information and custom mat qualification?
Please contact your Customer Service Representative, Cassie Peterson at 888-351-0306 or cpeterson@noodfashion.com.

Guarddog Mats

The Guarddog Equation
• Did you know that 65% of Property Managers purchase their building’s walk off mats between the months of July and September?
• Did you know that the average size mat purchased is 10ft x 12ft?
• Did you know that the average number of mats purchased is 2?
• Did you know the average street price for non logo mats is $17/sf and $23/sf for logo mats?
When I add this up, I get the following:
120 sf * 2 mats = 240 sf
240 sf * ($17 - $13.50) = $840 commission check from Rick!

Consider how many buildings in your area use walk off mats and how long it takes to drop in and find the Property Manager’s office. Here is the answer – They ALL use mats! MOST use higher end, high performance entry mats like Guarddog to protect their marble, granite and carpet, prevent slipping when it’s wet, and make their maintenance easier. In addition, any LEED building is going to buy walk off mats to get the easy LEED point.

For the second part of the quiz, we all know how to find the office. So what is stopping you? OK, so you need a good story.
Here's Guarddog's Unique Story
Guarddog is the only custom walk off mat that has 35% recycled content. As sales people, we all want a differentiator when we are talking to our customers.
Here are several:
• Available in any shape
• Available in any size
• 3 week lead time (competition on custom mats are 6-8 weeks)
• High performance
• 6 year warranty
• Competitive pricing
• GREEN (Did I mention Guarddog is the only custom mat program with 35% recycled content?)

Times are tight, the economy is still tough and not everyone is buying carpet. What they are buying, however, is mats. Here is a simple product to earn you easier commissions without adding significant time to your schedule. If you are already calling on Property Managers, take them a Guarddog folder.

If you have a friendly dealer that is calling on Property Managers, tell them about Guarddog. Nothing better than having more feet on the street helping you sell more. If you need help, call me and we can talk about who you can call.
I’m here to help!

If 65% of the Property Managers in your area are getting ready to order mats, now is the time to find them and present a product they are already budgeting and buying.

David Sides
415.533.1275
davidsides@noodfashion.com

Bounce Rubber

One thing in our industry will simply not go away, the need to drive healthy and sustainable building. It is one of the greatest initiatives on both the manufacturing and design implementation sides of the industry. With that said products that are made from naturally renewable resources and that contain high levels of recycled content carry tremendous force and leverage in gaining the support of your client base. Bounce Rubber by Nood is manufactured with up to 85% recycled content and is manufactured from Rubber which is a natural and renewable resource.

Here are a few things to consider:

• Bounce Rubber by Nood will help your designers deliver high levels of recycled content and contribution for Materials Resource Credit on any project they are working on.
• Bounce Rubber by Nood is a perfect fit on any Project… for example… on a Law Firm Project in Washington, DC 8,000 square feet of rubber was specified in the high density storage space. Every Law Firm has High Density Storage spaces, and the amount of commission you could earn on the rubber could in fact trump the total commission another rep earned on the carpet sale…. Or imagine if you happened to hit the home run and specify both the Carpet and the Rubber… Not only do you earn more, but you also CONTROL the project now with two products rather than one when it comes time to price the project.
• Recycled Rubber is a perfect product for gyms; however it is not only for gyms. Bounce is for break rooms, copy rooms, mail rooms, corporate break spaces, schools, universities, hospital rehab areas, nursing home activity spaces, and beyond.

Here is the straight forward deal:

Your designers specify recycled rubber…. And, unlike carpet and many other finishes in the industry, designers are not typically married to their ‘recycled rubber rep’. We all know that the carpet industry is king in the floor covering world, and relationships can be a driving force behind winning specifications and projects… With that said, you can use Bounce to your advantage… rather than presenting Bounce as an ‘oh by the way, we have recycled rubber’, set up a 10 – 15 minute presentation on Bounce and then use a couple Nood Carpet Products in striking bright colors for some pop and “oh by the way, are you familiar with our carpet line?”

Lastly, no product in our industry sells itself. Don’t believe for a second that you don’t have to constantly remind your design teams about Bounce, the levels of recycled content, our slick website, and of course the fact that Bounce is simply recycled rubber available as a roll or tile. Take a 6” sample and leave it behind in libraries out in the open EVERY time you visit… you will be surprised how many times a 6” sample lying around at the right place turns into a Bounce spec… You decide what to do with all of that extra money you earn from Bounce…. It’s yours to keep.

Good luck out there and please call me anytime that I can help!

Reade Palmer
Team Bounce
954-533-3272
or reade@SSquaredFL.com

Our Carpet Collections

We promised a little more on collections and here it is. There was a lot of thought that went into something as simple as the collections that we have come up with to segment and discriminate between products. Basic, Dynamic, Coordinates, Preview and A La Nood are the five basic categories that everything will fall underneath from this point forward.

Basic and Dynamic- These two will forever be linked for a myriad of reasons. The majority of our standard products will fall under one of these two collections. Basic being simple, small scale products that are more about texture than actual pattern. They will typically be sophisticated and subtle. The website does not do them justice in most cases and it is important to see them in physical samples to give them their due. Dynamic patterns are going to have more pattern layered with the texture. These are typically medium and large scale and the website or TRYKS is critical when trying to understand scale in broadloom and tile. All of the products in basic and dynamic are offered with eight standard piece dyed colors as “color me ready” and in “color your way” with BM paint colors as the reference for everything. These are all products that will be currently showcased in physical portfolios or they will be coming soon. It is important to note that in the dynamic portfolios, we always show a medium scale product on the cover and then partner it with a large scale pattern that is shown in TRYK form only inside. A lot of people are overlooking some of the larger scale products such as Wake Up Pretty, DC Metro and Southside because they are only shown in TRYKS that may get misplaced.

Coordinates- This will be our fastest growing collection in the coming months in physical portfolios and is designed for us to create unique groupings of patterns and colors that coordinate well together for some specific reason. This allows us to take very traditional challenges that designers face daily and create pre-defined packages that make their life easier. These collections are created through our history of collaborating with designers to solve unique challenges such as TI building standards, senior living rooms, high end executive suites or lounges or the new wave of value oriented carpet tile. While some of these will be simple solution dyed products with set color lines, others will offer some limited range of flexibility dependent on the category of product showcased. All Coordinates will offer multiple patterns with standard colors. They will be shown in portfolios and will not be shown with “color your way” capabilities on the portfolio but will be offered to recolor on the website if they are piece dyed instead of pre-dyed products.

Preview- This is the most exciting collection that we have at Nood and is designed to stay that way. This is a collection of patterns that have been created in collaboration with our clients. We respond daily to unique design requests to create new patterns for a specific project. The inspiration could be anything from an oak tree to a parking space. We typically design these patterns to work within our existing un-manufacturing system that allows maximum flexibility based on the short order cook philosophy. If the pattern is approved, we get the design firms approval and immediately launch it on Preview for the world to consider as an option for their next project with 1% of the revenue from that next project going to the charity of the original design firm’s choice. This is our way of outsourcing design to our clients and in turn giving back a real-time glimpse at what is hot and current. Don’t forget that “fashion” is part of our name. If a product gets specified out of Preview frequently enough, it will be moved to either Basic or Dynamic and a portfolio will be created with the standard colors being the ones that have been previously specified by the marketplace. No one will ever know where the original design or colors came from but will have the comfort of knowing that they are truly current. If someone wants their pattern to be custom and exclusive to them or their project, we will honor that request and not place it in Preview. The patterns in the Preview collection may have certain minimums and that information is readily available and constantly updated as they mature. Preview has been in existence for three months and has grown by at least a pattern/week and that should only multiply as people become more familiar with our capabilities and we expand into more and more markets

A La Nood- This collection’s name plays off the sound of A La Mode but the definition of A La Carte. If we were a steak house, our steak is carpet in broadloom and tile on high performance backing systems with eco-preferable ingredients. But we are excited to offer some unique stuff that compliments our steak like Guard Dog Mats or is just uber-cool like Spork II and Spike. This collection is a catch basin for anything that we feel obligated to offer our clients. We are uniquely passionate about Guard Dog because of the critical role that walk-off mats play in helping our carpet perform over long periods of time while Spork was just a whimsical addition that has turned out to be our most frequently ordered product.

Fez & Read Between Portfolio

We are excited to announce that the next portfolio coming your way will be Fez and Read Between. Fez has been out there in loose sample form for a couple of months and all eight standard colors are available today. We can also offer “color your way” samples with standard delivery expectations. The challenge in releasing this portfolio has been the larger scale Read Between pattern. When we transitioned to Nexterra for our tile backing, some unique challenges in manufacturing forced us to reconsider the original Read Between pattern and make some significant alterations. Some of you may have had loose samples and several custom colors were done. We even processed an 1800 yard order out of Philadelphia that was installed months ago. We have adjusted the pattern significantly and will not be offering the original version moving forward. For most of you, this is a mute issue as only a few reps ever got their hands on the original. If you have questions, please feel free to contact Lacy Price.

Un-Manufacturer

There is a lot of green decisions that we made at Nood that get a lot of sizzle points. We only offer eco-preferable products and are committed to changing or upgrading the minute something better comes along. We only make carpet and samples when someone actually wants it. The natural progression was to encourage the designer to stop shopping and start designing which allows us to minimize multiple waste streams because we are making exactly what the client wants instead of trying to predict something as shifting as fashion. What does not get a lot of attention is the un-manufacturing philosophy that defines Nood behind the scenes.

When we proclaim that less is more, there are truly no boundaries. When we started Nood, it became clear that there was already way to much capacity to make carpet in the industry. Designers were not complaining about the availability of carpet, mills or the reps that visit their firms by the hour. The problem was that they all started to run together and that the experience often left a little bit to be desired when all the mud-slinging and price cutting was over. Nood did not set out to be another company that made carpet and then tried to sell it. Our goal was to completely rethink the process with the intention of being a green company that helped designers make the carpet that they actually wanted. The shift from supply to demand became clear early on, and it significantly impacted our fundamental building blocks from day one.

Un-manufacturing is a term that really holds two meanings. One is strategically descriptive and simply means that we want to avoid adding any fixed manufacturing assets when there are existing companies we can partner with to provide that service. This is a completely acceptable practice in the industry for all mills especially for specialty backing or branded fiber systems. There was a time when being vertically integrated was a competitive advantage but times have changed. Nood prides itself in outsourcing almost all individual processes and will prominently herald the quality companies that we are partnered with. Some people make the mistake of assuming that we are simply re-branding finished products from other mills. That is absolutely not the case. Nood controls every aspect of manufacturing from product development to shipping. We choose to buy fiber like Ultron from Ascend instead of extruding it ourself. We choose to have the fiber converted by one of many companies that specialize in creating yarn. We choose to partner with existing commission tufters instead of creating excess competition. We aligned with a proven dye house called Chem-Tech to provide all piece and continuous dyeing. We choose to have UTT apply our high performance broadloom backings instead of trying to do something ourself that would cost way more. Finally, we partnered with Beaulieu to provide our new proven tile backing system called Nexterra. This is about being smart, lean, green and nimble. It does not make sense to invest in fixed assets when those assets are readily available at a fraction of the costs variably. Beyond the costs, technology and chemistry is changing at an incredible pace and Nood wants to be free to support any viable new ideas instead of justifying antiquated ones because we are financially strapped to them indefinitely. The entire premise of Nood is based on change, and we are beholden to support it whenever and however it manifests itself in a viable form that is attractive to our clients.

Un-manufacturing also holds a very tactical meaning when it comes to the daily grind of making carpet once the designer as done their part. We proclaim to be made-to-order and that is true in every aspect. I like to draw a correlation between Nood and a short-order cook at an all-night diner. We keep all the ingredients in their raw form and simply build any combination from scratch once an order is placed. This is a huge philosophical differentiator that usually takes people a while to get their arms around. From the beginning, Nood realized that one of the most wasteful practices in the industry was the habit of forecasting trends and then designing beautiful products and then finally figuring out how to make them. At Nood, we began with the simple idea of developing a tool box if you will, a basic set of yarns that feed varying thread-ups on different tufting machines. By coordinating simple and routine schedules, we can create a vast collection of products and patterns that can be dyed to any color with no minimums or up-charges. The more volume demanded actually increases the efficiency of the overall system because it is based on a simple concept of leverage. While we offer and will continue to introduce products that fall outside of this system. The vast majority will continue to grow out of this basic tenet. One simple guide is that any patterns found in the basic or dynamic collections fall into this system. There will be more to come on the collections.

Everything about Nood is founded in a belief that there is a growing demand for new and progressive thinking that dismantles the long-standing and misguided philosophy of MAKE-BORROW-BUY-SELL-DISCARD that has dominated our society recently. Nood represents change but also requires change. Salespeople, designers and endusers have to change the way they think and act. I would argue that a growing majority have already changed or are very receptive but need to have their hands held early on. We have developed many processes intended to act as training wheels but nothing replaces outstanding service and attention from a knowledgeable representative. Hopefully, this dissertation will help you understand how to position Nood and respond to some of those pesky questions that come out of left field.

NOOD’S POLICY ON CUSTOMER TERMS

Our standard terms are 50% deposit at the time of order prior to production and the remaining 50% balance prior to shipping. We hope this is not too much of a hardship on the customer but obviously we will get complaints. The reasons for this policy are:
1. As a relatively new company, we don’t have payment history on most accounts.
2. Many, if not most of our orders involve custom styles and/or colors that once created, have limited marketability to other customers. Particularly the custom rugs.
3. Many orders are too small to justify purchasing credit info from credit rating sources such as Dun & Bradstreet, Experian, etc.
4. In this economy, companies that were once considered rock-solid are now in bankruptcy. Nood has lost more than it’s share of bad debt in 2009.
5. We previously factored our accounts receivable with CIT Commercial Services to reduce our credit risks but CIT itself is now under Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

However, even considering all of the above, if you have a customer that you have experience with or that feels that they deserve net 30 terms based on their credit history and references, then let me know and I will consider their request. The first step is submitting our new account form with credit references. We intend to be competitive with other carpet manufacturers so tell me if they are getting better terms elsewhere.

Rick Holsomback