What commercial brands do you carry?

The list first, since that is what you came for. On the commercial side the names include Mohawk, Pentz, Engineered Floors, MSI, National Flooring Products, Nextfloor, Tarkett, Armstrong and Bruce, and the commercial page carries the same list. Now the useful part, which is what to do with it, because a brand name on its own will not get you an orderable floor.

Start at the space, before any name

Nobody should open at a brand. Open at what the space does to a floor, because that decides the format, and the format cuts the list faster than any badge does. A room full of rolling chairs with a noise problem is asking a different question than a corridor that takes carts and a machine every night. Write that down before you look at a single sample, and be specific about the worst thing that crosses the floor rather than the average thing.

Then the format, which is the real fork in the road

Commercial work splits into a short list of formats, and almost every manufacturer plays in more than one of them. Carpet tile, broadloom carpet, glue-down luxury vinyl plank or tile, sheet vinyl where seams are the enemy, hard tile at entries and wet areas, and laminate in lighter rooms that stay dry. Choosing the format halves the brand list on its own, and it also decides which questions the specification sheet has to answer. There is no sense comparing a carpet mill against a resilient manufacturer.

Now the names get useful

Cross your format against where each name actually appears on our racks and the list gets short quickly. Mohawk, Armstrong, Tarkett, Bruce, Nextfloor, Engineered Floors, MSI and National Flooring Products all appear on the luxury vinyl side, so a glue-down plank or tile keeps most of the list in play. MSI also appears under tile. National Flooring Products and Nextfloor appear under laminate as well, and National Flooring Products under hardwood. Pentz sits on the commercial list only, which tells you something about what it is for. Mohawk has a page of its own, and the brands page lists the rest of what is on the racks.

Rather than guess a line from that, ask which of them has what you need in the format, the color and the traffic rating the space calls for, and somebody will pull what is actually on the floor. Catalog names in commercial lines run to hundreds and they are words rather than numbers, so a line name off a spec sheet is the fastest way in.

The step that decides it: the specification sheet

This is where a commercial job is won or lost, and it has nothing to do with the badge on the box. Most of these manufacturers build product for houses and product for buildings, often in the same visual, sometimes under names that differ by a single word. What separates the two is written on the specification sheet. For resilient, the wear layer thickness and the construction beneath it. For carpet, the construction, the fiber and the backing system. For tile, the wear and slip ratings. Those figures live on the manufacturer's own document, and they are the thing to ask for, because they are the only place the difference is recorded. We are not going to print a mil count on a web page for a product nobody has chosen yet.

What a wear layer actually is and how tile wear ratings get scored are both worth reading before you go looking, and what makes a carpet commercial grade is the soft-surface version of the same question.

Two things that get decided with the order

The first is the manufacturer warranty written for that product in a commercial setting, which is usually a different document from the residential one. It often carries conditions about the installation method and the maintenance routine, which means the way the building will really be cleaned is part of whether the warranty means anything. Read it before, not after, and ask what it requires of you.

It is also the document that varies most between the names on this list, because every manufacturer writes its own and no two of them write the same one. Two lines that sit side by side on a rack looking equally solid can set out very different conditions about what may be rolled across them, what may be used to clean them and what has to be recorded if a claim is ever made. So the comparison worth making at the end is document against document rather than badge against badge, and it is a comparison you can only make with both sheets in front of you.

The second is attic stock, and it is worth ordering with the original run rather than chasing it later. The commercial page makes the general case for keeping some back, and the version of that argument that applies across a portfolio of units is where it bites hardest.

What to bring so the list narrows to two samples

If you have a specification, a line name, or even a photograph of the label on the back of an existing tile, bring it. If you have nothing but a building and a rough square footage, that is normal, and it is what a showroom is for. Samples side by side under one light settle a spec decision faster than any catalog, and the commercial page explains how the project runs once the material is settled. Call 636-332-0654.