Economic Recovery? Not Yet. Maybe Next Year?

By Steve Getsiv, 11/01/09

Everyone is expecting tough economic conditions for building materials this winter. It seems to me that within the construction industry, the economy is getting slowly worse, not better. We are hearing about more people losing their jobs, and more companies going out of business.

We measure our web results very closely and this is an excellent indicator of how many people are actually looking for building materials within our main product sectors - Prefinished Flooring and Residential Hardwood Decking. We've been working hard on our web sites all year long. Our rankings on the search engines keep going up. But, our overall hits per day, week and month are relatively flat to slightly down. That's a bad sign. I think fewer people are looking for flooring and decking; fewer people are planning new remodeling projects; and, few people are building new homes.

So what do we do about it? We'll continue to push our marketing efforts as hard as we can.

1. We have a new flooring brand coming to market soon - this is very exciting for us and will be the first time we have attempted to push a branded product as opposed to generic, white box, no-name material. As soon as the new brand is officially released, I'll blog more. Can't wait for everyone to see the new logo.

2. We are working more Southeast Asian decking species into our mix - Our Nova Batu is a fantastic Red Balau / Dark Red Meranti product. We just completed brochures for this program and hope to soon establish distribution on the west coast to compliment our established east coast distributors. Nova Batu Decking.

3. We'll continue to push our truck flooring programs with both direct sales and OEM sales. See our TrailerDecking page for more info.

Let's all hope that things start to improve for the construction industry by 1st Quarter 2010. Best of luck to everyone in this industry.

By Steve Getsiv, 11/01/09

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