Heritage
Online floors, before it was obvious
In 1998, Steve Simonson bet that people would buy flooring through a browser — not just browse a catalog PDF. That bet helped invent a category.
The pioneering idea
Retail flooring was local, tactile, and slow. The internet was young, skeptical of big-ticket home purchases, and short on logistics playbooks. Making floors transactional online meant solving trust, samples, freight, and product education at once.
We didn’t wait for ecommerce to grow up around flooring — we grew flooring up around ecommerce.
What “first” means here
First is a claim about pioneering transactional online flooring retail at scale in the late 1990s — a store where consumers could complete a real purchase of flooring goods over the web when that was still rare. The category has since exploded; the original instinct remains: homeowners deserve clarity without a sales-floor gauntlet.
Why relaunch this brand now
Because consumers still face a maze: waterproof claims, wear layers, underlayment footnotes, and infinite gray planks. eFloorCovering returns as a category-complete consumer destination — education, shortlists, and human help — carrying the 1998 name that started it.