How We're Innovating The Timber Flooring Industry

So often people ring and they ask, you know, how does your floorboard or how does your company differ from the competitors and what they're selling? Because you guys seem to be more expensive. And I'll say, yeah, naturally. I think the best thing to do is actually come down and experience it for yourself. But the approach or the heart that we take when we manufacture or introduce a floorboard is that the floorboard needs to not only be beautiful for life, but it actually has to be sustainable, responsible. And we do that by using a technology where we use the same timber or from the same log is used through the whole floorboard. So we're able to keep the floorboard fundamentally very flat. It doesn't shrink a cup like solid timbers do. But it's not like 20 or 30% of hardwood and then cheap timbers underneath, which is what we're seeing the whole industry is going to cheap. It's like a race to the bottom where nobody's actually saying, well, how can we produce the most outstanding floorboard? Which was always traditionally thought to be done where you put a solid timber floorboard and you sand it and polish it. And six weeks later, you have this beautiful floor. But you waste a lot of timber when you use solid timber. Because what do you do with the low grade? What do you do with the short pieces? What do you do with the rest of the log? Often, a solid timber floor will waste up to 70% of that timber log. With the technology we're using, we use the entire log. And even the sawdust that comes off the blades, we use very thin blades to cut it into thin sections. The sawdust is actually used to heat the kilns to dry the timber to age and condition it so that you have a beautiful kiln-dried, aged, wide product that lasts you a lifetime. It looks amazing. I'm often asked, why do you call yourself Lifewood? And I think that when I reflect on that, it really comes down to the fact that we're very passionate about the whole experience that the customer has. And we're very passionate about the whole process. For example, there's not too many people in this industry that, personally, the boss or the founder will go and source the most sustainable logs. They'll design their own floorboard. They'll systemise the entire business so that it's got flow and consistency. They'll handpick all of their tradesmen so that they have great values, great morals and great skills. All the staff are extraordinarily customer-focused and family-orientated people. And what that does is it manifests for the customer as this beautiful experience. So not only do they get a beautiful floor that looks good for life, but the feeling that they have about their floor is also beautiful. At Lifewood, we know we've done our job well. When we hear from you and hear that every time you wake up in the morning or you come home from work and you walk on your floor, that you feel incredibly proud of what you have created.