DEL.ICIO.USTop Georgia Companies / Georgia 100
Interface: Ranked No. 8 among Georgia's top public companiesPublished on: 05/22/08
Ticker symbol: IFSIA
Where traded: Nasdaq
 Frank Niemeir/Staff | ||
| Material handler Al Spencer loads a jumbo shredder with carpet tiles at the InterfaceFLOR plant in LaGrange in 2007. | ||
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Chief executive: Daniel T. Hendrix, 53
Business summary: Interface designs, produces and sells modular carpet and broadloom floor coverings to the commercial interiors market in 110 countries. Brand names include InterfaceFLOR, Bentley, Prince Street and FLOR.
Hendrix spoke about the company's growth strategy and success.
Q: After five years of steady growth the economy started to slow in 2007, due mainly to a slump in home construction and a crisis in the sub-prime mortgage market. The economy shows signs of slowing even more in 2008. How has that affected your markets and strategy for growing the business?
A: We are a global player. Our business is 50 percent outside the United States, and we manufacture in four continents. Asia Pacific is 11 percent. Europe is
about 30 percent. Latin America, Canada and South America are about 9 percent. The United States is about 50 percent. We were tied to the office market in 2000. Our strategy was to lessen dependence on the commercial
market, because it's very cyclical. We wanted to move into health care, education, retail, hospitality, and residential.
We wanted to segment our core business – office business – and lessen that dependence. We have been successful. That has helped. We have grown top line
double-digit for the past six years.
We realized the office market is very cyclical and so what we wanted to do was to expand globally and to also diversify our market segments so we weren't
depending on that market around the world. The U.S. office market represents 22 percent of our total business. Six years ago it was close to 60 percent.
We attribute our growth to diversifying. We focus on the core business, and internationalize the business and get it into more emerging markets – India China, Middle East, Africa and Europe.
We became very internationalized in 1988 when we acquired Huega, the largest carpet tile company in the world, in Holland.
Q: What is there about your business or your business strategy that resulted
in a Top 10 performance?
A: We had the right product. We had modular carpet, which was really a niche product going back six, seven years ago. Now it's a category for the commercial space. You had a shift, and we were leading it – a secular shift to modular carpet over the last six years.
We were the first to introduce modular carpet in the 1970s along with a company called Milliken. We both pioneered it in the U.S. in the 1970s. You had a product category that really fit the needs of what happens in the commercial space.
Back then, in the '70s, modular carpet was in the open plan office in the computer rooms. A very functional product, not design sensitive. As technology has improved, you can create a lot more designs with today's technology. You satisfy designers' needs and you have functionality.
Q: One result of the mortgage crisis was a virtual cutoff in credit in the broader financial markets. How has this affected your operations or planning? How
have you responded?
A: We focused on the modular carpet to create a category, and we are doing it on a global scale. The one big part of our business is around sustainability. We are also the most sustainable carpet company. We reduced greenhouse gases by 82 percent and have about 26 percent renewable energy (We are using green energy in our manufacturing plants). We went this sustainability route after company founder Ray Anderson had an epiphany in 1994 about how to have a zero footprint for Interface. For about 14 years, if you look at our percentage of recycled content, it's 25 percent in our manufacturing operations. Our renewable electricity is 88 percent and we have recycled about 133 million pounds through our reentry programs.
– Tenisha Mercer
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