When Stanton Design emerged from the 40-year-old shadow of Stanton Carpet, it had some pretty hefty shoes to fill—but fill it did. The rebrand helped to reinforce that Stanton was no longer a soft surface-only supplier (with a bolt-on hard surface offering) but had shifted into a full-service, one-stop shop for old and new customers looking to make money with a variety of flooring options.
But how does a brand several years late to the game—especially in the case of vinyl—hope to compete in the heavily competitive hard surface arena? First, it’s all about who you know.
Enter Jamann Stepp, senior vice president of hard surface. “I think for me, having been in the industry 30-plus years and knowing what Stanton’s done on the soft-surface side, it was intriguing to get the call because I had wondered in my previous decade or so why Stanton had never gotten into hard surface.”
Stepp would soon be the driving force behind the brand’s new hard surface portfolio, which was fully unveiled earlier this year at TISE 2025. The portfolio not only complements the already-established high-end allure of Stanton Design but expands on it to include design-forward, yet accessible options for a broader customer base.
Stepp is no stranger to launching hard surface brands into competitive markets. His experiences began about 25 years ago at Shaw as the behemoth also made the move into hard surface exploration. Perhaps the most well-known of Stepp’s branded claims to fame is that of the unprecedented success of COREtec. And, of course, his latest being that of The Dixie Group’s TRUCOR.
Stepp joined Stanton in November 2023 and in 16 months has completely revamped its vinyl program while simultaneous launching a hardwood program and reinventing its sales force. Stanton’s laminate program remains strong and tile is next up on the growth train under Stepp’s leadership.
“The only way you’re going to be successful in hard surfaces is product and people,” Stepp told FCNews. “And that’s what we spent the last 12 months doing—creating a portfolio of products across various categories, which now are laminate, vinyl, wood and porcelain, and then we built the team as we were doing that.”
While product was reassessed from the ground up, the Stanton Design team took a long, hard look at its sales force and decided a revamp was necessary. “We’ve gone out and hired a ton of people,” Stepp said. “Today we have a team of about 24 dedicated hard surface-only reps. Plus, we have about 24 that are still selling both soft and hard surface. So we’ve got about 50 people selling hard surface on a daily basis. Before that, all 60 carpet reps were selling hard surface, and I use that term loosely. I’ll take into the equation that we had probably six or seven of those 60 people who were doing a fairly decent job of selling SPC, but overall no one was setting the wood on fire. It was spreading everybody really thin. So the only way to truly manage that is to have a hard surface sales force and a soft surface sales force. And all of this was happening simultaneously while we’re rethinking the whole organization. Now, Stanton Design is the brand in both hard and soft surface with dedicated sales teams.”
Revamping vinyl
According to Stepp, the first move toward success in its new vinyl endeavor—and hard surface overall—was a complete change of mindset. “If you’ve been fully submerged in high-end luxury for 40-plus years, when you get into a category that is infinite in the number of customers you’re going to sell to—as opposed to the finite number of folks who have the clientele that can afford $80, $100/yard carpet—it’s different,” Stepp explained. “So that mindset has to be changed. If we’re going to enter this arena and play in this sandbox, then we have to know that the volume, margins and everything else is juxtaposed to some degree. And not that the Stanton brand can’t and does not bring value and gets us that opportunity but in this sea of sameness, in this world we’re playing in hard surface, you have to really dial in.”
In order to accomplish that Stepp took a deep dive into the brand’s SPC offering and made several necessary changes while also introducing WPC into the mix. “What needed to be changed is that we were only buying SPC,” Stepp said. “What needed to change is we were also, in my opinion, paying too much to who we were buying the SPC from. So we’ve made some pretty significant changes in our OEM supplier chain. We are now sourcing from, across the board, probably 16 or 17 different vendors across all categories, including sundries. But when I got here, we were a one-trick pony with a one-trick pony supplier. We were kind of held captive and had all of our eggs in one basket, which is not always advisable. So I spent a lot of time bringing us new sources of supply and new film suppliers as well on the design side.”
Now Stanton provides higher-end yet accessible SPC and WPC flooring across a variety of options. In WPC, Stanton Design recently unveiled its Summit collection, a large-format (10 x 82 and 12 x 86), 12mm-thick line with 12 higher-end SKUs, which sit at the upper end of its WPC offering.
Then there’s Natural Beauty, Max and Luxe collections, which are 8mm and 10mm in our that range from 4 inches wide to 9 inches wide and lengths from 60 to 72 across those platforms.
“I see WPC coming back to be that more desirable, rigid, core vinyl product as opposed to SPC,” Stepp said. “SPC is not going to die. It’s not going to go completely away. You’re going to see thicker SPCs, 7mm, 8mm in thickness, holding their own and still driving a lot of that volume. The 4mm cores, 3.2mm cores—no bueno.”
Today, Stanton Design carries 36 SKUs of WPC and 48 in SPC via its new merchandising displays. The new XL Summit line will have its own display while the brand’s SPC/WPC will feature together on one “Decorative Waterproof” display for consumers to shop color first.
Hitting high marks in hardwood
In addition to its new rigid core offering, Stanton expanded its hard surface line to include hardwood—and is continuing to focus on that high-end Stanton customer.
“I knew we wanted a premium and upscale collection of wood across white oak, European white oak, French white oak, ash,” Stepp explained. “We’re looking at some walnuts, teaks and hickories for the second phase of updates. I knew what I wanted our wood to look like in terms of merchandising, and the fixtures, the look and the feel that we’ve got on the branding side—it all just plays into this big picture we had a year ago when I started.”
Stepp noted that the brand will continue to focus on that high-end market with prices between $12 and $20 for its hardwood offering. “We’ve got a targeted audience,” Stepp said. “I think, for the most part, that level of consumer has never really waned too far down the path of, ‘Oh, the economy sucks, and I can’t afford it. I’m not buying.’ Those folks have money. They spend money.”
When it comes to merchandising, the display will feature 36 hardwood SKUs ranging in design from the brand’s showstopping 11 ¼-inch wide with a 5mm color range in the 6-inch-wide and the accompanying 4-inch-wide pattern plank options, including chevron, herringbones, double herringbone and even black and white.
What’s more, Stepp said the brand is not looking to “blanket the Earth” with displays. “I’ve given strict direction to our RVPs to go out and target the right dealers for this wood program. We’re not just going to try to put a display in to check a box and say, ‘Yeah, I placed my 50 displays.’”
Stepping it up in stone
While Stanton Design is in ceramic and stone, its program is poised for growth. “We have a very strong business in porcelain that is very much limited to a geographical region of the country,” Stepp noted. “So when you start shipping breakable tiles and you don’t have distribution in regional pockets, it becomes a little more difficult.”
Currently, Stanton Design’s tile inventory is located in Pensacola, Fla., where Floors 2000 was based. Stanton acquired Floors 2000 in 2022, which is how it entered the category.
“So the inventory for all our porcelain tile, our mosaics, all of our decorative products is down there,” Stepp explained. “We can ship to roughly half the country. But we do want to continue to grow our porcelain business. We are going to continue to enhance it.”
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