Floor & Decor grew from a floor George West couldn’t find for his wife
A building-supply executive set out in 2000 to open a store that sold only hard floors, and stocked far more of them than a home center would.
Atlanta, GA
George Vincent West was renovating a home in suburban Atlanta, and he could not find the flooring his wife had in mind. He looked in the local hardware stores and came up short.
West knew the building trade. He had started out selling glassware, then joined his family’s company, West Building Materials, and eventually became its president. He had already been thinking about flooring, but his first idea was modest: a discount reseller of closed-out product. The fruitless search for his wife’s floor pushed him toward something bigger. What was missing, he decided, was a store that sold nothing but hard-surface flooring and carried far more of it than a home improvement center ever would.
That store became Floor & Decor, which West founded in Atlanta in 2000. It has been a public company, traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol FND, since 2017. Its history has two halves. The first belongs to a founder with a simple, stubborn idea about selection. The second belongs to a man who started at Home Depot at 16 and, from 2012 on, turned that idea into a national chain.
The idea carried a practical problem. A store that promised more choices had to hold more product, which meant more inventory on site and a building larger than the typical mom-and-pop flooring shop. West built for that. The first Floor & Decor opened in the Brookhaven area of Atlanta as a warehouse, its shelves stacked with flooring.
It did not stay small, or stay his, for long. By February 2003, as a second store was opening, the private equity firms Saugatuck Capital and Najeti Ventures had bought the company. West stepped down as chief executive after the sale but kept close to the business. He came back as co-CEO in 2008, served as CEO again from 2010 to 2012, and then moved to vice chairman of the board.
Under its new owners the chain spread across the South. By early 2006 it had 13 stores stretching from Florida to Arizona. The financial crisis squeezed renovation budgets, but the company kept adding stores, and in 2010 it was sold again, this time to Ares Management and Freeman Spogli & Co. By then it had 25 large-format stores in nine states.
The new owners wanted a national chain and, eventually, a stock listing. In 2012 they hired Thomas Taylor as chief executive.
Taylor had spent his working life in big-box home improvement. He started at Home Depot at 16, became the company’s youngest store manager at 22, and stayed 23 years, rising to executive vice president. After Home Depot he worked as a managing director at Sun Capital Partners, overseeing a portfolio of retail investments. Lisa Laube arrived the same year as executive vice president and chief merchandising officer. She was later promoted to president and stepped down in 2022.
Taylor’s team laid out a plan to reach more than 350 stores within 15 years. The company filed to go public in 2014, then withdrew before the process was finished. On April 27, 2017, it listed on the New York Stock Exchange, selling 8.8 million shares at $21 each. The shares gained 53 percent, the largest increase of any initial public offering that year. The same month, the company dropped its old corporate name, FDO Holdings, and became Floor & Decor Holdings, Inc. It had 72 stores at the time, from California to Pennsylvania, and with the offering it lifted its long-term target to 400.
The founding idea still shows in the floor plan. An analysis published on the Stocks Under Rocks newsletter in 2023 put the warehouse stores at nearly 80,000 square feet. More than 2,000 square feet went to 32 rotating vignettes, and the company develops its own racks and displays. Flooring is a complicated purchase, the analysis noted, and shoppers need to see it.
The person running each store carries the title chief executive merchant, and the company says it gives those managers room to tailor the product mix and shopping experience to their own market.
Behind the shelves is a supply chain built to cut out layers. The usual path for flooring runs from manufacturer to agent or broker, then to importer and distributor, and only then to the retailer. Floor & Decor buys directly from manufacturers and quarries around the world. The 2023 analysis counted more than 240 suppliers in 24 countries and noted that the company also runs much of its own logistics, including its freight lanes, importing and drayage. In February 2018 it opened a 1.4 million-square-foot distribution center on a 90-acre site in Bloomingdale, Ga., 11 miles from the Port of Savannah.
The first customers West had in mind were homeowners like himself. But homeowners often hire professionals to lay their floors, and the company built a separate business around those installers. Pros get their own desk in the store, free storage, a separate loading area and no restocking fees. A writer at Kairos Research who had shopped at Floor & Decor for years wrote in 2023 that when a store opened in the writer’s city, contractors immediately made it a regular part of their operations.
Executives have argued that the shift toward hard floors runs deeper than one chain. “There’s been a long-term trend over 20 years of hard-surface flooring, taking market share from soft surface flooring,” Trevor Lang, who held the titles of chief financial officer and president, said at the company’s 2022 investor day, in remarks published by Quartr. Millennials, he said, were now the largest group of homebuyers. “They don’t want the flooring their parents had and their grandparents had.”
The company sells no carpet. It stocks tile, wood, laminate, vinyl and natural stone, along with the grout, mortar, underlayment and tools needed to put them down. In 2021 it moved into commercial flooring by acquiring Spartan Surfaces, LLC.
By the end of 2021, Floor & Decor ran 160 warehouse-format stores and two small-format design centers in more than 30 states. At its 2022 investor day, leadership raised the long-term goal again, this time to 500 stores. In December 2023 it opened a store in the New York City metropolitan area, a long way from a renovation in suburban Atlanta.
The first store is gone. The company tore down the Brookhaven building in 2021 and replaced it with a new one.