Meeting Consumers’ Needs

Thursday, May 2, 2024

Coverings 2024 Brings Connections & Opportunities

[Atlanta] Coverings 2024 was the hub for the lates in tile and stone design from color to texture and the technology to support it. As well, concepts such as sustainability and global connections were part of the conversation.

Patricia Acosta, strategic brand marketer, MILEstone, explained, “Coverings is a premier show for North America, but it's also global show. It's critical for us to be here to share — our customers are here, they're shopping, they're looking to see what the latest trends and what's available. And then we use it as do many others to launch new collections. So this year's particular focus is continuing to support our commitment to sustainability, but then to offer our customers solutions.”

Marazzi’s Zellige Neo collection captures the colors of the moment, evolving the biophilic trend to its next level of warm colorful soothing blues, greens, beiges and warm whites and charcoals that capture the essence of the natural world.

Coverings is also the place to spot the latest trends. Marazzi and American Olean’s senior marketing manager Jessica Kwak reported, “This is one of our heavy distribution shows for the year. So, we invite all of our distributors to the show and private meetings in our space to show them our new lines and sell the new launches into their program. So that's our main goal: just to get everybody knowledge of our new products and sell them into more distribution centers.”

Connections Made

Alongside the new offerings and intriguing developments, the connections exhibitors make here help them achieve a variety of goals.

At Crossville’s booth, which resembled a home setting centered around an outdoor oasis, Lindsey Waldrep, vice president marketing, explained, “I really want people, as far as goals, to see how they can incorporate tile in so many areas of their project, whether it's commercial or residential. We think about Crossville in a commercial space, but our tile could just as easily be my patio or an outdoor veranda or multifamily patio. You could have two little chairs and table on your high-rise apartment balcony. It's more about just imagining tile in multiple ways than just a floor tile. And to also demonstrate how different textures, different finishes work in different places in different ways.”

At Crossville, Lindsay Waldrep shared the porcelain Argent 2.0 collection, seen here in colors Sunkissed Rose, Marble Faun and Golden Glow, enabling the consumers’ desire to not only expand into outdoor spaces, but to make that space their own through colorful accents.

Sofia Sabattini, director of marketing U.S., StonePeak, said the show was about building an even stronger brand identity. “2024 is the first year that we come to Coverings as the new Stone Peak. We had a complete overhaul internally and externally of StonePeak. We came with our new logo and this is in celebration of our 20-year anniversary. So, we celebrated that with our new look, our new logo, new products, made with a round of investments that we made in coincidence of our 20-year anniversary. We're very well known in the industry, and what we hope to gather is to strengthen our already current relationships with our customers and show that we're always looking to tomorrow,” said Sabattini.

Veronica Gripp, brand manager at Portobello America, explained the logic behind Portobello America’s art-gallery-esque booth. “We bring the products to life because then people can really know how it's going to work on a daily basis,” she said. “Even for the distributors, it's the way that they can have the repertoire to sell to architects and interior designs. This is something that we use in Brazil over our 45 years as a leader in that market. And it works. And that's what we are bringing and adjusting to the U.S. market.”

Offered Aitor Viera, sales manager from Porcelanosa, based in the Tile of Spain pavilion, “Our goal, it's always try to be attractive for both sides, both residential and commercial. In commercial and residential, we are expecting to have the same products like the bestsellers because it's a different market and probably residential is more sensitive to prices or trends. But for us it's all about being on top of the big sizes because we think that is going to be the new trend.”

Implementing Lessons

Exhibitors here also looked to address consumers’ desires. MSI’s Emily Holle, director of trend and design, shared, “One of the biggest strengths that MSI has is all these product lines we play in because we learn from ‘what's working in LVT, you can carry over to porcelain’. Or you know, maybe something in the quartz line is working well. So all these products should go together. [For example,] one of the first things we noticed when we introduced our Everlife LVT, was that the blonde colors, there's a color named Acadia, it shot through the roof. We went back and looked at our tile, we looked at our quartz, we looked at our mosaics and we didn't have any blonde woods, we didn't have any blonde veining in quartz [with] all this warm movement with brush brass and just the warming trend in general. So we are now launching White Hill, Cabana and more. Just [capturing] that warmer, very sleek, simplistic graphics.”

LATICRETE’s Spencer Maheu, senior director of product management, said the company brought to Coverings new categories and products it hadn’t offered in the past. “This is the first year that we're displaying in here with a fully functioning business where we're supplying distributors. Still a lot of people don't know about our profile, so we get an opportunity to touch on that and then talk about some of the other initiatives and products that we want to highlight here. And we're really focusing at this show on high performing products and high-end products that, you know, have been such a legacy for the LATICRETE company and brand for such a long time.”

Similarly, Sika looked to connect with contractors. Tom Carroll, Senior Product Manager, and Philip Hall, marketing communications manager – interior finishing, shared that the company is focusing on telling contractors and partners what Sika products are in store for the future such as waterproof membranes, which will lead to future product developments in the same category later this year.

Leslie Del Pozo, QEP Co., Inc.’s vice president of marketing communications, said Coverings is as a tool to show attendees how QEP is working to make their lives easier. “As a brand, we are here to connect with the installers [and share with them] a lot of the tools and the improvements that we have made, tweaks we’ve made because we heard what the installers need. And we've addressed these some of these issues to help them save time and make their job easier,” Del Pozo said.

McKay Ashby, account executive of QFloors, also looked to meet needs by supporting the overall business. QFloors said it is making it easier for companies to use and apply barcoding in warehouse as well as expanding its QPay program, for example. Customers who use Pay get access to a lot of expanded features as well, such as installer calendar. “The biggest problem of new products is the set up. We have a premium implementation package where we set it up for you.”

MSI’s EverLife porcelain tile was created and released to address a market need.

Tom Carroll and Philip Hall welcomed attendees at the Sika booth.

Numbers & Facts

The Tile Council of North America (TCNA) provided an overview of the industry’s performance, highlighting areas of concerns. Overall, during a presentation by Eric Astrachan, executive director of TCNA, noted that the ceramic tile industry is its second year of contraction, following the U.S. housing market, remarking “U.S. ceramic tile consumption in 2023 was 2.85 billion square feet, down 7.3 percent from the previous year.”

That said, Astrachan highlighted that more ceramic tile factories are being built and opened in the U.S., leading to imports getting slightly smaller (dropping to 80 percent) compared to previous years. “The 2.00 billion square feet of tile imported in 2023 represented an 8.4 percent decline from 2022,” reported Astrachan.

Astrachan also noted that, within the import market, India has outstripped Spain, who similarly had previously led the import market after China had an anti-dumping action brought against them. Astrachan remarked that similar action is being taken against India. On April 19, 2024, “Coalition for Fair Trade in Ceramic Tile filed anti-dumping (AD) and countervailing duty (CVD) trade remedy petitions with the Department of Commerce and the U.S. International Trade Commission, with anti-dumping tariff estimated between 408 to 828 percent,” noted Astrachan. He highlighted how TCNA was stressing this information, in order to ensure anyone affected would not be caught off-guard, as the tariff would be paid by the importer, and the coalition will file for tariff to be applied retroactively. He also outlined the timeline: “Preliminary anti-subsidy tariff will be expected in 4-5 months; Preliminary anti-dumping tariff expected in 7 months; and final tariffs are expected in 16 months from date of filing.”