See Our Floors in Your Home—Virtually

Rod Lorenz

Anyone who knows me even a little knows that I’m passionate about hardwood floors. I love how beautiful and durable they are.

I’m particularly attracted to the tradition of hardwood floors. They hearken back to a time before mass-produced carpet and other manufactured flooring products such as linoleum, when solid-plank hardwood flooring was the only option.

That old-style simplicity is right up my alley. I’m a firm believer that things don’t have to be complicated to be great, and hardwood flooring made from unprocessed solid wood planks is a perfect example of that.

What may surprise some people is that I also love things that aren’t traditional at all. For example, at Ralph’s I’ve embraced digital technology that improves our customers’ experience as they search for the floors of their dreams.

One of our uses of this technology is our new “see our products in your home” pop-up on our website’s homepage.

It works like this:

1. After you click on the homepage pop-up, click on the “browse our products” button or the logo of one of our manufacturing partners. On the page that loads, use the filters to search for a flooring style you like.

2. Upload a picture of a room in your home, being sure the photo shows the flooring well.

3. See how that flooring would look in your home.

4. Rotate the flooring in the visualization and change products until you find just the right look for you!

I think this pop-up tool is really cool, and everyone I’ve talked with who has used it agrees. In a way, because it’s so easy to use yet very useful, it merges my love of simplicity with my appreciation of technology,

The flooring you’ll be looking at is another example of Ralph’s welcoming of innovation. These are modern manufactured products—prefinished hardwood, engineered hardwood, and luxury tile.

There was a time when I would have considered these flooring options inferior to conventional solid-plank hardwood flooring finished on-site. That’s not the case anymore. Traditional hardwood flooring will always have a special place in my heart, but technical innovations have made it possible to offer manufactured products that are the best option for many homeowners—and that we’re proud to sell.

So, yeah, the perception of me as an old-school kind of guy is on the money, but that doesn’t mean I don’t value and enjoy the benefits of technology. It is helping Ralph’s move into the future—and helping our customers do the same in their homes.

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