Six Key Facts About Wood Floor Business

Understandably, there’s a fair amount of confusion in the industry right now about our recent rebranding from 29 years as Hardwood Floors to our new, independent brand, Wood Floor Business (you can read our news story about the change here). I wanted to clear up some of that confusion and answer questions I’ve been receiving from clients recently. Here are some key facts about Wood Floor Business going forward:

1) Our products and staff are the same.
All that has changed is the brand name. The magazine, E-News, website and social media are all the same products you know and trust. We have exclusive rights to all the content we have generated since the beginning, which can now be found at woodfloorbusiness.com. While I and three other key HF staff—Editor Kim Wahlgren, Associate Editor Andrew Averill and Publisher Shawn Gahagan—were offered jobs at NWFA, we declined, and continue in our positions here at AB Media Inc. along with our extensive support staff for production, circulation, marketing and much more.

2) We are invested in the wood flooring industry.
We aren’t a huge media company that happens to do a wood flooring magazine. AB Media Inc. is a small, family-owned company that has only three brands, all of which are considered an essential part of their industries. AB Media’s owner created Hardwood Floors magazine 29 years ago with the founding fathers of the NWFA, and we have worked to help build and improve the entire wood flooring industry ever since. Our dedicated staff have more than 35 years of wood flooring industry experience and understand the unique challenges and opportunities of this business. As a now-independent voice, we will continue to provide the industry with unbiased, valuable content, while connecting advertisers with the most engaged, qualified prospects.

3) We are looking forward—for our customers and our industry as a whole.
No one in the media business is successful in today’s extremely challenging market by being complacent. One of the reasons for our continued success is that we are constantly updating our products to meet our customers’ needs across all channels, from print to digital to social media. As our marketing partners know, we are always open to discussing new ways to achieve specific marketing goals—whether that be targeting a very specific list with a custom promotion or thinking outside the box with a special cover treatment. We also will continue to tackle issues important to the industry; in our February/March issue, our theme is “The Next Generation,” discussing what the current labor shortage means for our industry. And our April/May issue will, as always, contain our exclusive State of the Industry statistics. What topics do you think we should be tackling? We’d love to hear from you.

4) We exclusively own our email lists and related data.
We have invested many years developing quality email lists for our E-News and Custom E-Mail products, which are a part of a larger data platform we have—and will continue to offer—to our customers. Currently, our E-News and Custom E-Mail lists each have more than 17,000 email records and are constantly maintained to ensure active, engaged readers. Our open rates for each product far exceed industry norms: 45% for E-News and 34% for Custom E-Mails.

5) Our circulation is audited.
Wood Floor Business circulation is audited by AAM, the Alliance for Audited Media. AAM’s tagline explains their purpose well: Transact with Trust. The auditing process ensures that when we say our print circulation targets 23,500 wood flooring professionals who are decision-makers in their company, you don’t have to take our word for it. The audit process is both expensive and labor-intensive, but we feel it’s important to deliver that value to our customers.

6) We are still proponents of the NWFA.
We have contributed more than $5 million to the NWFA since the magazine began, and despite the fact that we are no longer contractually bound to NWFA, we are still proponents of the many good things the NWFA does for our industry.

I hope the above helps to eliminate some of the confusion you may have had regarding our recent name change. As always, feel free to reach out to me directly should you have any questions.

Best,
Kendra

(800) 722-8764 ext. 107
kendra@woodfloorbusiness.com ​​