Our sales data shows an interesting fashion swing between summer and winter.

Originally, to enhance stock management and data-guided inventory triggering, we assigned a few magic numbers for each of our products. In addition to dimension data, we also analyse elements such as finishing, shade, and the transparentness of the colour of the flooring. The result data aids us in the decision-making of new products and seeing what trend the market is performing well so we can adjust our stock level on certain products accordingly.

One summer month, we witness a surge of sales in our dark herringbones and few members of the sales team also commented that the dark boards do really well in summer. That tickles our curiosity. Do seasonal differences affect us psychologically when comes to choosing our floor covering?

This is by no mean a rigorous scientific test and there are many other factors and elements that might cause a misinterpretation of the data, but the decade-long primary data we have collected over the years suggested that darker boards do gain better popularity during the summer months, and the lighter colour boards however, are very consistent throughout the year. Perhaps, it is true that the winter months do deter buyers from choosing a darker board.

Based on that, we decided to look into the darker variant of our products a little more. Interestingly, not only do they perform better in the summer months, they also tend to be orders in larger quantity. As designers oversee a lot of the design element in their projects and command many of the decisions for their clients, we pop the question to one of the designers we frequently work with. She suggested that this phenomenon may be due to the fact darker boards are more suitable for large rooms with a lot of natural lights, and mostly commercial applications like restaurant and bars that designed with a particular theme would opt for darker boards. With many projects taking place during the summer months, this might explain the surge of darker colour boards’ popularity.

Conversely, during winter months the day light is much shorter each day and the overall exposure to natural light in rooms will be significantly reduced. When people return home from work, most likely it is already dark, and we unconsciously would prefer a lighter-coloured flooring base to make the whole atmosphere feels brighter and livelier. It is no wonder that in those scenarios, the popularity of darker-coloured boards waned, ergo their sales figure during winter months.

In conclusion, we detect a quite interesting sales pattern in flooring based on the colour of the board and its correlation to seasonal changes, specifically to the length of the exposure to day light and the size of the room where the customer wants the flooring to be fitted. When making any recommendations to customers, this can be an important factor to ask the customers and to take into consideration when closing the deal.