Much of the product innovation and design for the company is done by Sandy Chilewich, along with her partner and husband, former architect Joe Sultan. The company manufactures a wide range of products today, using the proprietary textiles that Ms. Chilewich and her design team have woven for them exclusively. These designs are then sold through different distribution channels around the world under the Chilewich brand.
Many pieces across Chilewich’s diverse product lines also have a surface with a particular lack of definition that, to me, recalls a napkin sketch, or a brilliant idea hurriedly caught on paper before it becomes a distant memory.
“It is very architectonic,” said Mr. Sultan. “This is like suit fabric. You are buying something where you can see the texture.”
I always appreciated the look of Chilewich, especially the flooring, but I was suspicious of how it would hold up over time, and some high profile failures made me think for a few years that this product was too good to be true. As a resource librarian for interior design firms for many years, I often gave a caveat to any young designer who wanted to use this on their commercial flooring project: Chilewich is not for every commercial application; proceed with caution.
“Tufted carpet was invented in the 1950s,” said Mr. Chilewich. “It didn’t exist before then. Our flooring is really just woven carpet, which had its beginnings more than 10,000 years ago. Tufted carpet is really the new kid on the block; we are the old flooring.”
When Mr. Sultan approached the Carpet and Rug Institute about getting Chilewich certified in their Green Label program, he was told his products were not carpet.
“I wrote them a long letter and highlighted the definition of carpet, which is a woven textile attached to a backing. I asked them, ‘What part of us is not a carpet? We make a woven textile attached to a backing intended for the floor.’”
Chilewich now has Green Label Plus certification. No other manufacturer who has resilient flooring can claim the same.
“In the beginning,” said Mr. Sultan, “it was very simple. We just didn’t know what we were doing.” A former architect who had practiced for more than 20 years, he noted, “We have been making Chilewich for 15 years now, and it is not the same product we started with back then. We have learned a lot about process, technique and manufacturing, shipping – all the stuff that goes into this business. I never thought any of us needed to be superhuman to design and sell this product. I thought then, and I still think now, that this is beautiful. The quality of our design is what we are bringing to the table now.”
In preparation for NeoCon this year, Chilewich will be introducing Woven Plank Plynyl flooring. Available with either a vinyl backing or BioFelt backing, the 6 x 36 size plank was chosen to allow for ease of installation and to highlight the inherent bi-directional quality of Chilewich woven textiles. The visual effect of the woven plank flooring is one of strong linearity, similar to other natural materials like wood or stone.
Unlike carpet tile, which can appear to be visually monolithic when installed, woven fabrics by their very nature are a patchwork of sorts. Celebrating the edges and aggregating each unique tile into a holistic design feature, the woven planks highlight the separation from each other, creating a wonderfully active texture on the floor.
“These planks have a very accessible design language. We are introducing both gold and white and silver and white color stories for NeoCon this year. We have six new weave constructions, and we will be doing older white and silver over all of those designs.”
“It took us a long time,” continued Mr. Sultan, “but we developed BioFelt, a new backing system for these planks. BioFelt has specially formulated polyurethane in the middle, which is self-leveling. The felt contains 100% recycled soda bottles. There is recycled content in the polyurethane, the felt is all recycled, and the backing is something like 80% recycled content. When combined with our fabric, it’s more than 50% post consumer content.”
Responding to requests from sustainability-minded designers and architects, he noted, “We did it to get away from using vinyl backing, which is a very common carpet backing in the industry today.”
When it came time for the inevitable question for any manufacturer that continues to use vinyl in its products, Mr. Sultan admits his own limits.
“We are working with what is available to us,” he said. “We’re always looking for new materials. Olefin yarns are really not an option for us right now; they don’t provide the strength, durability and color. There are polyurethane yarns, but they are cost prohibitive at this point.”
Admitting that product innovation and material innovation are two separate business approaches, Mr. Sultan went through a laundry list of certifications the company has already achieved.
“We introduced Microban, an antimicrobial protection, into our product. Our fabrics are Greenguard certified, our flooring backings have a lot of recycled content, and we took the phalates out of our vinyl. Our brand name for that is TerraStrand. We’ve done a lot over the years, but for some people, we are still not good enough. There are also some critics we know we will never make happy.“
Indeed, the stance Mr. Sultan and the team at Chilewhich have is one of creative independence.
“I wonder about being all things to all people,” he said. “I don’t like doing that. People ask us if we can do a mat with the company logo. We can, but we designed this product with careful attention to detail. Sometimes, the best tool in our arsenal to protect our brand is to say no. Especially with the technology we have, we can do almost anything, but the question is whether we want to or not, or to even encourage it.”
Bringing in an architect’s sensibility to creating and distributing products, Mr. Sultan noted, “I read something once that has now become my guiding light: if you focus on your competition, you are going to kill your business. If you focus on your business, you are going to kill the competition,” he said. “I can’t focus on what everybody else is doing. We are moving forward and continuing to innovate.”
Concerned with preserving originality and cultivating creative innovation, Chilewich is a vocal member of Be Original Americas, a professional organization committed to establishing a set of industry standards that provide an environment that encourages consumers, the A&D community, manufacturers, dealers and media partners to fully support creativity and authenticity in order to invest in the future of design, incentivize innovation and give back to the industry and the people it serves. According to the International Chamber of Commerce, counterfeiting is one of the fastest growing economic crimes of modern times, an epidemic that devalues brands, hinders investments and drains upwards of $1 trillion from the global economy.
Perception of authenticity counts for a lot in the design industry. Chilewich was the first company to produce flooring with a look that has now become ubiquitous worldwide.
“It’s like open season now,” said Mr. Sultan. “Many companies have copied us. I don’t mind that other manufacturers now make woven vinyl flooring, but continue also to innovate and design something new of your own.”
The way Chilewich designs new products is intuitive, and not driven by focus groups.
“Unlike our competition,” said Mr. Sultan, “we are designers. We know what we like, and that is what we make. We are not listening to a lot of other investors. We work all this out on our own. When you are buying Chilewich, you are not buying some designer in some faraway land. You are buying our personalities and the people behind this product. It’s who we are and what we stand for, and that is irreplaceable.”