Cleaner Carpet Samples

Here's an interesting article about a startup company that is producing environmentally-friendly carpet samples. Think of all of the carpet samples that the many companies produce and ship out each year. Georgia startup, Tricycle, saw that as an opportunity to produce carpet samples that are less harmful. Tricycle's product produces samples that look and feel like the real thing. They do this through their powerful software, which requires a great amount of detailed information to be entered into a database before the samples are produced.

According to the article, producing carpet samples eat into 8% of the typical carpet manufacturer's revenues. Also, "in 2005 manufacturers shipped about 34,000 paper samples, saving 8,611 gallons of oil and 51,665 pounds of carpet from being sent to landfills. That's a small footprint - samples take up less than 10 percent of U.S. landfills - but Tricycle has bigger plans. The company, with revenues of nearly $10 million last year, plans to expand into other design markets, replicating textiles, wallpaper, and wood. Says Bragdon, 37: "Our future is being able to show every available surface.""