Introducing the New Caye Collection

About a year or so ago, we launched our first ever resilient flooring collections. Honestly, it was a bit of an experiment for us. We’ve always been wood experts (and proudly snobbish about that!), but vinyl has been the fastest growing category in all of flooring by an order of magnitude, and our customers kept asking us for it, so we thought “Yeah ok, we’ll try anything twice.”

Well, we learned a lot from that initial offering and now we’ve got something new for you. We wondered if we could take the best components of a premium line, but make it much more cost effective by cutting out the stuff people don’t really care that much about and offer THE best bang for your buck in resilient flooring. 

We’re calling it The Caye Collection. I could tell you why it’s awesome, but wouldn’t it be better if I just showed you?

In order to offer the best bang for your buck, we first needed to identify what was important and focus the resources there. It’s really only two things:

• Look
• Durability 

We can’t compromise on the look, or there’s no point in going any further. The Caye Collection is 12 total looks, nine wood looks and three gorgeous tile looks.

There are two types of people in the world: People who think this bathroom floor is gorgeous and people with bad taste.

So these visuals are great, but let’s talk about the nerdy stuff, that’s why you’re really here and don’t you dare deny it.

The Caye Collection is an SPC, which stands for Solid/Stone Polymer Composite. It’s different from a WPC which is Wood Pulp/Polymer Composite. What do those differences actually mean? SPC is typically less expensive, and more durable than WPC while WPC is a little softer underfoot.

Personally I can’t tell the difference unless I’m comparing them side by side.

The SPC in the Caye Collection is actually more stable than a more expensive WPC, so if you're putting it in a room that gets a lot of direct sunlight, for example, it’s going to be much less likely to warp.

Let’s talk about the top layer, or “wear layer” as the kids call it. We did something super cool there.

First, some common industry terms. The wear layer is the protective coating that goes over the floor’s visual. The wear layer is measured in something called “mils,” not to be confused with millimeters, they are VERY different things. A mill is 1/1000 of an inch, or roughly as thick as a facial tissue.

Entry level products will have something like 6 mils, and more expensive products can go north of 20 mils. The more mils, the thicker the layer of finish protecting the visual is. Understandably, most people look at that and say “the thicker the better!” and move on. 

Here’s the thing though, not all finish is created equal. Most vinyl manufacturers add a scratch resistant coating to the top layer to give it extra protection. Once you scratch or wear through that top layer, having a thicker wear layer helps for sure, but those other layers don’t offer the same protection as that first layer, but still significantly add to cost.

Well, we realized we could dramatically increase the performance of the wear layer by offering a scratch resistant additive throughout the entire wear layer and not just on the top. Think of a normal vinyl wear layer as a muffin with chocolate chips on top. The Caye Collection is a muffin with chocolate chips throughout the whole thing.

Normal scratch resistance in the wear layer

Extreme scratch resistance coating. Look for these drawings to be hanging in a gallery somewhere!

Muffins aside, what does this actually mean for you?

How thick is the Caye Collection wear layer? It’s not like we skimped on it, it’s a 12mil product, but it performs better than a 20 mil product that only has the scratch resistance on the top layer, while costing considerably less.

We didn’t have to sacrifice anything. We just wasted less material.

Order a Caye Collection design kit today and you can see exactly what I’m talking about. If you have any other questions, don’t hesitate to schedule a call with one of our experts and we’ll find you exactly what you need for your project.