Retail Therapy: Barefoot Floors

Barefoot Floors’ website greets you with zingy orange and a sense of carefree happiness, which is, of course, exactly what they’re offering their customers. Barefoot Floors are selling a concept, not just flooring and that concept is delivered to the browser through a variety of means, video, photo galleries, personal accounts from all members of staff successfully portraying the team, from CEO to Customer Care as a close-knit, highly enthusiastic group who are all 100% sold on the products and services they can offer.



The widespread use of video and story-telling is a great tool for creating brand awareness and drawing the customer into a world, instead of simply presenting products on a flat page. Consumers will feed off the energy and positive attitude of the team in their personal “barefoot stories” which will encourage them to stay longer on the website and browse a greater variety of products.
Potential buyers can browse flooring by product, by room or by sector. Each sub-category contains a list of links. For example, under “by room”, one finds bedroom, bathroom, garden and pathways etc. For each page, suggestions are made as to the collections best suited to those environments, with examples of layout, design and room themes. There is a video of a customer testimonial where they are also invited to tell their “barefoot story”, linking them with the company and further strengthening the impression that this is a company a customer can have complete trust in and form a solid retailer-client relationship. The video also allows for consumers to see exactly how a barefoot floor can fit in a home and what level of customer service the clients enjoyed.


The Products link takes you to the collections, with a designer or customer testimonial and an inside look at who and what inspired the various designs and colours. Brochures are available to download for every collection.
Barefoot Floors have a list of partners, all of whom reflect their concept of carefree, zen living and individuality. The partnership page for garden designer Bernie Quinn features a flip-book photojournal of a barefoot flooring installation as part of the garden designer’s award-winning garden at the Royal horticultural Show.
The overall aim of the website, therefore, is to sell customers an entire lifestyle, based around a flooring product. The stories, images, videos, flip-books and art installations that fill the pages are perfect for the ADD generation whose attention needs constant fulfilment and variety, but also give the impression that when buying barefoot you are buying so much more than a floor, but buying into happiness, a slice of the team’s perfect world. It may sound far-fetched and pretentious, but twenty minutes of browsing on the website and I still wasn’t bored, although a couple of the staff testimonial videos were a touch too sugary for me.



The product barefoot are selling is genuinely creative, stunning to look at and different enough from the norm to hook you in. No amount of fantastic online marketing can flog a duff product, but everything from the slick website design to the high-quality art work and sheer conviction of everyone connected to the company delivers a powerful retail punch.
The only let down? Some missing links and wrong telephone numbers - easy mistakes to make but shocking on a website of this calibre as well as fundamental information for a buyer.

Barefoot Floors