clem-sturgess

Clem Sturgess

Hard Flooring Expert

Clem is our resident expert on hard flooring. Clem has been in the flooring industry for over 25 years, and has a wealth of knowledge about timber, bamboo, laminate, hybrid, and even in flooring acoustics.

Clem’s Experience and Expertise

Clem came into the flooring industry by accident. In 2000, he was offered a job with a local flooring retailer after a chance encounter. In this role, he learned about all aspects of flooring and window coverings, and ended up running accounts for some of Queensland’s biggest builders. He found that the area of the industry he enjoyed the most was timber and laminate flooring. Soon, he was to move into the other side of the industry: wholesale representation.

After several years in this capacity, Clem was offered an unusual opportunity with a company that had both a flooring and acoustic engineering division. It was the acoustic division that Clem was invited to join, and he found himself doing complex acoustic attenuation tasks. These included isolating swimming pools high up in building structures, and isolating vibration noise from energy plant rooms in large commercial buildings and hospitals. In this role, he worked closely with the company’s flooring division, as acoustic attenuation was becoming more and more critical in multi-res developments.

After several years, Clem moved into the company’s flooring division and spent several years with timber, bamboo, and laminate flooring. Additionally, he and another colleague convinced the company’s owner that he should take a punt with a brand new category of flooring: WPC hybrid. It was in this role that Clem met Dean (while helping Dean solve some acoustic issues).

Several years on, Clem had another chance encounter with the owner of Signature Floors, and in 2016 joined the company to help start their hard flooring division. Signature Floors was the first company to invest in the second generation of hybrid flooring, SPC hybrid, which has taken Australia by storm!

Clem saw the changing nature of the flooring industry, and he and Dean would often talk about the direction in which it was headed. Based on their mutual friendship, he joined Online Flooring Store in 2020.