LL Flooring Is Coming Back…as Lumber Liquidators 

Back under the ownership of its founder, the flooring retailer is expected to emerge from bankruptcy with fewer stores and an old familiar name. 

Just when it seemed LL Flooring would succumb as another retail victim of the downturn in the housing and home improvement business, it appears that it will live to see another day. 

Only a few days after the company said it would shut down, liquidating its networkof about 400 stores – and causing big problems for its suppliers in the flooring business – its founder and former CEO came forward and put together a deal to buy the business. Thomas Sullivan, who left the company in 2016 following a scandal on the safety of some of its flooring products exposed in a 60 Minutes report, said his private equity firm, F9 Investments, had put together a deal to buy the company. He said he would keep 219 of its stores, as well as a Virginia distribution center.

Most interestingly, he said he would return the retailer to its original name, Lumber Liquidators, the brand he used when he founded it in 1994 as, literally, a business that bought excess inventory from supplier and builders and sold it in barebones locations. The name was changed in 2020 as a way to distance itself from that tainted materials incident but apparently Sullivan believes enough time has passed for the original name – and potentially its more downscale image – to return. 

The details of the Sullivan purchase are still being finalized and it’s unknown when the name switchover will occur. But, whatever the name over the front door, for suppliers of wood flooring all of this is good news indeed.

Editor’s note: This story updates an earlier report in IWFNN’s last issue that was published just as the Sullivan purchase was happening.

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