Lumber Liquidators store manager John Erickson adjusts a sign by a row of flooring samples in the store on Thursday in Bend. Lumber Liquidators opens Friday and is the first Oregon location east of the Cascades. (Joe Kline/Bulletin photo)

Lumber Liquidators opens its Bend store Friday, the company’s seventh retail outlet in Oregon, the company announced in a news release.

Located at 20505 Robal Road, just across N. U.S. Highway 97 from the Cascade Village Shopping Center, the store takes up 1,200 square feet for a warehouse and showroom. The company caters to do-it-yourself home improvers with a selection of hard flooring, molding, tools and related merchandise.

“For us, it’s a good community,” Anthony Espinoza, Lumber Liquidators regional manager, said Thursday, “especially with so many new homes.”

The local store expects to provide services for commercial installers, too, said Michael Fishbaugh, regional installed sales manager.

Lumber Liquidators specializes in four types of flooring: wood, engineered wood, laminates and vinyl, Espinoza said. Also, “we’re the best source for butcher block countertops,” he said.

The company opened branches in Olympia, Washington, and Milwaukie in November, he said.

Lumber Liquidators bills itself as the largest specialty retailer of hardwood flooring in North America.

Founded in 1994, it went public in 2007. Headquartered in Virginia, the company has 375 stores in the U.S. and eight in Canada. It serves a substantial market: $37.5 billion worth of floor covering was sold in the U.S. in 2015, according to the company’s fourth quarter 2016 earnings report.

The Bend store is comparatively small. The average Lumber Liquidators store is between 6,500 and 7,500 square feet, according to the earnings report. The company employs 2,100 people, most of them full time.

Lumber Liquidators took a financial beating starting after high levels of formaldehyde were discovered in laminate produced in China between 2012 and 2014 and sold by the company as late as May 2015. The company share price, which reached $119 in November 2013, had fallen below $12 by March 2016, according to the New York Stock Exchange.

About 614,000 consumers nationwide purchased the Chinese-made laminate, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission in June 2016.

The company agreed to a testing and recall program, according to the commission, and after testing more than 17,000 households for air quality, it found no floors that required replacement.

Lumber Liquidators in fourth quarter 2016 reported revenue of $244.9 million, an increase of 4.3 percent over the same period in 2015, said CEO Dennis Knowles during an earnings call Tuesday.

“Net sales from comparable stores increased 2.8 percent in the fourth quarter, making this our second consecutive quarter with positive top line comparisons,” Knowles said, according to a transcript of the call. “We’re very encouraged about this on several fronts.”

— Reporter: 541-617-7815,
 jditzler@bendbulletin.com