Sustainable Manufacturing in Action: How Local Production Is Shaping Flora’s Future

An Unexpected Opportunity Close to Home

When we started developing our flooring, we weren’t setting out to bring back domestic manufacturing. Our focus was on creating a better material. One that reduces reliance on petroleum-based inputs, lowers carbon impact, and performs beautifully in real spaces. As we began exploring how to produce it at a meaningful scale, we made a practical decision: the closer production is to us, the fewer resources it takes to get materials from point A to point B.

Shorter distances mean fewer emissions. Moving materials halfway around the world carries a real carbon cost. Producing closer to where products are ultimately installed shortens that journey and can reduce transportation emissions substantially, sometimes by up to 80% compared to international supply chains. Plus, closer collaboration means faster iteration. Proximity simply made sense.

So, we started looking domestically. And what we found was much more than we expected.

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Earlier this year, we visited manufacturing partners in Michigan with decades of experience in polyurethane production — including teams at ESCO and PURforms, whose expertise in formulation, molding, and scalable equipment design has shaped the industry for years. These are facilities built for scale and run by people who know their craft inside and out.

But like so many American factories, parts of their business have shifted overseas over the past few decades. Some production lines that once ran at full capacity are now quieter. The knowledge is still there. The infrastructure is still there. But the volume has changed.

We didn’t walk in with a grand plan to change that. We walked in needing to test and refine our product.

Working alongside ESCO on chemistry development and equipment design, and collaborating with PURforms to translate hand-poured samples into repeatable manufacturing processes, we began to see what was possible.

As production trials advanced, additional partners joined the process. Focus Finishing has worked closely with us to refine UV and wear-layer coatings, dialing in surface preparation, temperature, and cure times to ensure durability at scale. And Foam Surface brings precision fabrication and water-jet cutting expertise, transforming large poured sheets into finished, installation-ready tiles.

Standing on those factory floors, talking with teams who have been doing this work for 40+ years, something clicked. There was an opportunity here not just for us to make our product closer to home, but to participate in something more hopeful.

To invest locally. To collaborate with people who deeply understand materials and manufacturing. To explore what’s possible together.

Making Here, Learning Here

We’re still in development. As any entrepreneur can tell you, there are no guarantees. Building something new requires iteration. We test and adjust, we install and we learn.

But keeping production close allows us to move through that cycle faster and more thoughtfully. It also keeps the environmental footprint smaller and the relationships stronger.

And along the way, we’ve started to see how innovation doesn’t always require that every part of a process is new. Sometimes it means bringing new ideas into places that already know how to make things — places that are looking for what’s next.

A World of Possibility

There’s a real need, but also a real opportunity in many manufacturing communities right now for new industries to emerge where others have faded.

We’re still early in our journey. We’re still refining, still testing, still learning what this product wants to become.

But the more time we spend inside these facilities, the more we believe that the future of bio-based materials doesn’t have to be outsourced. It can be developed thoughtfully, collaboratively, and close to home.

Not because we set out to make a statement. But because it makes sense environmentally, economically, and humanly.

And sometimes, that’s reason enough to try.