Bamboo Flooring Hawaii, LLC
Bamboo Flooring Hawaii, LLC has provided bamboo floor furnishings to Hawaii residents for over five years. Owner Mark Elwell has been a successful importer for over 20 years, importing everything from women's clothing to exotic birds. He has found bamboo flooring to be the most impressive and exciting product to date because of its low-cost and environmentally-friendly attributes. Mr. Elwell imports all bamboo from Shanghai, China, ensuring the highest quality through partnerships in China and Hong Kong.
Bamboo, a variety of grass, is often substituted for the endangered hardwoods of tropical rainforests. It grows at a much faster rate than most tropical hardwoods and retains the durability that these tropical hardwoods are known for. On average, bamboo is 25 percent harder than red oak and approximately 10 percent harder than rock maple.
To produce bamboo flooring, bamboo strips are soaked, bleached and bonded with the highest quality polyurethane resins, with additional attention given to preventing insect and mildew damage. The resulting product is the flooring you see in restaurants and homes around Hawaii and the United States.
Bamboo Flooring Hawaii, LLC offers two configurations for its bamboo flooring: horizontal cut and vertical cut. Strips used in each configuration are precision milled to a .5 centimeter thickness to ensure an optimum balance of forces in the finished board. To ensure dimensional stability, the material is precision milled in 3-foot and 6-foot lengths with tongue and groove on the sides as well as the ends. The flooring can be installed through the top-nail or glued-down approach.
In the horizontal cut, the bamboo strips have been layered horizontally and professionally compressed to ensure quality bonding of the bamboo strips. This cut comes in two colors, natural (light) and carbonized (dark).
The vertical cut is distinguished by the "side-pressed" layering of the bamboo strips. This creates a more dense appearance, which is favored by certain customers. This cut is also available in natural and carbonized finishes.
All flooring material is packaged in boxes that measure 21.5 square feet per box. Cleanliness and organization is maintained to ensure products arrive free from damage.
How the FTZ Benefits Our Company
With sales of $2.1 m illion, I credit my astronomical growth rate to three factors. One of these factors is the Foreign-Trade Zone Number 9 which has given me the opportunity to slowly grow Bamboo Flooring Hawaii, LLC. FTZ-9 has provided me with a small office space. It has also provided me with the option of reducing and increasing in size depending on stock availability through flexibility with container space, and an accurate, up-to-date inventory tracking and maintenance system.
Without FTZ-9, I would be forced to incur larger overhead with fixed leasing costs, warehouse costs, staffing costs, and inventory maintenance costs. The savings FTZ-9 has provided are substantial. The staff at the FTZ-9 is also friendly and easy to work with while providing exceptional service.
Mark D. Elwell
Owner, Bamboo Flooring Hawaii, LLC.
521 Ala Moana Boulevard, Suite 210
Honolulu, HI 96813
