From Booth to Buying Signals: What We Learned at TISE

Our Recap from TISE 2026

People now recognize Service Buddy.
That didn’t happen overnight.

If you run a flooring store and sell carpet, rugs, and hard surface products, we built Service Buddy for your day-to-day operations.

We are also clear about who the product is not built for. That focus matters, both for customers and for our product roadmap.

At the show, we spoke with dozens of store owners, managers, and operations teams. The feedback was very consistent.

Most conversations came back to the same problems:

• Quotes are hard to manage and often incorrect
• Inventory is unreliable
• Payments are slow or difficult to track
• Office work takes more time than it should

These are not feature gaps. They are workflow problems.

What people asked for was simple: a system that makes the business easier to run.

Not a larger set of tools. Not more reports.
Just fewer steps, fewer mistakes, and less manual work.

We also heard something important about buying behavior.

Stores will pay for software when it clearly removes friction from daily operations—especially around quoting, job tracking, installs, cleaning and repair, inventory, and billing.

Many flooring and rug businesses still rely on a mix of disconnected software, spreadsheets, email, accounting software and paper. Teams try to use general business software to manage:

• customers
• quotes and approvals
• inventory and purchasing
• payments and invoicing

That setup works for a while, but it becomes harder to manage as the business grows, adds locations, or increases installation and service volume.

Flooring operations have their own complexity.
Most general software is not designed around how this industry actually works.

Another common topic at the show was AI.

Right now, AI in flooring is very early.

Without clean data and consistent workflows, there is not much AI can realistically help with. If information is spread across files, inboxes, and separate systems, automation is limited.

Getting the operating foundation right comes first.

We also had several productive conversations with partners across the industry. Those discussions focused on practical integration and data flow, not announcements or marketing.

It is clear that better software in this industry will come from tighter connections between the tools stores already rely on.

One of the strongest signals from the show came from existing customers.

More than once, new prospects mentioned stores already using Service Buddy. Hearing how other operators are running their day-to-day work on the platform made the conversations more direct and more practical.

Dover Rug was one example that came up repeatedly.

On a lighter note, the team also made it to the Sphere to see the Wizard of Oz experience.

It was fun.

The bigger takeaway from TISE 2026 is straightforward.

Flooring retailers are not looking for more software.
They are looking for fewer systems and fewer workarounds.

They want clearer processes, better visibility into jobs and inventory, and less time spent fixing mistakes or chasing information.

That is what we are focused on building.

What a show.

We’re about to get very busy.