The entrance to your store should be welcoming and provide a positive first impression for your customers. Your entrance (and in particular the entrance matting) also plays an important role in keeping the rest of your store clean and reducing long term refurbishing costs.
If you’d like to know if your retail entrance mats are performing up to scratch here are six questions you should be asking your entrance matting supplier.
1. Does it Scrape?
Dirt, stones and other debris brought into stores on shoes and wheeled traffic can quickly scratch, wear out, and damage expensive floor finishes. Make sure your entrance flooring has a scraping action to remove stones, grit and other destroyers of internal flooring.
2. Does it Brush?
Whilst a scraping action is an essential (and often missing) component of a well peforming entrance mat, brushing is equally important. Dirt is considerably more costly to remove once it is inside your store, so it is most cost-effective to remove as much as possible at the entrance. A scraping and brushing combination is the best way to achieve that.
3. Does it Capture?
Removing dirt at the entrance is all well and good, but where does that dirt end up? Make sure your entrance mats are able to capture and store debris (for example in a mat well), otherwise it may be end up in your store anyway.
4. Does it Absorb?
As well as preventing dirt from entering your store, removing moisture from incoming traffic is an important job for your entrance matting. Wet interior floors can lead to slipping accidents as well as looking very unsightly. On a rainy day, your entrance flooring may need to absorb a significant volume of moisture, so check the absorbtion area and moisture retaining effectiveness of your entrance mats.
5. Does it Clean?
The role of effective entrance matting is to capture dirt and moisture so it doesn’t end up in your store. If an entrance mat is doing it’s job, it will need to be cleaned of the collected dirt on a regular basis. However, some mats are easier to clean than others. Check that your mat has a weave that makes cleaning easy. You should also double-check that your mat can cope with stronger cleaning products without being discoloured, when for example tougher debris such as chewing gum needs to be removed.
6. Does it Comply?
To comply with BS 7953 a minimum width of 2.1m (in the direction of traffic) is required (based on the circumference of a 26″ wheel). However, many experts recommend that 6 metres (8 to 10 foot falls) is the optimum length for effective dirt and moisture removal. Whilst this may sound challenging, it can often be economically achieved by combining entrance matting systems both outside and inside the store. Can your matting supplier help you towards this goal?
What next?
- Download our Entrance Matting Brochure
- Give us a call on 01296 652800 or email enquiries@c-sgroup.co.uk and talk to us about how we can help select the right retail entrance mats for your store.