Nitro Garage Flooring: From a Bedroom Office to 28 Million Square Feet

You can buy a Nitro garage floor at Home Depot, Walmart, Amazon and Wayfair, and direct from us. FlooringInc has sold more than 28 million square feet of Nitro garage flooring since the line launched in 2012.

That’s the end of the story. Here’s the start of it.

If you’re still choosing between a garage tile, roll, coating or anything else, our garage flooring ideas guide compares all of them. This one is about one brand, and the eight years we spent selling other people’s first.

2007: three of us, a bedroom office, and other people’s flooring

FlooringInc has been selling flooring online since 2007, when three of us started the company from a bedroom office. We didn’t make any of it. We bought from the people who did and put it on a website.

We sold garage tiles very early on, and for years every garage tile we sold was somebody else’s mold and design. We private labeled them Grid-Loc, Ultra-Loc and Octane, and out they went, shipped direct from our manufacturers. It was an exciting time to be a young entrepreneur and sales were growing steadily. However, over time we realized we had no control over the quality of the product. Somebody would call about a thing that bothered them, we’d write it down and pass it along to the manufacturer, and that was the best we could do.

Reselling does teach you one thing worth having: you find out what people complain about. We’d hear the same short list for years, across brands and price points.

The complaint we kept hearing: how many tiles does this take?

One item on that list was never about the tile. People could see the floor they wanted, a checkerboard or a border or a bay of one color where the truck goes, and no way to turn that picture into tiles per color.

Here’s some feedback, from our own garage tile page in April 2011, still in the web archive:

“When measuring, Garage Flooring [Inc] could provide additional compensation for the gaps between the tiles… After dry laying 17′, I discovered that I need to take an inch off the first or start point…”

John, San Antonio. Archived customer review from April 2011, not a current one. He left it on GarageFlooringInc.com, an old site of ours we have since consolidated into FlooringInc.com. The bracket is ours; the rest of the quote is his.

A man on his knees in his own garage, doing math we should’ve done for him.

We’d started on the answer already. FlooringInc has run a floor designer on its site since at least 2009, and on garage tiles since 2012: pick the tile, pick the colors, type in your dimensions, and it tells you how many tiles of each color the design takes. It’s free, self-serve, and needs no quote form.

We weren’t first: RaceDeck shipped one in 2002 and Swisstrax in 2005, and we sell Swisstrax now. But we had ours years before most of this industry did, six years before we even had a tile of our own to put on it.

May 2012: we put our own name on a garage floor

Nitro is FlooringInc’s garage flooring brand. It launched on garage rolls in May 2012 and on tiles in August 2015, and it now runs across rigid polypropylene tiles, flexible PVC tiles, rolls and mats.

The first one was a Diamond-pattern roll, 7.5 feet wide, in two colors, and the launch page said it shipped the same or next business day.

Putting your own name on a floor changes the arithmetic on every complaint you get.

The goal we set for ourselves was specific: the best-engineered garage tile we could build, at a price that gave people the most floor for their money. Not the cheapest tile on the market and not the most expensive. The best bang for the buck.

Sources for the timeline: 2009 floor designer archive  ·  February 2012 garage tile designer archive  ·  May 2012 Nitro roll launch archive  ·  August 2015 Nitro tile archive

August 2015: the tile, and why garage floor tiles buckle

The tile came three years later. Nitro garage floor tiles are 12 inches by 12 inches by 3/8 inch of impact-resistant polypropylene, and FlooringInc has not changed those dimensions since they launched in August 2015.

Two colors then, eight now, and male and female edges and corners on day one, not two years later. Everything else that’s changed is invisible in a photograph: the material, the color, and the fit between two tiles.

Concrete grows in heat and shrinks in cold, and so does the plastic on top of it, at a different rate. A two-car garage floor on a July afternoon is measurably bigger than it was at dawn, and that growth has to go somewhere.

An interlocking floor gives it two directions: sideways across the joints, or up. A tile engineered with give takes it sideways, a fraction at a time across several hundred joints, and stays flat. A tile that locks solid has nowhere to go sideways, so the growth goes up and you get the tented ridge people call buckling. It’s a thermal expansion problem, not a defective tile, and not a thickness problem either: a thick tile with a rigid interlock can still buckle.

Nitro tiles are engineered with give in the interlock, so the floor can expand and contract without lifting at the seams. That’s the question worth putting to any manufacturer, us included: how does the interlock handle that movement, and what do the install instructions say?

Give in the joint works alongside a perimeter gap, not instead of one: our garage tile installation guide specifies half an inch at the walls and around anything fixed. The gap handles the edges, the joints handle the middle, and we sell a Nitro tile expansion joint too.

Our tiles have been engineered from the ground up to minimize the risk of buckling when extreme temperature changes happen.

Then the line grew: what we make, and who each one is for

What people do in a garage isn’t one thing: they park in it, stand in it, or work in it. FlooringInc sells four lines of Nitro garage tile, Nitro Tiles and Nitro Pro and Flex Nitro XL and Slate Flex Nitro, alongside Nitro garage rolls and Diamond Nitro mats for a golf cart or a motorcycle. Each exists because the interlocking garage floor tiles we already sold couldn’t do something.

Every Nitro tile line carries a Limited Lifetime warranty: Nitro Tiles, Nitro Pro, Flex Nitro XL and Slate Flex Nitro.

We designed all three Nitro tile patterns, Coin, Diamond and Vented, to interlock together. So if you want to add a row of vented at the door or around the perimeter, and coin or diamond everywhere else, you can lay it out in our designer and get the exact number of tiles you need, all in one order.

Trim is specific to each line, and the lines don’t interlock with one another, so pick the line first and mix patterns inside it.

Here’s the number that surprises people: more Nitro has gone out as roll than as tile, about 15.7 million square feet of roll against about 12.4 million across the tile lines.

FlooringInc still sells Swisstrax Ribtrax Pro and Octane Tiles HD, so if you want the highest end premium tile, you can get it from a store that has been doing this since 2007, with the same team behind it and the same service either way.

We have never called a tile finished

We try to stay at the front of this category rather than following it, and in practice that means a tile is never done. The interlocks are hidden, so you don’t end up staring at a grid of tabs across your floor. The tiles sit low, so the transition at the door isn’t something you catch a toe on. Edges and corners shipped alongside the tile in 2015 rather than turning up two years later as an accessory. Nitro Pro puts two colors into a single molded tile, and it launched that way: the solid colors came afterward.

What hasn’t changed on our flagship Nitro tile line is the part that was right the first time. Twelve inches by twelve by three-eighths, since 2015. Every change since has been refinement inside those dimensions, not a redesign of them.

What does that mean for you? It means if you bought tiles from us five years ago and one got damaged, you can order a replacement today and it will still fit your floor perfectly. That’s the beauty of a well engineered tile that has stood the test of time.

And we’re not finished now. The designer let you build a floor on a screen. What we’re building next lets you see it in your own garage.

Today: with over 28 million square feet of Nitro garage flooring sold

The strangest part of this story is finding our own tile for sale on somebody else’s website. Nitro garage flooring is sold at Home Depot, Walmart, Amazon and Wayfair, and direct from FlooringInc. Three of us started this in a bedroom office.

The goal we set back in 2012 was the best-engineered garage tile we could build, at a price that gave people the most floor for their money. Whether we hit our goal isn’t really ours to score. In Bob Vila’s hands-on garage floor tile testing, IncStores Nitro Interlocking Garage Floor Tiles were named Best Bang for the Buck and earned a 4.5/5 value rating. That matters to us because value — not simply being the cheapest tile — was the target from the beginning.

Here’s another good thing about buying garage tiles from us directly: you don’t have to buy them by the box and end up with extras you don’t need. You can order the exact number of tiles to fit your job.

That benefit carries over to garage rolls. No marketplace listing I know of will sell you 19 feet of floor, because there’s no item number for 19 feet and no saw behind it. FlooringInc cuts garage rolls to the length you specify, so the floor ends where the wall is.

Some other reasons we feel like we’ve built the most complete garage flooring line: we offer free samples on all of our tiles and rolls, so you can see and feel the product before you buy. We offer matching edges and corners for the exact tile you bought, in Black, Graphite or Gunmetal.

We have over 125,000 verified customer reviews on our own site, and we’re reviewed independently on third-party platforms like Trustpilot and Shopper Approved. You don’t have to take our word for any of this: go read what our customers actually say about us and our products.

And we have a team in central Tennessee that ships all of our Nitro garage floor products the same or next business day, so you get it fast. We’ve been keeping that speed up since 2012. It’s not just our commitment, it’s our company’s culture.

Common questions about Nitro

Cutting, cleaning, cost and the epoxy comparison are answered in our garage flooring FAQ.

Why we always care how a garage floor turns out

A garage floor is the one project where the person doing it is alone, or with their spouse, on a Saturday with the door open and a nice beverage in hand. It’s also a job done by someone who wants to take pride in having one of the nicest looking garages in the neighborhood.

We’re eighteen years in, and we don’t want to let our customers down by being short a tile or shipping a product that’s hard to assemble. With our garage designer you order the right quantity the first time, color by color.

Kurt
Co-founder, FlooringInc