3_0_ScanMag_66_July_2014_Text_Svetlana:Scan Magazine 1
27/6/14
10:12
Page 31
Scan Magazine | Special Theme | Made in Sweden
Superfloor at a Kennel Gotland, Sweden
Twist it – using diamonds Like most successful businesses, HTC Flooring started with a problem. The Thysell couple, Håkan and Gunn, was running a cleaning company, but as they found many floors difficult to clean they decided to focus on polishing floors to a high-gloss, lowmaintenance condition. Unfortunately, not even this appeared easy, as most polishing equipment was old-fashioned and inefficient. The couple decided to provide a solution. By Linnea Dunne | Photos: HTC Flooring
Today, HTC Flooring is seen as the founder of the entire floor polishing industry, an innovator making the cleaning quick and cost-effective through a holistic approach to solutions and tools. Among its all-round best-sellers is the HTC Twister: a polishing pad impregnated with different-size diamonds for different purposes, used for everything from the occasional upgrade to daily chemical-free cleaning with dramatically higher-gloss floors as result. In addition to being cost-effective, the HTC Twister is user- and environmentallyfriendly, as all you need to add is water. “Imagine the look on people’s faces as we tell them that they don’t need chemicals anymore. Most of them don’t believe it!” says Lars Landin, CEO of the HTC Group. With clean floors being a competitive ad-
vantage in everything from shopping centres to office complexes, the Twister is used to clean a whopping 15 million square metres of floors every day globally. The innovator – not the imitator Back when it all started, Håkan Thysell researched the global market before developing his own machine, and the fact that most current competitors are old distributors is a sign of HTC’s success. “Lots of companies are trying to copy us, but we’re still very much the market leader,” says Landin: “A HTC customer should never risk losing a contract to a competitor using a different brand.” The holistic concept with a tool for every situation is key to this success. While cleaning systems may not usually cause
excitement, HTC Flooring provides enough innovative solutions for some serious geekery: the HTC Superfloor, a dry-process polishing invention; remotely-controlled grinders, increasing the efficiency by 50 per cent; and rideable industrial grinders with a grinding width of 1.5-2.5 metres – and that is just a small selection. The innovation never stops: plenty of news is about to be rolled out in the hardware polishing department, the Twister is about to see a new incarnation specifically targeting polish-coated floors, and a brand new set of diamond tools, the SMHX series, has just been launched. “We are also looking for other areas where our technology can be used, for example in infrastructure, where the HTC method is used for the renovation of bridges,” Landin enthuses. As the HTC slogan goes: diamonds – it’s brilliant! HTC Twister cleaning and polishing pads
For more information, please visit: htc-floorsystems.com
Issue 66 | July 2014 | 31