Find the flooring you want with this matching tool

Major paint manufacturers commonly offer online tools and smart phone apps that let you take a photo of a color you like and match it to the paint maker’s selection. At this week’s International Builders Show, Lumber Liquidators introduced a similar tool for flooring, using an online tool called Color Match.

The tool, accessible through your laptop or a mobile version on your smart phone, lets you take a photo of flooring you like in a friend’s home or a restaurant, or even of your kitchen cabinets, and view the closest product Lumber Liquidators offers. A spokesperson for Lumber Liquidators calls color a key factor in the flooring decision process for customers.

While the online tool is not yet live, the company has been demonstrating it in its booth at the Builders’ Show. The accompanying photo shows the steps to uploading a photo and finding a match through the tool.

A feature we’d like to see would be a way for you to view the product Color Match has found for you in your own home. That capability already exists in the company’s existing Floor Finder app, available for the iPhone and iPad only. We'd like to see a way to launch the app from within the Color Match too to show how the flooring would look in the room where you’ll have it installed.

We’ve run a few products from Lumber Liquidators through our tough flooring tests and although they fell short of our recommended list, they did well on many of the tests. But before checking our flooring Ratings of 50 wood, laminate, vinyl, and other flooring products, check out our flooring buying guide.

—Ed Perratore

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