The development of modern synthetic materials helped the development of carpet tiles for floor-covering solutions.

Materials such as polypropylene are much cheaper to use for carpeting than wool, and this helped create a good carpeting solution where, although the surface was wool, the sub-surface was synthetic and therefore much cheaper to make.

The concept of carpet tile was introduced as a floor covering option in 1957. .
It had bitumen as its backing, which is a sticky black oil.
It was then 10 inches and square-shaped and was only used commercially.

A decade on from 1957 and a carpet company called Heuga bought a needle punch machine and developed the product by punching in carpet tuft in needles into the bitumen.

The catalyst to develop such a new product at the time was the high amount of waste normally created when laying carpets. The company could clearly see that wastage in laying a floor in module tiles of 10 or 12 inches would significantly reduce waste. And of course, being first to market offered the reward in terms of market share penetration into the whole of the floor covering the sector.

For an ambitious company, this was a very attractive business model. Today we take for granted the range of colours and qualities available online at such places as carpet tile wholesale in Nottingham uk,

Developers invested in new technology which would allow fusion bonding, a process that bonds together two materials at a very high temperature. These early pioneers were part of an industry that by 1981 had grown to $60 million. The product has taken off and established itself.

In 2007 this had grown to $330 million.
Customers were quick to take up the product. Typically served open offices where the workspace was broken up into smaller offices or cubicles. There was no great demand in those early days for design. The tiles offered carpet-like surfaces, retained heat and were a significant improvement on industrial floor coverings at that time.

Today the use of carpet tiles is everywhere, including health and retail.

New uptakes drove the sale to an even higher level and eventually for technology to develop so that colours and weaves began to appear in the market.