Top Ten Reasons to Shop at Factory Direct Carpets
1. Family Owned and Operated since 1946
3. Free Sample Checkout Service so you can compare samples in your home
6. Experienced and Knowledgeable Sales Staff
7. Honest “No Surprises” Pricing
8. Lifetime Installation Guarantee
The late J. C. “Andy” Anders started a Floor Covering business in Los Gatos at the end of the Second World War.
J.C. “Andy” Anders established Factory Direct Carpets after returning from the Long Beach shipyards at the end of the war in 1946.
Andy worked with heavy equipment in the oil fields of Oklahoma and Texas during the depression. Along with many others, he went to a local Texas recruiting station to do his patriotic duty after Pearl Harbor, but the recruiters told him they had been ordered to look for people like Andy who had experience operating machinery. America was going to need an enormous number of new ships, and there was no time to train the people who would have to build them.
The recruiters told Andy the best way he could do his patriotic duty was to go to Long Beach and put the skills he learned in the oil fields to work in America’s shipyards.
Andy did just that and without delay moved the family to Long Beach where he and his wife spent the duration of the war building combat ships and submarines to support the war effort. Andy’s wife Hazel was one of the very first “Rosie the Riveters when she became a welder in the shipyards upon arrival in Long Beach.
The Anders family decided to remain in California after the war but wanted to get out of the Los Angeles area. They decided to come north and settled in Los Gatos.
Andy found a new profession as a carpet installer. Andy’s sons worked as helpers from the time they were 10-years-old. Years later, Bill put his only son, Curtis, to work as helper when he too was only 10-years-old. Curtis liked the work and enjoyed being the youngest kid on his block with a steady paycheck during his summer vacations. (Texans never paid too much attention to child labor laws anyway.)
Andy had an old-fashioned work ethic that he impressed upon his sons. Andy believed that an employee always owed an employer an honest days work for an honest day’s pay. He also believed that any job had to be done the right way, not the easy way or the quick way, because doing the job right was a moral responsibility.
In the early 1980s, Andy retired to a small town in Oregon, and Bill Anders had built a substantial business installing carpet for major department stores such as Emporium, Macy’s and Montgomery Wards. However, the large department stores were abandoning the carpet business to smaller specialty stores, and Bill needed to find a niche in the carpet business.
A Los Gatos High School friend of Bill Anders suggested he sell carpet as well as install it.
Bill Anders
Owner of Factory Direct Carpets
Andy had some friends from his childhood in Oklahoma at the carpet mills in Dalton, Georgia, where most of America’s carpet and hardwood was manufactured. Andy and Bill flew back to Dalton together, and Bill discovered that he could save a lot of money buying directly from the factory and shipping large orders back to San Jose. Factory Direct Carpets’ competitors were paying much higher prices by buying from middlemen in the bay area and Los Angeles. Of course, the middleman was one more layer of bureaucracy that the customer would end up paying, and often the carpet had to travel a much longer route to get to San Jose and the customer wound up paying for that as well.
Bill was able to pass his savings on to his customers and earned a reputation for selling quality goods at a good price and having a well-trained and experienced staff.
Bill still owns and operates the company, but his son, Curtis, also helps out at Factory Direct Carpets while continuing with his law practice.
Presently, we do not know where the future will take us, but Factory Direct Carpets is still providing the same quality product and installation as it did in 1946.
Bill Anders in the early 1980s when he began flying to Dalton, Georgia to buy directly from the carpet mills rather than Bay Area and Los Angeles middlemen.
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