The tile in the showroom and the tile on our warehouse rack often come off the same factory line. The difference is how many hands it passes through before it reaches you, and every set of hands adds a margin. Here is the chain, dollar by dollar, on a real tile.
The middleman chain
Most tiles sold in Australia travel this route: factory, then exporter, then importer or distributor, then showroom, then you. Nobody in that chain is doing anything dodgy. They all have real costs. But you are the one paying for all of them.
Take our Litchfield White Terrazzo Look. We sell it at $36 per square metre. The same style of tile carries a $65 to $75 ticket in a showroom. Here is roughly how that showroom price stacks up. Numbers are rounded and vary by tile, but this is the shape of it:
| Step in the chain | Adds | Running price per m² |
| Factory gate price | $14 | $14 |
| Exporter margin, freight and port costs | +$6 | $20 |
| Importer / distributor margin | +$10 | $30 |
| Showroom margin (typically 2 to 2.5x their buy price) | +$40 | $70 |
| Same tile, factory direct at Bloom Build | $36 |
That is the 40 to 70% gap in one table. On a 40 m² floor, the difference between $36 and $70 is $1,360. Same porcelain, same slip rating, same factory.
What the showroom price actually pays for
Rent. Tile showrooms sit on main roads in expensive retail strips, with hundreds of square metres of display space earning nothing until you walk in.
Sales reps. Commissioned staff whose time gets built into every square metre that leaves the building.
Display stock. Every board on the wall and every room set is stock that will never be sold, written off against the tiles that are.
None of that makes the tile better. It makes the tile easier to look at in person, which matters. Our answer to that is samples at 3 for $5: we skip the showroom, and you still see and hold the real tiles in your own light before you buy. We covered how to get the most out of them in how to test a tile sample at home.
How direct works
We buy straight from the factory and put a flat margin of around 20% on top. That is the whole model. No showroom lease, no reps, no distributor in the middle. It is also why we almost never discount: the price is not inflated to leave room for a sale sticker.
A few of the tiles people compare hardest at showrooms:
Before you order, check how many tiles you actually need so the savings do not get eaten by a short order and a mismatched top-up.