LL Flooring CEO resigns, effective immediately

LL Flooring President and CEO Charles E. Tyson has resigned effective immediately, the Henrico County flooring company formerly known as Lumber Liquidators announced in a Securities and Exchange Commission document released Friday.

The move is not exactly a surprise, coming several weeks after Thomas Sullivan, Lumber Liquidators’ founder and former CEO, purchased 219 LL Flooring stores, which he said he would keep operating — but renamed as Lumber Liquidators.

LL Flooring filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in August, and an entity connected to investor F9 Group, owned by Sullivan, purchased the stores for $44.5 million in cash and at least $22 million in assumed liabilities. QTS Data Centers, meanwhile, purchased LL Floorings 995,792-square-foot distribution center on 97.55 acres in the White Oak Technology Park for $104.75 million in September.

Tyson was appointed president and CEO of LL Flooring in May 2020 and joined the company’s board at that time, after having been interim president starting in February 2020, and before that, chief customer experience officer. From 2008 to 2017, he served in executive roles at Advance Auto Parts, and previously was a senior vice president at Office Max and Office Depot.

He renamed the company LL Flooring in 2021, after the company was fined $33 million in 2019 by the federal government for continuing to sell laminate flooring after it failed formaldehyde emissions tests in California. Sullivan, who founded Lumber Liquidators in 1994, departed in 2016 after appearing on a 2015 “60 Minutes” investigation into the laminate flooring.

In 2022, LL Flooring opened 17 stores, but sales dropped the following year. Net sales in 2023 were down 18.5% from 2022, from $1.11 billion to $904.7 million. LL Flooring closed eight locations and opened three in 2023, and net losses last year amounted to $103.5 million, a large increase from a net loss of $12.1 million in 2022.

The Sept. 6 announcement of the sale of 219 stores and closing of 211 others came only hours after an earlier announcement that all of the stores would shut down, as LL Flooring said it had not found a purchaser.