By Emma Peterson.
Even as the industry experiences uncertainties, there remains a rising trend of homeowners investing in home renovations and improvements. In this episode of Roofing Road Trips®, Jack Gottesman from IKO Industries came to talk about this. He started off by sharing a little bit of the background to this trend, saying, “I think COVID is what sparked that. People were at home and started paying more attention to both the interior and exterior of their houses. And then there’s the uncertain interest rates that mean a lot of people are staying in their homes potentially longer than they had planned and so they're going to want to invest and make their homes more of a long-lasting place for them.”
Awareness of this shift in homeowners’ priorities and perspectives is what drove IKO to their new tagline, “proven performance.” This tagline, which was announced at the 2025 International Roofing Expo was accompanied with a relaunch of IKO’s brand with a new, homeowner-centric website. Jack elaborated, “When it came to relaunching, we realized two things: contractors come to our website to learn about who we are and to learn about our products, but homeowners are also coming to our website and researching more than they ever have before.”
One of the ways that IKO is helping homeowners find what they are looking for is through the development of new colors to fit any aesthetic. As Jack pointed out earlier, homeowners are looking at their spaces as more permanent residences and finding ways to make houses into their dream homes. To help homeowners with this, IKO is leading the way into new colors and aesthetic options. Jack gave an example, saying, “We innovated something called matte black and launched it at the end of 2024. The orders are through the roof. The market needed this and the market wanted this, and we are thrilled with what we anticipated the market's response to be and what it has been.”
In addition to creating new colors, IKO has also made partnerships (such as one with Scott McGillivray from HGTV) to share information and guidance about aesthetics with homeowners visiting their website. Jack explained, “One of the many things that Scott does on our site is talk about color inspiration. And we have mood boards from both him and other people with very good color taste available on our website for reference.”
While aesthetics are important to creating a dream home, they must be backed up by performance. That’s another way that IKO is delivering for homeowners – the performance of their products has been proven over the years. Jack shared, “We really feel that the tagline proven performance defines who IKO has become over the last couple of years. The big distinguisher is our Dynasty and Nordic performance class shingles. These have features like the ArmourZone wide nailing zone, the reinforcement in the back, the FastLock sealant and the Advantage size that is bigger than most other shingles in the industry that have taken the roofing world by storm over the last couple of years.”
The final piece of the puzzle for homeowners looking to create their dream space is to find the right professional to help them. And yet again, IKO is stepping up to help them find that easily. Jack explained, “We've realized that homeowners are coming to our website and wanting to find a roofer that they can trust. So that's where our ROOFPRO program, which is our network of thousands of roofers that are installing IKO products with huge smiles on their faces, comes in.”
Roofs are a huge investment for homeowners, and one that they often will only deal with once or twice in their life. Being able to find the products that will perform and look the way they want and then easily find a roofing expert to install them is invaluable today. And that’s exactly what IKO is offering them.
Read the transcript or Listen to the full episode to learn more about IKO and how they help both contractors and homeowners with their proven performance products.
Learn more about IKO in their Coffee Shop Directory or visit www.iko.com/na/.
About Emma
Emma Peterson is a writer at The Coffee Shops and AskARoofer™. Raised in the dreary and fantastical Pacific Northwest, she graduated in 2024 from Pacific University in Oregon with a degree in creative writing and minors in graphic design and Chinese language. Between overthinking everything a little bit, including this bio, she enjoys watching movies with friends, attending concerts and trying to cook new recipes.
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