The company behind Hoover and Dirt Devil vacuums is packing up most of its Charlotte office and heading 130 miles south to Anderson, South Carolina, leaving just a skeleton crew of about 30 workers behind. Royal Appliance Mfg. Co., doing business as TTI Floor Care North America, has agreed to repay North Carolina $1.3 million after failing to hold up its end of a job-creation deal struck more than a decade ago.
According to the Charlotte Observer, the company will no longer maintain operations in Charlotte as of December 31, 2026, when its current facility lease at Innovation Park expires. The Charlotte Observer reports that TTI Floor Care originally leased 60,000 square feet at that site before expanding into an additional 68,000 square feet in 2022, and that the company now has only about 30 of its original 172 Charlotte jobs remaining after layoffs began in January 2026.
The retreat traces back to 2015, when Royal Appliance Mfg. Co. pledged to create 200 jobs and invest $5 million in a marketing and innovation center at 8405 IBM Drive in University City, per the Charlotte Observer's reporting. That pledge qualified the company for a Job Development Investment Grant worth up to $3.7 million between 2016 and 2027, with the company having already collected nearly $2.4 million in state payments before the North Carolina Economic Investment Committee voted to terminate the grant. The company has now agreed to pay back $1.3 million within 30 days, according to state officials cited in the same report, after requesting state approval on August 26, 2026, for early termination of its agreement.
Why the Jobs Are Heading to Anderson
The relocation isn't happening in a vacuum. Techtronic Industries Co., the Hong Kong-headquartered parent company, announced in October 2025 that it was moving its Charlotte floorcare operations to Anderson, South Carolina, with some TTI employees expected to transition to the new location, per the Charlotte Observer. TTI had already invested more than $500 million in South Carolina since 2019, building an Anderson County footprint of over 1,500 employees across 500,000 square feet of office and engineering space plus 3 million square feet of distribution facilities, according to Anderson County Economic Development.
That existing scale gave South Carolina a strong hand. The Anderson County Council voted in October 2025 to extend local tax incentives to TTI after the company committed to creating up to 200 jobs in the state as part of the floorcare transfer, the Anderson Observer reported. TTI Chief Executive Officer Steven Richman has said the complete operational transfer from Charlotte to Anderson is targeted for completion by June 1, 2026.
It's not South Carolina's first successful pitch to TTI. State officials awarded job development credits back in May 2015 for an $85 million Anderson County expansion that created 216 jobs, then followed with a $100 million expansion in 2020 that added another 525 jobs, according to the S.C. Department of Commerce.
A High-Wage Loss for Charlotte
What Charlotte is losing isn't just headcount — it's high-paying corporate work. When the marketing and innovation center was first pledged in 2015, the project promised an average annual wage of $103,618, equivalent to more than $143,600 in 2025 purchasing power once adjusted for inflation, according to BusinessNC. An official Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification filed with the N.C. Department of Commerce in October 2025 confirmed the permanent facility closure at 8405 IBM Drive, affecting 172 workers, with layoffs running through June 1, 2026.
North Carolina's Job Development Investment Grant program, enacted by the General Assembly in 2002 and scheduled to sunset in 2030, provides performance-based annual cash grants equal to 10% to 75% of state income tax withholdings from newly created jobs. Companies that fail to meet those job creation and capital investment milestones face mandatory grant termination and clawback repayment, a structure the N.C. Department of Commerce has laid out in its annual JDIG filings.
Corporate Pressures Behind the Move
The consolidation lands against a broader corporate backdrop. Techtronic Industries reported $15.25 billion in global revenue for 2025, a 4.4% increase from $14.62 billion the prior year, and generated $1.336 billion in earnings before interest and taxes, with total assets reported at $13.4 billion as of December 31, 2025. The company employs over 47,000 people worldwide.
But not every division is thriving. TTI's Floorcare & Cleaning segment, which includes Hoover, Dirt Devil, Oreck, and Vax, experienced a 9.7% decline in sales during 2025 — a slump that drove the corporate decision to reorganize floorcare into a single consolidated global unit rather than keep separate teams split between Charlotte and Anderson. TTI's U.S. floorcare manufacturing remains centered at a plant in Cookeville, Tennessee, which functions as the company's primary North American site for molded and assembled Hoover, Royal, and Oreck products, distinct from the corporate hubs in Charlotte and Anderson.
For now, TTI Floor Care North America is transitioning to a reduced operating footprint in Charlotte rather than vanishing from the city entirely, with roughly 30 employees expected to remain in the area even after the bulk of the operation resettles in Anderson.
