The champion of independence

In terms of the number of stores, Do it Best Group is the largest cooperative of independent hardware retailers in the U.S. Just under two years ago, it expanded significantly when it acquired its competitor True Value – itself a one-time cooperative which, at the time, had even more members. A key factor that made the insolvent acquisition target attractive to Do it Best Group was its outstanding brand recognition.

Dan Starr, CEO of Do it Best Group, spoke at the Global DIY-Summit about the challenge of maintaining this appeal for the next generation of younger customer groups. DIY International had the opportunity to follow up on this in a detailed interview.

Our interview is taking place in Amsterdam, in Europe. When you compare home improvement stores in the USA with those in Europe, where do you see the biggest differences?

Dan Starr: I'm operating on a very small sample size. I went to see a number of stores just yesterday as part of the store tour organised by the Global DIY-Summit.

It's the first time you are in Europe?

I've been to Europe before, but it's the first time I've been able to visit stores. The stores they took us to were large format. There were a number of similarities, for example when it comes to wayfinding, categories, store design. But what was surprising to me was one very large store. In the U.S., I would have thought that it would be more oriented to the pro, but the vast majority of their business is DIY. And I was surprised that it was so large and that it wasn't very dense, meaning the planograms, the gondolas, it‘s very spread out. In the U.S. when you're going for a DIY customer, you typically find that retail is very compressed. narrowed down probably about 10,000 square feet (about 1,000 m²) at the most.

Let's talk about the U.S. We saw last year a decrease in sales in the U.S. market, I‘m referring to the US Census Bureau. How is the situation for the moment?

For us, our sales are up a little bit. Maybe we're doing a little bit differently than the total statistics would reveal. Where it's down for us is in what we call commodities: building materials and things like that, because housing has been impacted, the interest rate environment in the United States has gone up, you've got a lot more people who are just kind of holding in place. So the housing market is really limited. But in the normal categories or hardlines categories of paint, plumbing, electrical, those things are actually performing well.

And your prognostics for…