Help to be better

At one time, America's hardlines retailers were being provided with merchandise by hundreds of hardware wholesalers, but today the number of firms has shrunk drastically to about a dozen surviving companies.
One of the survivors is a family-owned firm based in Knoxville, Tennessee, whose survival is based on its ability to offer a wide range of services to help its customers grow their businesses and effectively compete against giant competitors like Home Depot, Lowe's, Walmart and yes, even that online giant, Amazon.
How? This 112-year old company has changed from simply being a distributor of merchandise into a marketing and management partner for its customers.
The firm is House-Hasson Hardware, and the credit for its transformation goes to the firm's current president, Don Hasson. He not only transformed the company, he bought out a number of competitors, which has enabled the company to grow from being a relatively limited regional wholesaler into one that now serves more than 2 500 hardware stores, home centres and lumber-building material dealers scattered across 22 states and more than a dozen foreign countries, primarily in the Caribbean region.
What the company did was to take a look at the challenges any independent retailer would face - its competition, its own retail management, its promotional efforts and needs - and then it developed a broad range of services to supply those customers with what they needed to be better managers, better promoters, better merchants.
Today its 80 territory managers no longer function as order takers. Instead, they function primarily as retail consultants for their customers.
As needed and requested, they conduct price checks of their customers' competition. They provide recommendations on end caps and advertising specials. If a customer plans to expand or open an additional store, they work with home office specialists to conduct market studies that help the retailer determine store size, trade area size, and competitive pricing needs.
One of the ways in which House-Hasson has been especially helpful to its retailers is by helping them develop or improve the dealer's website. With House-Hasson's help, a dealer's website gives the store access to the wholesaler's 58 000 stock-keeping units to satisfy consumer needs for items the store itself might not stock.