Co-op unveils new paint, garden formats

Home Channel News, Nov 6, 2000 by Brae Canlen

INDIANAPOLIS -- With the prospect of a record rebate in the air, more than 2,100 Do it Best members gathered here last month to renew acquaintances, attend seminars, and buy next year's inventory at the co-op's annual fall market.

An additional 150 vendors showed their products at the newly expanded Indianapolis Convention Center. The extra room also allowed Do it Best to showcase its new Paint Solutions department. Two separate formats, designed to fit hardware stores or home centers, feature vinyl wood flooring and a black-and-purple color scheme that tested well with female customers.

A new Backyard Habitat department was also on display, incorporating more than 200 planograms for garden tools, power equipment, statuary, water ponds and wild bird seed. One option allows dealer-members to erect a wooden truss system to merchandise birdhouses and create a separate environment.

The co-op organized the show's educational seminars by topic this year, covering business management, employee relations, increasing sales, product knowledge and store operations. Members learned how to manage the local news media, open and manage a package-shipping counter, service pneumatic tools, lower their accounts receivable balance, and handle personnel conflicts.

Do it Best launched its Installation Services program at two presentations that drew close to 300 people. Dealers can chose between two levels of participation, one involving product installation and the other for remodels and other big projects. The program is being offered through the Michigan Lumber and Building Materials Association.

First-time attendee George Edwards, owner of Champaign Hardware in Champaign, Ill., said he found the market very easy to shop. "They do a good job of keeping the vendors from jumping out at you," he observed. A former Ace dealer who just joined Do it Best, Edwards said he ordered almost $50,000 worth of inventory for his store, which is located near the University of Illinois.

Biggest rebate payout ever

As always, the Do it Best market was a folksy event with a retail twist. A troupe of Frisbee-catching dogs kept kids entertained in a banquet room while their parents shopped the exhibition hall, taking advantage of prepaid freight, cash bonuses, and other favorable terms. Do it Best merchandising supervisor Chris Hill, who delivered an invocation before the event's kick-off breakfast, gave thanks for a long list of items that included the co-op's record rebate, sales and visiting prospects.

The buying group's president, Mike McClelland, presented the co-op's biggest rebate check, $928,022, to Scott Parker, owner of Parker Do it Best Lumber, a 10-unit retail chain in Texas. Gill-Roy's Complete Hardware, with 24 locations throughout Michigan, came in a close second with a rebate check of $924,085. Altogether, Do it Best distributed $53 million in cash rebates, its highest amount to date. (In fiscal 2000, Do it Best paid out 12.3 percent of warehouse purchases in rebates.)

Andy Clark, owner of Clark's Do it Center near Baltimore, said he planned to spend his rebate on opening a rental center. (Clark later won an award for highest warehouse purchases -- $1.96 million -- for a single store.) But McClelland tried to persuade any member he could buttonhole to put the rebate towards opening another location.

"You're going to see more multiple-store owners down the road," McClelland told a NHCN reporter. He predicted that more units would change hands as the next generation of hardware store owners turns its attention to other things. Vowing to grow the buying group's sales by at least 8 percent a year, McClelland also sees mergers and acquisitions on Do it Best's horizon. But not with rival coop TruServ, McClelland said in response to a question. "But I've thought about it a hundred times," he admitted.

Buyers and sellers meet, greet and order

INDIANAPOLIS -- To the uninitiated, the first day of Do it Best's lumber trading market looked like the breakup of a luncheon speech: clusters of people leaned against banquet tables in easy conversations, or they sat in small groups, talking quietly. Every so often, someone laughed out loud.

Over the course of the buying group's four-day dealer convention last month, lumberyard owners and their suppliers mingled in the back of the Convention Center here, choreographing the flow of building materials in time-honored fashion. Rivals greeted each other like old friends, buying and selling wood products while trading tidbits about the wife, the kids, and in a few cases, the husband. It was hard to tell who was working and who wasn't; they might not have even known themselves.

Art Dragoo, vp and general manager of Dye Lumber in Monon, Ind., came to the market on Oct. 21, ready to buy some yellow pine. He took up a position at one of the folding tables in the dealer section, a big blue square of carpet hemmed in on three sides by white banquet tables. The suppliers sat at the long tables, facing the dealers but not really looking at them. Do it Best employees -- the only ones wearing shirts and ties -- shuttled back and forth with sheaths of multicolored papers in their hands.