The Whole Foods of DIY moves into Dallas

Last time I looked, Whole Foods was not doing so well, so the comparison may not be apt. TreeHouse needs to differentiate itself from Home Depot, Lowe’s and local hardware stores through the products it sells and the knowledge and skill of its sales people. It does not have to compete on price, but it can’t become “Whole Paycheck” either. Being eco-friendly is important, but it breaks the bank for DIYers.

The “hardware store” concept is long overdue for a rework, especially those serving urban markets. Too early to tell how wide TreeHouse’s appeal will be. It’s probably never going to have the store count of Ace or True Value, but if it can channel the Whole Foods/Trader Joe’s consumer it can reach several hundred stores, and based on what I see — I hope so!

OK, I concede that high-income hipster homeowners can be a lucrative target segment, but I’d hesitate to roll these stores out in an aggressive fashion.

TreeHouse seems less like a concept for DIYers and more like a showroom for trending home tech and eco-friendly home fashion that may be too complex or unfamiliar to select online.

I can visualize some innovative display merchandising going on, as well as a proliferation of facial hair and yoga pants among store associates and customers.

TreeHouse could have opened a second store across town in Austin for this test, but I suspect it knows something about the “urban-gentrification aftermarket” that indicates a one-store-per-city strategy.

I don’t know; there’s a superficial similarity, certainly, between people who “eat green” and those who “build green” — or at least in our stereotypes of them — but I’m not sure there are enough of the latter to sustain a chain. Everyone eats, not everyone lays floor tile. I wish them well.

TreeHouse and similar stores will remain a niche concept at best; there is probably some room to grow for them, but not on a large scale just due to the cost of what they sell.

Having said that, though, home improvement retail is definitely ready for shaking up once the right company comes along, even if TreeHouse isn’t it. Of all of the subsectors in retailing, home improvement seems like it has been one of the last to really start adapting to Millennials, probably because they’ve become homeowners later than previous generations and Boomers/X-ers have been where they money’s been at in this part of retail up until now.

Compared to other types of retail, home improvement and hardware stores don’t operate all that differently than they did thirty years ago, and for some, even longer than that. There are starting to be some changes, what with things like urban store formats and increased use of technology, but there is a lot more that can be done.

While e-commerce penetration has accelerated in DIY, the industry at large has done a good job of avoiding the “race to zero” with a combination of localized assortment and pricing, and good old-fashioned customer service. Ace Hardware with its neighborhood value proposition is an outstanding example of this approach. TreeHouse is a next logical step to moving beyond price. While it will be interesting to see the size of shopper appetites & budgets for “premium hardware,” it’s interesting to note that Restoration Hardware started out selling doorknobs!