Orgill Case Study | 21 While the Orgill transition team addressed some of these “assortment gaps” in their immediate improvement plan for the store, there was a much broader plan for adding to Germantown Hardware’s selection. Also, because the team was able to more than double the amount of floor space available, the team was also able to do a complete review of other underserved categories. Setting Goals The primary goal for the review of the overall product offering at Germantown Hardware was to build a hardware store that would better meet the needs of the community by offering complete assortments across all of the core hardware categories. In addition to offering a more complete presentation for Germantown customers, the planning team saw a broad range of opportunities for enhancing sales by offering more complete product assortments, transitioning to preferred vendors and mixing in private-label products where they made sense. “We were really starting from ground zero, so we knew there was a lot we were going to be able to do,” says Jason Burdick, operational project manager for Tyndale Advisors. While the team addressed some of the inventory holes and shortages of product on the shelves immediately after the acquisition was complete, a deeper dive into the store’s assortments and category presentations was needed to realize the bigger opportunities for the location. The team also wanted to capitalize and expand on the product categories where Germantown Hardware already had a solid reputation: outdoor power equipment, lawn and garden, outdoor living and paint. “We knew where their strong suits were, so in areas like lawn and garden and outdoor living, we just wanted to find ways to add to those areas,” Burdick says. “We also wanted the rest of the departments to be complete to a point that a customer could get everything they needed across the categories, not just those few where they were dominant.” The Process One of the first things the assortment planning team did to develop a plan of where Germantown Hardware could go was to turn to some of the insights they had gleaned from other brands within the CNRG family. After all, CNRG and its multiple brands and formats serve as a living laboratory for Orgill to test retail concepts and refine programs for all of the distributor’s customers. In the case of Germantown Hardware, the assortment team relied heavily on the merchandise mix from a handful of other CNRG operations, primarily Outdoor Supply Hardware (OSH) in Northern California and Town & Country Hardware in North Carolina. The markets served and value propositions of these brands aligned with the vision the Orgill team had for Germantown Hardware, according to Phillip Helms, former CNRG/Home Hardware Centers senior vice president of merchandising services. The product selection at Germantown Hardware was originally very, very fragmented. Even in areas where there was a lot of product, it wasn’t merchandised in full assortments, says Mike Pierre, pricing and merchandising analyst at Tyndale Advisors. “This left a lot of holes in their offerings. So we started by trying to fill those holes, and what we did was look at how we built assortments for Outdoor Supply Hardware. We started from the ground up,” says Pierre. “We looked assortment by assortment at the planograms we used at OSH. Then we looked at the other CNRG brands and kind of picked and chose the best of the best for what we thought would work for the Germantown market.” The Orgill team took these assortments as a baseline and then examined them at an item-by-item level to see if there were any additional holes they felt needed to be filled. “We did use a lot of our OSH assortments as a starting point, but then we also looked at some of our core convenient hardware brands under CNRG, such as Town and Country, to get a good representation of what else was out there that would be a good fit,” says Bryan Goldsworth, merchandising analyst at Tyndale Advisors. The store, in its legacy state, made it difficult for customers to find the products they needed to complete a project. This also meant the store was leaving potential sales on the table.
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