Orgill Report: From the CEO
“I think that people are looking for promotions and looking for things to drive footsteps in the store, and we certainly have that at this event,” Moore told HBSDealer, about the distributor’s Summer Online Buying Event.
The veteran executive of the Memphis, Tennessee-based distributor shared a variety of insights on the state of Orgill, as well as the state of the industry. Speaking shortly after two big barometers of home improvement retailing – Home Depot and Lowe’s— posted comp-store sales declines in excess of 4 percent, and the NAICS 444 sales were reported as down 5.7 percent from a year ago.
While the major players have guiding down in the single-digit negative territory for the year, Orgill’s sales year-to-date in 2023 have been flat, he said. The company was up 0.4. percent in the first quarter, aided by new business. Moore said March and April brought slower traffic to hardware and building supply stores in general, weather and lumber deflation being the chief culprits.
“It’s a different scenario than we considered six months ago when we were making our plans for the year,” he said. Still there is optimism.
“We're excited about the opportunity,” Moore added. “It's times like this that our mission statement rings even more true: to help our customers be successful. I'm very excited about the early results we're seeing in the summer buying event. We've had some good weather in the last couple of weeks that have driven up some comp-sales increases. So, we'll see what happens. But I'm pretty bullish on how we see the rest of the year playing out for us.”
Market leader
In the meantime, Orgill nation is doing its best to control what it can control, including the distributor’s market calendar and strategy. The distributor hosts four online buying events each year, with the spring event coinciding with a traditional live-and-in-person event. (This year’s Spring Dealer Market took place in New Orleans.) That’s a departure from decades of a pre-pandemic schedule that was anchored by two live events, one in the spring and one in the fall.
“We went through two years without an event. And in doing that, we built a lot of skill in making an online buying event useful,” he said. And in fact, all of our events continued to grow every year.”
A key development in the Orgill market schedule was the live celebration of the company’s 175th anniversary Spring Dealer Market in Orlando, Florida, in the spring of 2022.
That was our first hybrid event where we incorporated what we were doing in an online buying event with an in-person dealer market,” Moore said. “And that was very, very successful.”
He added that Orgill is continuing to find ways to connect online event with in-person events that opportunities for its vendors and customers to get together.
Bringing Concepts to Collierville
Creating opportunities for members and vendors to connect is at the heart of another Orgill initiative – this one taking place at the company’s headquarters in Collierville (just outside of Memphis.) That’s where plans for a 500,000 square foot Concept Center are about to take shape.
The building will replace an existing concept center which measures about 250,000 square feet and is located 10 miles from Collierville, in Olive Branch, Mississippi, where about 40 Orgill employees are engaged.
Moore explains the idea behind the expansion.
“We’ve been in that Olive Branch concept center since 2014,” he said. “And as our lease was coming up, we had to make a decision on what we were going to do. We saw an opportunity to really leverage what we've been doing in that facility into a bigger idea and doing it right here at our home office. So we bought the 47 acres behind our office, and we'll be constructing a Concept Center basically twice as big as our current concept center. With a lot more flexibility.
What happens in Concept Center? Not only is it a retail laboratory for vendors and retailers, it’s a facility that allows for the design and execution of strategic solutions and customized planograms and line reviews are part of the activities.
“So there's a lot of things that go on there,” he said. “And we've got a vision for improving the impact of the center,” he said. “We also support, in a really balanced way, brands from home centers to farm stores to hardware stores, and then pro dealers as well. So each of those has a different way that a set might need to be imagined, and our team does a great job of that. And it's really just doubling down on what we do well in customization.”
