Spring Has Sprung!

It looks like spring has finally sprung and even though it was an incredibly mild winter, we couldn't be more excited about spring! Our Spring Merchandise Catalog was recently mailed to thousands of our neighbors with a sampling of the more than 67,000 products we have available. The catalog has been a huge hit with many people placing orders in-store or online at www.randys.doitbest.com. Here is a sampling of some of the more popular pages from the catalog:

These are only a couple of the hundreds of full-color pages included in our catalog. We know it's weird to get excited about advertising, but this thing is cool! If you didn't get one in the mail, come down to any of our stores and pick one up. 

Another sure sign of spring around the stores is the addition of our garden plants and we've got 'em! Right now, because it is still often frosting at night, we have onion sets, cabbage, lettuce, kale, strawberries and other cold weather crops. As soon as it gets a bit warmer we'll add all of the fun plants like tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, etc. We are also fully stocked with garden seeds and seed potatoes!

New Year Update!

A new year is upon us and I suppose that gives me a good enough excuse to FINALLY get this blog updated!

First of all, the Bridgewater store is completely remodeled and open for business! We had our soft opening on August 26th with an invitation only event that turned out to be very popular with local business owners and members of the community. After the success of our soft opening we began preparations for our Grand Opening. This event was held October 21-23 and was overwhelmingly supported by the local community. Bands, charitable organizations, radio stations, vendors and hundreds of members of the public were here to help us celebrate the Grand Opening.

Since then, business in Bridgewater has been incredible! The community has been very helpful and supportive as we have worked out many of the kinks in the system. We are still open Monday - Friday 7:30a-7:30p, Saturday 8:00a-7:00p, and Sunday 1:00p-5:00p.

In other news, we are continuing to improve our ability to serve our customers constantly. As part of our efforts, we have come to realize that our flagship store is in desperate need of more space. Lucky for us, a spot in our current shopping center has been vacant for some time and the good folks over at Strickler Furniture & Carpet have agreed to move into that vacant spot so that we can expand into their current location! In other words, the Timberville store is about to get a whole lot bigger! We are incredibly excited about this expansion and the ability it will give us to expand our product offering to better suit our customer's needs.

Despite the economy, we continue to grow and strengthen. 2012 promises to be another year of exciting growth for us and we want to thank you for being a part of that!

No More GREEN!

We have been working like crazy to get the Bridgewater store ready for all of the fixtures to arrive this week. Painting, scraping, building, wiring, there was a lot to be done. Luckily, we had some great help and were prepared in time to receive the fixtures on Monday of this week. After spending half the day unloading the pallets and pallets (and pallets!) of shelving and pegboard, we began the arduous task of assembling them.

 It took a while to get the hang of the process and there was some trial and error involved, but by the end of the day we accomplished a lot and were rewarded with having several walls of that awful blue and green covered up (finally!).

We started with organizing and laying out the amazing amount of different components (center spanners, lower spanners, spacer spanners, splicer spanners.....AGH!) and doing our best to review the incredibly and surprisingly terribly written instructions. After trying to decipher them, we decided trial and error would be our best bet. It should be mentioned here that although there was some "error" involved, for the most part, there was more "trial" happening.

And these are some of the results of day one!




Day two involved completing the wall fixtures and beginning work on the gondolas. Now, I have to admit that the ratio of "error" to "trial" went way up as we fumbled our way through the Ikea-ish instructions on these. But, after another full day, we were pleased with our progress!

Day three, we completed all of the rest of the gondolas and the endcaps! We finished a day ahead of schedule and are now just about ready for our first shipment of merchandise to come!

The beginning

Here is a panoramic tour of the Bridgewater building. If you were to walk in the front door right now, face south, and then gradually turn yourself to the north, these are the views you would see.

As you can see, we have a lot of work to do!




First step is to rid the floor of boobytraps (i.e. 18" deep holes and an army of outlets!) then we can't wait to tear down that pharmacy!

Woh!!

It has been a LONG time since this blog was updated and we felt it was about time, even though there isn't anyone yet following us! A lot has been going on in both locations since last post. We are also in the planning stages for our third location. That's right, store number 3 is in the works, but you'll have to stay tuned to find out where.

By clearing out a lot of our obsolete inventory and squeezing things together even more, we were able to make room for another entire aisle of fasteners. The new selection mostly consists of agriculture fasteners and small engine odds and ends, but we also added a large selection of stainless steel bolts and screws!

Woh! That's a big screw. Another great addition to our fastener selection has been a dramatic increase in the number of metric fasteners we're carrying. We hope our new selections will help our customers know where to come for all their fastener needs.

Another great addition to our store has been our recent successes with social media. If you're not already, be sure to friend us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/randyshardware or follow us on twitter @RandysDoItBest. Staying connected to our customers and being available for questions or comments as conveniently as possible is something we are striving for. We're able to give special announcements and run social media only sales to our followers and friends fairly often and we try to make it a worthwhile thing for our customers to do. To date we have 200 Twitter followers and nearly 1800 friends on Facebook! Woh!