The Home Depot, Inc.

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Retail store meets warehouse

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The Home Depot, Inc. is the largest retail home improvement and construction supply company in the world, with more than 2,300 stores in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The company was established in 1978, and today employs nearly 475,000 workers. It is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia.

The Home Depot was founded in 1978 by Arthur Blank, Ron Brill, Pat Farrah, and Bernard Marcus, with capital secured through investment banker Ken Langone. Blank and Marcus had been the CFO and president/CEO, respectively, of a Los Angeles–based home improvement company called Handy Dan when they were ousted by the head of its parent company, Daylin Corp. Over coffee, they conceived a home improvement company that would dwarf the competition with massive, warehouse-size stores that would carry virtually everything retail do-it-yourself (DIY) consumers and professional contractors would need.

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Sporting the iconic orange apron

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The first two Home Depot stores opened in June 1979 in the Atlanta suburbs of Doraville and Decatur, Georgia. The company’s signature orange logo was created by branding designer Don Watt, who believed the color suggested energy and that orange aprons would help Home Depot salespeople stand out to customers.

The first Home Depot stores were smaller than today’s supersize warehouses, but laid out so as not to be intimidating to shoppers. Sales staff were expected to be knowledgeable in specific areas of home repair so they could expertly advise customers. But despite these good intentions, early customers to the first two stores were a bit perplexed, and vendors were reluctant to sell goods to the company.

Blank and Marcus were concerned the company would fail before it could get off the ground, until a customer returned one day with some produce they had grown in their garden, proof of the stores’ value to the average homeowner. Low prices and word of mouth helped build a clientele, and by the end of the year, Home Depot had added a third store and boasted $81,700 in sales.

Home Depot filed an initial public offering (IPO) in September 1981, raising more than $4 million. Shares began trading on the New York Stock Exchange in April 1984. Growth came quickly to Home Depot, and within four years of its founding, the company had 19 stores and sales exceeding $250 million.

Home Depot experienced significant growth over its history through expansion and acquisition. Specific acquisitions include:

The purchase of Hughes Supply gave Home Depot a huge advantage in the business-to-business sales sphere. The company was incorporated into The Home Depot Supply—which was created in 2004 as a combination of its Maintenance Warehouse and Apex business units—and rebranded as HD Supply in 2007. However, HD Supply didn’t stay within the Home Depot family for long. Just five months after the rebranding, HD Supply was sold to a group of private equity firms for around $8.5 billion.

In a twist of fate, Home Depot bought back HD Supply in 2020 for $8 billion. That re-acquisition—plus other additions in the early 2020s such as IDG and SRS—are intended to bolster Home Depot’s reach in the professional services market, in hopes of diversifying its revenue streams beyond the traditional DIY consumers.

Rapid growth resulted in some financial difficulties for Home Depot over the years. In the mid-1980s, for example, its aggressive growth strategy—and a ballooning of the company’s long-term debt from from $4 million to $200 million in just two years—resulted in a 42% drop in earnings in 1985. It managed to climb out of this financial hole by slowing expansion to just 10 new stores in 1986 and offering 2.99 million shares of stock at $17 per share.

By the end of the decade, Home Depot had righted its financial ship, and its growth strategy resumed. By 1989 Home Depot had surpassed rival Lowe’s (LOW) to become the largest home improvement company in the United States.

Home Depot expanded internationally in 2002 by opening stores in Mexicali and Tijuana, Mexico, and acquiring the Mexican home improvement company Del Norte. Four years later, in anticipation of a home improvement boom, Home Depot purchased Home Way, a Chinese home improvement company, and transformed its 12 stores in China into Home Depot stores. However, Home Depot badly misinterpreted Chinese culture, not realizing that homeowners preferred to hire low-cost professionals rather than do home improvement work themselves. It started closing stores within five years of its China debut, and was completely out of the big-box home improvement business there by 2012, although it retained some smaller stores that primarily sold specialty items.

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Robert Nardelli, 2008.

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Home Depot has weathered its share of controversies over its history. In January 2007, CEO Robert Nardelli, who assumed the job in 2000 after leaving General Electric, resigned following complaints over what many considered his harsh management style, the appropriateness of his $123.7 million pay package in light of the company’s poor stock performance, and other issues. Nardelli made significant upgrades within the company and opened several new stores during his tenure, but a lack of retail management experience resulted in initiatives that sent some customers into the arms of Home Depot’s competitors. Nardelli was replaced as CEO by Frank Blake, who had a long history with Home Depot. Blake remained as CEO until 2014, when he was replaced by Craig Menear.In September 2014, Home Depot acknowledged a massive data breach in the United States and Canada that affected potentially tens of millions of customers. The breach was the result of hackers entering the company’s payment network and using malware to gather customers’ credit card information.

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Floor-to-ceiling merchandise

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Home Depot corrected the issue and offered affected customers a year of free credit monitoring. In November 2020, the company agreed to pay $17.5 million and hire a chief information security officer to settle a multistate investigation into the data breach.

The founders of The Home Depot saw a need for a one-stop home improvement store and met that need with tens of thousands of products and a skilled sales staff that could advise customers regarding their home improvement projects. It saw growth through low prices, word-of-mouth recommendations, the acquisition of companies that would add products and improve sales, and a commercial push outside the United States. It eventually became the largest home improvement company in the world, with $153.7 billion in revenue in fiscal year 2023.