Dealer Profile

It’s perhaps an  unlikely place for $4-billion-a-year co-op Do it Best Corp. to unveil the prototype for its compelling new store design program: small-town Vassar, a dot on the mitten-shaped

As a little kid, Richard Hobbs had big plans. “When I grow up, I want to be a Senator,” he told his mother. As second-generation co-owner with her husband of

The light bulb moment occurred when Mike Friedman ran out of space. Mike had launched a home-repair business in Portland, Me., in 2005, which, as he reports, “grew-grew-grew. We’d started

All of those self-help gurus advise us strivers to learn a new word a day. Well, today is Monday, and my new word is Kentuckiana. It’s the location of PC

Boone Kenton Lumber & Building Supply Co., of Erlander—in business for 101 years—is the oldest enterprise in the Kentucky town and the third-oldest lumberyard in the entire state. That, and

Back in 1904, North Side Lumber & Fuel Co. was launched to serve the building and heating needs of its Milwaukee neighbors. A young employee named J.P. Bliffert married the

This is A bro-mance now playing at a lumberyard near you—well, if you’re within viewing distance of Fargo, anyway: the same North Dakota town that lent its name to the

PMC Building Materials opened in Marietta, Ga., in 2008, just in time for the arrival of the biggest recession the country had seen in generations. To thrive, it would need

If you haven’t heard of Shipshewana, In., in the corner of the state where it meets South Michigan, well, that makes two of us. There’s not even a dot on

Jeff Sell has earned his stripes at making lemonade—although that’s one of the few items that his business, Central Lumber & Hardware, Harlowton, Mt., doesn’t sell. His parents, who ran