A San Antonio start-up that Kmart renamed.

Builders Square did not begin under that name. English Wikipedia, citing the San Antonio Express-News of May 1983, says the company was founded on 16 February 1983 as Home Centers of America by Frank Denny, who had recently been president of the home-centre subsidiary of W.R. Grace and Company. It was funded as a public company from the outset, Wikipedia adds, citing the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s News Digest of April 1983.

Its stores carried a third name. Wikipedia, citing the San Antonio Express, says the first store opened as Home Pro Warehouse in San Antonio on 28 May 1983, in a building that had been a Woolco store, and that the Home Pro Warehouse chain went on to trade in Corpus Christi, Houston and Lubbock as well as San Antonio.

Kmart arrived within about a year. Wikipedia dates the sale of Home Centers of America to Kmart to June 1984, citing a San Antonio Express report of 30 June 1984, and Kmart’s own corporate timeline, now published by Transformco, records that in 1984 Kmart acquired Walden Book Company and Home Centers of America, “which was subsequently renamed Builders Square”. The same year brought the bookseller Waldenbooks and the home-improvement chain into the Kmart group side by side.

The new name went up first outside Texas. Wikipedia, citing the Austin Daily Herald of October 1984, says the first stores to open as Builders Square were in the Chicago area on 18 October 1984, and, citing the San Antonio Light, that the existing Home Pro Warehouse stores were converted to Builders Square on 1 January 1985. Frank Denny stayed on as president of the company for several years and oversaw its expansion, Wikipedia says, and a 1995 business directory it cites lists Builders Square Inc. in San Antonio, where the chain kept its headquarters throughout its time with Kmart.

A second format, a sale and a merger.

The chain sold to do-it-yourself customers in a crowded field. Wikipedia, citing a 1985 report in The San Bernardino County Sun, lists National Lumber, The Home Depot, HomeClub, Builders Emporium, Ole’s and Angels among the businesses chasing the same customers in the 1980s, and describes Builders Square’s format as similar to that of The Home Depot, Menards and Lowe’s, with large warehouse stores carrying a broad stock.

In the 1990s the store itself was redesigned. Wikipedia, citing the South Florida Sun Sentinel of 9 July 1992, says the first Builders Square II opened in Sunrise, Florida, on 8 July 1992. Compared with the earlier stores, which became known as Builders Square I, the new ones were larger and more upscale, and the middle of the floor was given over to an “Idea Center” showing kitchen and bathroom designs. Older stores were then either converted to the new format or replaced, Wikipedia says, and it dates the last new Builders Square opening to 2 May 1996, in Sterling Heights, Michigan, citing a full-page advertisement in the Detroit Free Press.

Kmart let the chain go in 1997. Its corporate timeline records that in 1997 Kmart sold the operations of Builders Square, and the Los Angeles Times reported in August 1997 that the Los Angeles investment firm Leonard Green & Partners planned to combine the Kmart subsidiary with Hechinger, the Maryland home-improvement chain it was buying at the same time; a Leonard Green partner told the paper that both purchases would close together. The New York Times, carrying an Associated Press report in June 1999, described Builders Square as one of four subsidiaries Kmart had sold or spun off as part of a plan to refocus on its discount stores.

Under the combined company the Builders Square name was phased out. The same June 1999 report said Hechinger’s Chapter 11 plan would concentrate on larger Hechinger stores and its Home Quarters Warehouse outlets, that most of the stores to be closed were Builders Squares, and that the remaining Builders Square stores would be converted to the Home Quarters format. Wikipedia says the reorganisation failed and the company moved to liquidation in September 1999.

Design and documentation.

A home-improvement store brand is carried by more than a logo. It sits on a tall roadside sign meant to be read from a moving car, on the fascia above the entrance, on shopping carts and on the aprons and name badges worn by the staff who walk the aisles. It is printed on weekly circulars and newspaper inserts, on paint-can labels and on the stickers and tags that mark what is on sale.

Many of these chains grew out of lumber yards and hardware counters, and the yard side of the business left its own marks: names stencilled on delivery trucks, stamped on bundles of wood and painted on the sheds where contractors loaded up. When a chain changes owners, closes or is folded into another company, those objects tend to outlive it, turning up in old advertisements, archived photographs and the memories of shoppers.

Each guide in this group looks at one store name: who started it, who owned it over time and what became of it, and how its signs, ads and printed matter presented the store to the people who shopped there. The colours shown are our own reading, not an official specification.

Three names in two years, then a second life online.

In the space of about two years the same San Antonio business traded as Home Centers of America at the corporate level and Home Pro Warehouse on its storefronts, and then, once Kmart owned it, took a single name for both. According to Wikipedia, new stores opened under the Builders Square name in the Chicago area in October 1984, and the original Texas stores followed on New Year’s Day 1985, so that within months one name covered every location.

When the format was refreshed in 1992, the company kept the name and numbered the generations, with Builders Square II marking the larger stores and their central Idea Center, and the older stores becoming Builders Square I.

The name outlived the stores. Wikipedia says Home Decor Products, a company based in Edison, New Jersey, bought the rights to the Builders Square name and reused it in 2006 for builderssquare.com, a comparison-shopping website for home and garden products. After Home Decor Products filed for Chapter 7 in April 2009, Wikipedia says, former executives bought its assets as HomeClick LLC and dropped the Builders Square brand and its website. The same company had already revived the Hechinger name online in 2005, as The Washington Post reported in 2006, so both halves of the 1997 merger had a brief second life on the web.

For a design guide, Builders Square shows how a corporate owner can replace a local store name with one of its own, roll it out market by market and later number its store formats, and how the resulting name kept enough value to be bought for a website after the stores were gone. Compare it with Hechinger, the chain it was merged with in 1997, and The Home Depot, the warehouse format it resembled. For this guide we use brick red, steel blue and warehouse navy with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Builders Square’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.