A Chicago lumber yard, a son and a new name.

Handy Andy began as a lumber yard. The Chicago Tribune, reporting in February 1988, said Joseph Rashkow started the business in 1946 as Arrow Lumber Co. on Chicago’s South Side, and the paper repeated the 1946 date in October 1995, describing the chain as founded in Chicago by the father of its chairman. English Wikipedia gives the founding year as 1947 and also places Arrow Lumber on the south side of Chicago.

The family stayed at the centre of the business. The Tribune said in 1988 that Joseph Rashkow’s son, Ron Rashkow, joined him while still a teenager in the late 1950s, and that Ron took over when his father retired to Miami. Wikipedia dates that handover more precisely, saying Ronald Rashkow bought out the single-store operation from his father in 1967 and converted the company to the Handy Andy name in 1971, when it opened its expansion unit. The Tribune described the chain as having evolved about a decade after the son joined the yard.

The reason for the name change came from Ron Rashkow himself. In a Tribune interview quoted in 1988, he said: “We changed the name to Handy Andy because we wanted to make it a chain.” He tied the move to a change in what the business sold, saying it was a time when people could not find tradesmen to do home improvements, or could not afford the ones they found, and that the company “moved to handling not just lumber items but all kinds of products to maintain, improve and repair the home.” The same report said that, alongside the Handy Andy centres, two stores in Chicago still carried a combined Arrow Lumber Co. and Handy Andy name, so the older yard name and the new chain name sat side by side for years.

The chain’s offices were in suburban Schaumburg, Illinois, according to the Tribune in both 1988 and 1995. Wikipedia describes the stores’ core range as hardware, lumber, building materials, home decor, kitchen and bath products and lawn and garden goods.

Acquisitions, a Belgian parent and a closing in 1996.

Handy Andy grew in part by buying other building-supply businesses and putting its own name over their doors. The Chicago Tribune listed several in 1988: the retail store of Danley Lumber Co. in Gurnee, Illinois, the Republic Lumber chain, the Forest City stores and the Mr. How stores. English Wikipedia adds dates and sellers, saying Handy Andy bought Republic Lumber locations in the Chicago market from Jewel Food Stores in 1979, Mr. HOW stores in the Chicago area from Service Merchandise in 1986, the Forest City lumber chain, with stores in Ohio, Michigan and Illinois, from Forest City Enterprises in 1987, and Central Hardware locations in Missouri, Kentucky and Ohio from Interco in 1989. Wikipedia says the Mr. HOW stores were later renamed.

Ownership moved partly abroad in the 1980s. The Tribune reported in October 1995 that the Belgian conglomerate GIB had bought a majority stake in Handy Andy in 1985. The Rashkow family remained involved: the same report named Ron Rashkow as chairman and Richard George as president and chief executive.

The end came quickly. The Tribune reported on 17 October 1995 that GIB had said earlier that month it would no longer support Handy Andy financially, that GIB and Handy Andy management had agreed terms for management to buy GIB’s shares, and that, while the company was planning to close some stores, a group of lending banks led by LaSalle National Bank filed an involuntary bankruptcy petition against it. The New York Times, carrying an Associated Press report on 26 January 1996, said Handy Andy, “forced by creditors into bankruptcy” the previous autumn, would close its remaining stores in Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Tennessee and Wisconsin by June 1996. The same report said the company had planned to reorganise into hardware supermarkets, but that several of the banks it owed preferred liquidation.

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.

A friendly name and a striped building.

The Handy Andy name did a specific job. Ron Rashkow told the Chicago Tribune the company adopted it because it wanted to become a chain, and a chain needs a name that can travel from one town to the next in a way that a single yard’s name does not. Arrow Lumber described a place and a product; Handy Andy described a person who can fix things, which suited a store that had moved, in Rashkow’s words, into “all kinds of products to maintain, improve and repair the home.” The alliterative pairing of a given name and an adjective is short enough for a roadside sign, a circular or a radio advertisement.

English Wikipedia records two parts of the visual and verbal identity. It says the stores were “highly visible” and known for very large vertical stripes of brown and white that typically covered the whole building, so the building itself worked as the sign. It also gives the advertising line as “Handy Andy, you’ve got it made”, which kept the name at the front of the slogan and paired it with a promise about finished home projects.

Because so much of the chain was assembled from other businesses, the name and the striped front also did the work of turning bought stores into recognisable Handy Andy stores. The Chicago Tribune list of acquired chains — Republic Lumber, Forest City and Mr. How among them — records chains folded under the Handy Andy banner, and Wikipedia notes that the Mr. HOW stores were later renamed.

The brand story also has a clear end date. After the 1995 bankruptcy petition and the January 1996 announcement, the remaining stores were to close by June 1996, according to the Associated Press report.

For a design guide, Handy Andy shows how a regional home-improvement chain could lean on a friendly personal name and a boldly striped building to tie together stores it had built and stores it had bought. Compare it with Menards, another Midwest home-improvement name, and Builders Square, a rival chain of the same period. For this guide we use stripe brown, sawdust and stripe white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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