Home Hardware Brand Guidelines: 122 Dealers, a St. Jacobs Store & a 1964 Co-op

A village store in St. Jacobs, Ontario.

Home Hardware grew out of a hardware business on King Street in St. Jacobs, a village near Kitchener in Ontario. The St. Jacobs Village business association’s history walk says the story begins in 1893, when Henry Gillies opened a blacksmith shop and hardware store there, and that Gordon Hollinger bought the business in 1934 and added a wholesale division supplying independent dealers in the region; it became known as Hollinger Hardware.

The Observer, the Elmira weekly, told the next part in May 2010. Walter Hachborn went to work for Hollinger in 1938 after finishing high school, sweeping the floor, stocking shelves and serving the Old Order Mennonite farmers who made up most of the customers. Later, Hachborn, the store manager Henry Sittler and the Elmira lawyer Arthur Zilliax formed a partnership and bought the business; the village association dates that purchase to 1949 and spells the lawyer’s name Zilliox. Sittler built up the wholesale side, importing goods from Germany, Britain and the United States when Canadian manufacturers were reluctant to supply a small rural firm, the Observer reported.

The idea for Home Hardware came from Pennsylvania. In 1957, the Observer said, Hachborn visited the American Hardware and Supply Company in Pittsburgh, a nonprofit cooperative that acted as wholesaler and distributor for small hardware dealers by pooling their buying power. As discount chains such as Kmart and Woolco spread in the 1950s and 1960s, he called a meeting of 25 dealers and suggested they see the American model for themselves; a larger meeting in Kitchener, which ran from ten in the morning until ten at night, voted to form a company of their own.

Owned by the dealers it supplies.

On 1 January 1964, 122 independent hardware retailers bought Hollinger Hardware and formed a dealer-owned cooperative with Hachborn as manager, the Observer reported; English Wikipedia and the village association give the same date and number, and the association names the new company Home Hardware Stores Limited. The model sits at the centre of the brand: the wholesale company is owned by the independent retailers it serves, and each store is run by its own dealer-owner.

The business soon outgrew King Street. By 1965, the Observer reported, it was growing fast enough that distribution ran from the building later used by Home Furniture, with stock kept in buildings all over the village. The paper said the company bought 13 acres along Henry Street in St. Jacobs and began building there in 1966, with an office that housed a computer for orders, inventory and invoices. The village association says warehouse operations moved to the new Henry Street site on 5 September 1967, during Canada’s Centennial year, and that the original King Street building was renovated and carried on as a retail hardware store. English Wikipedia dates the official adoption of the Home Hardware name and logo to 9 November 1967.

Expansion across Canada came in stages. The Observer said the company moved into the Atlantic provinces after a dealer in Windsor, Nova Scotia, asked to join, and that it came to run distribution centres in Debert, Nova Scotia, and Wetaskiwin, Alberta, alongside Elmira and St. Jacobs, with about 2.5 million square feet of warehousing in all. English Wikipedia says Home Hardware merged with the western Canadian Link Hardware in 1981 to create a national chain, and bought the Beaver Lumber chain from Molson in 1999. English Wikipedia adds that the network reaches beyond the provinces, with one store in the French overseas territory of Saint Pierre and Miquelon. Rona’s history records a purchasing alliance between the two dealer groups, Alliance Rona Home Inc., from 1984, according to English Wikipedia.

Aisles, counters and banners.

DIY chains, home-improvement retailers and builders’ merchants present themselves through the places where customers meet them. A home-improvement store is usually a large warehouse-style building with long aisles, high racking and a garden or timber area, and the chains describe those stores in their own words on their websites. A builders’ merchant is more often a yard and a branch, where tradespeople buy timber, bricks and fixings across a counter. For a design reader, the shed, the yard and the counter are where the colours, signs and lettering of these companies are seen at full size.

Many trade suppliers also sell from a catalogue and a website, with orders collected from a counter or delivered to site. Printed catalogues, product codes and click-and-collect services appear in the companies’ own descriptions, and in the trade press that covers them. Liveried vans and lorries carry the same names and colours from the branch to the building site, so a merchant’s identity often travels further on the road than it does on the high street.

Store and own-label naming is usually plain. Chains carry a founder’s surname, two merged surnames, or a literal compound of a product and a place, and many sell house ranges under their own names alongside the branded tools and materials they stock. Groups often run several trading names side by side, one for each trade or customer type, rather than folding them into one.

Corporate pages fill in the rest: founders, owners, listings, demergers and the investment groups that sit behind many chains. Ownership in this sector changes more often than the shop signs do, so the guides in this series date each change of owner to an independent source, describe each name and colour as documented, and treat the palettes shown here as unofficial interpretations.

One name over many owner-run shops.

Home Hardware sells under its own labels as well as suppliers’ brands. English Wikipedia lists private-label names including BeautiTone, Benchmark, Mosaic and Natura. Hachborn retired from day-to-day operations in 1988 and later became president emeritus, the Observer reported in 2010; English Wikipedia says Ian White was appointed chief executive in November 2024.

Independent stores still join the network. Hardlines, the Canadian hardware trade journal, reported in October 2026 that Okanagan Hardware & Supply, a family-owned store in Oliver, British Columbia, that had traded since 1999 and added lumber and building materials in 2014, had joined Home Hardware and would trade as Okanagan Home Hardware Building Centre. The journal said the change gave the store access to Home Hardware’s hardlines and lumber and building-materials programmes.

The St. Jacobs roots stay in view. The village association’s history walk, which is undated, says the head office and warehouse are still up the road on Henry Street, and that the present Home Hardware St. Jacobs store stands across King Street from the original building, near the site where Henry Gillies first set up shop.

For a design guide, Home Hardware shows how a dealer cooperative that started with one village store built a single national name over many owner-run shops. Compare RONA, its purchasing partner from 1984, and The Home Depot, a corporate big-box chain, for contrast. For this guide we use a hardware red, a warm cream and charcoal with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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