RONA Brand Guidelines: A 1939 Montreal Dealer Alliance, the Lowe’s Years & RONA+

A buying group of Montreal-area dealers, 1939.

RONA began in September 1939 as Les Marchands en Quincaillerie, “the merchants of hardware,” an alliance of independent hardware retailers in the Montreal area. English Wikipedia says the dealers wanted enough buying power to deal directly with manufacturers rather than through wholesalers, that they opened their first warehouse within two years, and that the group held its first dealer show in 1946. CBC News, in a November 2019 report, described the company as founded by two Quebec entrepreneurs and the 1939 group as an alliance of independent hardware stores.

The name came in 1960. English Wikipedia dates its adoption to 20 July 1960 and says “Ro-Na” was formed from the first names of the co-founders Roland Dansereau and Napoleon Piotte; CBC News spelled the first name “Rolland” in 2019. Member stores added the Ro-Na logo to show that they belonged to the buying group. In 1962, English Wikipedia says, Piotte and ten other dealers bought Dansereau’s controlling interest and formed a dealer co-operative, Le Groupe Rona Inc.

Growth came through alliances, mergers and purchases. In 1984 Rona formed a purchasing alliance with Ontario’s Home Hardware Stores, called Alliance Rona Home Inc.; in 1988 it merged with the building-materials company Dismat to form Rona Dismat Group; and in 1998 it dropped the Le Quincailleur and Dismat names, introduced banners such as Rona L’express and Rona Le Rénovateur Régional, and renamed itself Rona Inc. English Wikipedia lists the purchases that followed: Cashway Building Centres in Ontario in 2000, Revy Home and Garden in British Columbia in 2001, and Réno-Dépôt, bought from the British group Kingfisher, in 2003. Rona shares traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange after a public offering in 2002.

Big boxes, dealers and banners.

RONA has long mixed corporate stores with stores owned by independent dealers. English Wikipedia says the company opened large Rona Home & Garden stores in the 1990s, warehouse-style outlets of a scale similar to the American big boxes, and that in Quebec many of them were owned by local dealers who had run smaller Rona stores; in 2015 Rona bought out the remaining franchised big-box stores, so that the chain became wholly owned. Smaller banners sat alongside them, among them Rona Cashway, Moffatt & Powell of London, Ontario, and Dick’s Lumber, a Burnaby, British Columbia, business bought in 2007.

The name also reached television. In 2004 the company sponsored two reality series based on the New Zealand programme Mitre 10 Dream Home: Rona Dream Home on Global, which ran for two seasons in 2004 and 2005, and its French-language counterpart Ma Maison Rona on TVA, English Wikipedia says. In the same year Rona joined the Air Miles reward programme.

When Lowe’s agreed to buy the company in February 2016, CBC News reported that it was a friendly takeover approved unanimously by both boards, and the American chain’s second attempt in four years; an earlier approach in 2012 had been called off. Lowe’s agreed that its Canadian headquarters would be in Boucherville, Quebec, and said it would keep Rona’s store banners. In May 2016 CBC News reported that the Competition Bureau and the federal government had approved the deal, and that Rona then had 496 corporate and dealer-owned stores across Canada, 238 of them in Quebec. English Wikipedia says the purchase closed that month, and that in December 2016 Lowe’s announced that a group of large Rona stores outside Quebec would take the Lowe’s name.

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.

From Lowe’s to Sycamore, and a plus sign.

The change of owner led to a ruling about the storefronts. Rona had put the words “Truly Canadian” and “Proudly Canadian” in large letters on many outlets, CBC News reported in November 2019. After two complaints from members of the public, the Ad Standards council ruled in January 2019 that the signs conveyed an inaccurate general impression given the company’s ownership; Rona appealed, a second council upheld the decision, and the signs were taken down. The company told CBC News that it disagreed with the decision, that it was incorporated in Quebec and that its head office was in Boucherville.

Lowe’s then sold its Canadian business. In a release dated 3 February 2023, Lowe’s said it had completed the sale of its Canadian retail business to Sycamore Partners, a New York private equity firm that invests in retail, consumer and distribution businesses. The trade journal Hardlines reported on 27 July 2023 that RONA inc. had developed a new banner, RONA+, after the sale, and that ten former Lowe’s stores in southern and southwestern Ontario, among them Ancaster, Kitchener, Waterloo and two stores in Windsor, changed to it that day. In September 2023 Hardlines described fifteen more former Lowe’s stores in Ontario adopting the “yellow-bannered” RONA+ name. English Wikipedia says the conversion of the Lowe’s stores was completed in March 2024 and that Réno-Dépôt stores were also moved to RONA+.

As of November 2026, Hardlines reported, RONA inc. was owned by Sycamore Partners and had a new president and chief executive, Alain Ménard, who took the role on 1 October 2026 after serving as senior vice-president for RONA’s affiliated dealers. The journal described RONA as a company with a mixed model of corporate and independently owned stores.

For a design guide, RONA shows how a Quebec dealer alliance turned two founders’ names into a retail banner, and how that banner later took over an American chain’s Canadian stores. Compare Lowe’s, its owner from 2016 to 2023, and Home Hardware, its purchasing partner from 1984. For this guide we use a deep blue, a hardware yellow and a sawdust cream with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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