Wilcon Depot Brand Guidelines: From a 60 sqm Quezon Avenue Shop in 1977 to a Depot Chain

A 60-square-metre shop on Quezon Avenue.

Wilcon Depot traces its business to 1977, when a 60-square-metre shop opened on Quezon Avenue in Metro Manila, trading as Wilcon Builder’s Supply, Inc., according to the company. Its 2025 annual report to the Philippine Securities and Exchange Commission names William T. Belo as the founder and says the first store carried local brands of tiles and flooring, plumbing and sanitary wares, electrical and lighting products, and hardware and tools. BusinessWorld reported in September 2017 that the company was then marking its 40th anniversary, which matches the 1977 date.

Growth was gradual at first. The annual report says three more branches, averaging about 2,400 square metres, opened between 1989 and 1995. The first store outside Metro Manila followed in 2002 in Davao City, on Mindanao, which the company’s website names as Wilcon Depot Matina. Its first branch in the Visayas opened in Talisay City, Cebu, in 2012, the company says. By then the business had spread across all three of the country’s main island groups, Luzon, the Visayas and Mindanao, which the company still uses to group its store list.

The listed company is younger than the business it runs. Wilcon Depot, Inc. was incorporated on 17 December 2015 as a subsidiary of Wilcon Corporation, which trades as Wilcon City Center and was formerly Wilcon Builder’s Depot Inc. It began operating on 1 April 2016, when the retail business and its assets were transferred into it. Land, intellectual property and investment properties stayed with the parent, and the retailer leases land for its stores from it, the annual report says. On 31 March 2017 Wilcon Depot listed on the Philippine Stock Exchange under the symbol WLCON, floating 34 per cent of its shares; after the offering the parent held about 65 per cent.

Depots, Home Essentials and Do It Wilcon.

The format that gave the company its name arrived in 2003. The first depot store opened in Las Piñas, at about 10,000 square metres; the annual report says the five earlier stores averaged about 4,223 square metres, and that the depot carried more international brands and new lines such as furniture, furnishings and houseware, paints and building materials. Over the following 13 years the company opened 27 more depot-format stores across the country. Its investor pages now give the average store as about 9,000 square metres.

A smaller format came in 2009 as Wilcon Home Essentials, mall-based or community-based stores for everyday home-improvement items. In 2023 the company amended its name to include Do It Wilcon and rebranded those small stores under that name, aimed at customers who need a basic range of tools and materials for simple repairs and maintenance. It also introduced Bargain Center outlets for pruned stock, and in 2025 opened its first Premier Outlet Depot, in the Subic Bay Freeport Zone, the company says.

The range is broad. The 2025 annual report lists more than 1,100 brands and about 95,000 stock-keeping units across plumbing and sanitary wares, hardware and tools, tiles and flooring, electrical and lighting, furniture and houseware, paints, appliances and building materials. It sorts them into in-house brands owned by the company, exclusive international brands that only it distributes, and other local and international brands. Tiles come from Philippine makers and from China, Indonesia, Italy and Spain, in ceramic, glass block, porcelain and vinyl, the report says.

The selling floor has moved online in stages. BusinessWorld reported in September 2017 that Wilcon sales staff carried tablets to show customers design variations beyond what was on display, and that the company had opened a branch in Cagayan de Oro that August. The company says it launched a virtual-reality store experience and the My Wilcon app, which tracks points and tiered membership, in 2022.

Design and documentation.

Home-improvement and hardware chains speak to two audiences at once: households fixing, painting or refitting a room, and builders, trades and small contractors buying in bulk. Many chains answer that split with separate store formats under one name. In Chile, Sodimac runs a Homecenter format for home projects and decoration and a Constructor format for building professionals, and its first store in Mexico combined both under one roof in 2018, according to Gestión.

The store sign carries most of the identity. A chain’s name sits on a large warehouse façade, often beside a car park and a drive-in yard for heavy materials, and the same mark then reappears on aisle signs, trolleys, staff aprons and delivery trucks. Own-label ranges, trade-loyalty schemes and tool-hire counters are usually named as part of that same system, so the house style has to work from a billboard down to a shelf label.

Ownership shapes how these brands present themselves. Some began as co-operatives of builders or independent hardware dealers, and some still describe that member or dealer structure on their corporate pages; others belong to large retail groups that also run supermarkets, department stores and shopping centres, and that publish their store networks country by country. Sodimac belongs to Falabella and Easy to Cencosud, two Chilean retail groups whose home-improvement chains have competed in Chile since the 1990s, Peru Retail reported in November 2026.

Corporate history pages are where these companies tell their own story: the founding co-operative, the family or group that took control, the first store abroad. Read as a set, the chains in this series show how one category, from Latin America to North America, Asia, New Zealand and Europe, adapts a shared warehouse model to local ownership and local habits.

From 39 stores to 111.

The network has grown steadily since the listing. BusinessWorld counted 39 stores in September 2017. The company says its 100th store opened in Lubao, Pampanga, in 2024. The 2025 annual report gave 104 stores at the end of that year: 18 in Metro Manila and 86 in the provinces, ten of them Do It Wilcon stores, with only twelve of the sites leased from third parties. BusinessWorld reported in November 2026 that seven stores had opened in the first nine months of 2026, giving the company 111 stores as of the end of September 2026.

Ownership has stayed concentrated since the offering. The annual report names Wilcon Corporation as the parent company and describes the retailer as a spun-off operation that relies on that parent and other related parties for most of its store sites. BusinessWorld identified Lorraine Belo-Cincochan as president and chief executive in September 2017 and again in November 2026, and the company’s investor-relations office is in Quezon City, according to its investor website.

The 2025 report also describes who the stores are for: middle- to high-income homeowners whose needs range from new construction and renovation to repair, maintenance, furnishing and design. The company carries tiles, sanitary wares and building materials in its depots alongside furniture, paints and appliances, and keeps a narrower range of tools and repair materials in the Do It Wilcon units.

For a design guide, Wilcon Depot shows how one name can stretch from a 60-square-metre counter to depots of several thousand square metres. Compare HomePro, the Thai home-centre chain that also runs several store formats, and AZKO in Indonesia. For this guide we use a deep green, stone grey and a terracotta with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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