We want to live in a world where the local store is still there.

Mid-2000s · A filter brand opened the wrong door

We didn't set out to be a hardware company. We were running an HVAC filtration supply business and chasing down one specific filter brand we needed for our customers. The trail led to a regional hardware distributor based in the Pacific Northwest — the kind of operation that quietly supplied thousands of independent hardware stores up and down the West and beyond. (They've since been absorbed into one of the big national hardware co-ops. Anyone in the industry can probably guess which one.)

We opened the account for the filters. Then we got a look at the rest of the catalog — tools, fasteners, plumbing, electrical, lawn and garden, the whole independent hardware-store backbone. Tens of thousands of SKUs, and almost none of it being sold online by anyone who knew what they were doing.

So we spun up a separate division. The HVAC filter business kept running. Alongside it, we quietly built a tool-and-hardware e-commerce operation off the same distributor relationship — and promptly shocked everyone, including ourselves, with how fast it grew.

The years that followed · Inside the stores, hands on the work

That early success put us in rooms we hadn't expected to be in. Over the years that followed, we were invited out to specific independent hardware stores to consult, spoke at a few trade shows and annual conventions, and built relationships with retailers all across the channel. It wasn't glamorous. Most of it was sitting at a back-office desk next to a store owner, working through the actual nuts and bolts of getting a site up, keeping it running, and getting it found.

What we kept running into wasn't a lack of will. It was the technical lift. To us, the work felt routine — it was what we did every day. To a store owner already running a counter, a delivery truck, a payroll, and a paint desk, it was another full-time job nobody had budget for. Every retailer we worked with hit the same wall: "We'll handle the website ourselves" turned into months of effort, a site that couldn't out-rank a national chain, and a quiet retreat.

We saw a version of the same thing on our way out. When we eventually sold the tool-and-hardware division — a small business, sold locally — the buyer had real hopes for it, and we did too. But what came next looked a lot like what we'd been watching in the stores: the online side of the work proved harder to sustain than anyone expected. It wasn't a lack of effort. It rarely is. It's the same gap that's swallowed so many brick-and-mortar businesses trying to step into the online space — the distance between seeing the opportunity and actually keeping the whole operation running.

That's the moment it really landed. Asking every independent to build and run their own site is the wrong solution. Watching retailers struggle, then watching something we'd built struggle for the same reasons, made it impossible to ignore: this channel needed a different approach entirely. The tools and infrastructure that exist today — the platforms, the integrations, the data — weren't there yet. If they had been, a lot of those stories probably end differently. But they didn't exist, so the better answer had to wait.

Years later · The question wouldn't go away

Eventually we sold the tool-and-hardware division so we could focus on raising a young family and growing the HVAC filter supply business into a national operation. The hardware chapter closed on paper. The question never did.

One reason it never closed was a phone call, years later. Back when we were running both businesses, we'd had an employee — a great one — whose family had owned an independent hardware store in Everett, Washington for generations. A pillar of the community. She left us to start a family and go back to work in the family store. We stayed loosely in touch over the years.

A Lowe's had been built across the block from that store nearly twenty years ago. Maybe longer. They held on anyway — the way independents do — with a big-box lurking across the street, year after year, stealing a little more oxygen out of the room every quarter. They held on for as long as they could.

Then we got the news: after generations, they were closing.

That one hit different. It wasn't an abstraction anymore. It wasn't a statistic on independent retail or a chart showing big-box square footage. It was a family we knew, in a town we knew, in a store that had been on that corner longer than most of the chains across the street had even existed.

Independent hardware stores kept disappearing. The marketplaces kept winning the search results. The big-box chains kept spending the kind of money local stores couldn't match. And the better way we'd been thinking about for years was still just an idea in the back of our head — waiting for the moment it could actually be built.

Today · The answer we couldn't build before

Twenty years on, with more experience, better tools, and a much clearer picture of what the channel actually needs, we came back to it. The distribution relationships were still there. The infrastructure was still there. The independent stores were still there — just fewer of them, and most still without a meaningful digital presence.

Looking back, it's hard not to see the whole path as one long setup for this. The accidental filter account. The years on the road. The retailers we couldn't help the first time around. Every wrong turn taught us something we needed to know to build National Hardware Group the right way.

One network. One digital footprint. One marketing budget, pointed at every independent hardware store that joins. Whatever flag the store flies — or no flag at all — every retailer in the network strengthens it for everyone else.

The mission isn't commerce. It's making sure the local hardware store is still on the corner ten years from now — because the people who spent twenty years caring about that finally found a way to win.