People of the Year: Don Devine

The second annual HBSDealer People of the Year list includes some heavy hitters in the home improvement industry. These are executives who have displayed outside-the-box thinking, along with stick-to-your-guns discipline. They are the leaders of billion-dollar corporations, as well as family businesses. They are guiding huge mergers, and huge acts of charity.

In the next several issues of the HBSDealer Daily, we'll meet all of HBSDealer's People of the Year. 

What do HBC Home & Hardware Products, Handy Hardware and plumbing leader Jones Stephens Corp. have in common?

These companies and a handful of others are all components of the new World and Main, the hardware industry brainchild of Don Devine, who has been carefully and steadily assembling the parts and the vision for the company formerly known as Hardware Holdings.

Devine’s vision can be described as the creation of a new industry player, which develops, sources and distributes more than 70,000 SKUs worth of branded products, plumbing and building supply, and 15 “owned brands.” Five North American distribution centers and a sourcing and design center in Wuxi, China, add muscle to the structure.

“The introduction of the ‘World and Main’ brand is tremendously exciting, as it marks our evolution into a national distribution company,” Devine said. The company’s owned brands “offer greater margin return to help our customers compete with the big boxes,” he explained.

While 2015 was about planning and organizing, the game in 2016 will be execution and performance, he said. “The big guys spend every waking moment trying to figure out how to grow their basket with every customer who enters their store,” he said. “We want to help our customers do the same by bringing great delivered value across a broad assortment of products with a reliable and flexible distribution model.”