The Home Depot: A Competitor’s Strategic Audit, A Case Study

The Home Depot, Inc. (Home Depot) was founded in 1978 by Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank with the help of investment banker Ken Langone and merchandising expert Pat Farrah. The vision was of a one-stop shopping location for the do-it-yourselfer, and the idea materialized with the opening of the first two Home Depot stores on June 22, 1979, in Atlanta, Georgia. The first stores, each at around 60,000 square feet and carrying an inventory of over 25,000 items, were far larger than the average hardware stores of the time. However, the idea was not new in Europe. In 1962, Heinz-Georg Baus, a resident of Mannheim, Germany, had the idea of bringing all hardware specialty stores together under one roof. He had been looking for tools and building materials, and was continually frustrated by having to drive to numerous stores to find what he needed. The same year, he opened the first store called Bauhaus in Mannheim, with an inventory of about 25,000 products in a building measuring about 2, 691 square feet. Today, the German company has over 250 stores in 17 European and Near-Eastern countries (Bauhaus, 2014). Sixteen years later, Home Depot revolutionized the home improvement industry in North America by bringing the know-how and the tools to the consumer, and saving them money in the process.