Can I Call You Mike?

“Next year remind me not to get so carried away when I decorate the house for Christmas,” I heard her grumble as she laid the nutcrackers in their cardboard caskets. Preparing the Christmas soldiers for their year-long interment.

Or maybe longer even longer, after Covid killed Christmas for the second straight year, putting more grump into the holiday's grumpiest day: undecoration day.

Reminding my fianceéic that I had given her exactly that advice just earlier this year, I was excused from participating in the undecorating process, sans for dragging out the tree and finding the Menorah a spot on the shelf. The least amount of work the home's lone Jew could get away with during the reboxing, leaving time for a batch of chicken soup to simmer for a family member home with Covid.

Whether or not the soup cures Covid can be a subject for debate, but now at-least we know that a spoonful of sugar is not the only way to make the medicine go down.

T’was the Season

The paint industry goes silent over the holiday season, with most news from the channel’s c-suites on hiatus during an extended Christmas break.

But with the holidays completed PPG got back to work, announcing on January 5th, that they are expanding their relationship with the nation’s largest home improvement retailer Home Depot. The move makes their line of professional coatings available in all Home Depot and HD Supply locations around the country, HD Supply is one of the nation’s largest distributors of maintenance, repair and operations (MRO) products.

The move makes best-selling PPG professional paints such as Speedhide,Permanizer and Breakthrough available in the nearly all of the 3,000 combined locations, you can find a full list of products which will be available in these stores here.

The change in distribution strategy caused PPG dealers to reach out, all expressing their concerns for remaining competitive with those products now that Depot is in the mix. And they're right to have that concern, as this move will have that impact.

Plus the impact on PPG stores and the move seems fraught, certain to cost them both volume and margin in the near term. And for the long-term PPG has tangled their brands into a knot of conflict, betting it all on the hopes that Home Depot will buy more than they'll lose in the other two channels. Parlay's which won't hit and if they do Home Depot will never allow PPG to add the profit margins dealers and their own stores allow, making reason hard to find in this move.

More of the same from PPG, a company which never had a cohesive brand strategy in architectural paints.

Only Pigments Should Be Opaque

In 1958 a group of independent PPG paint and glass retailers addressed the Congressional Committee on Small Business on the topic of the company’s unfair distribution practices, sentiments dealers I have been in touch with have all been channeling. Many with reasonable questions about their future with PPG considering this move, and CEO Michael McGarry owes them some transparency.

In light of their announcement, I encourage Mr. McGarry to make himself or a senior member of his staff available to answer dealer’s questions, like what plans he has to address dealers who will be harmed by this action?

Though I think we all know that answer.