Third generation of Hassetts opens new hardware store

Conventional wisdom is that small family-owned businesses just can’t compete with big box retailers. The local family that owns Hassett Hardware is proving conventional wisdom is not always correct. The family just opened the fifth Hassett Hardware store, this one located at the Woodside Plaza shopping center at 348 Woodside Road in Redwood City.

Richard and Eric Hassett, the third generation of Hassetts to run the business, say Hassett Hardware is thriving and looking for more opportunities to grow.

The Hassett brothers, who with their sister Emma attended Woodside Elementary School and Woodside High School, have taken over the day-to-day operations of the family business from their father. They grew up in a rural neighborhood off Skyline Boulevard in southern San Mateo County, where their parents, Larry and Penny Hassett, still live. Their grandfather, Bob Hassett, opened the first family hardware store in 1957 in Campbell.

The Hassetts own hardware stores in Palo Alto, San Mateo, Half Moon Bay, and the Willow Glen area of San Jose in addition to the new Redwood City store. The location of the new store is convenient for the brothers. Richard lives only a few blocks away and Eric lives in Menlo Park.

Eric Hassett says a big part of what sets Hassett Hardware apart from some competitors is service. Customers, he says, want three things: price, product selection and people (providing service). “You have to be good at all three, but excel in one,” he says. “I’m taking the service.”

The company, which has for two years in a row been nominated by employees and voted a “Top Workplace” in the Bay Area by the Bay Area News Group, puts new employees through a three-day orientation in which they learn, among other things, about the Hassett Hardware history and culture, and study effective communication skills.

Eric says he wants customers to bring their projects and problems into the store for help. An example, he says, is a malfunctioning garage door opener. Hassett Hardware employees can “open it up and try to figure it out,” he says. “We can do those service diagnostic things fairly easily.”

Employees are trained to help customers with their requests, even if that means directing them to some other store. “I don’t want them to say ‘no,'” Eric says.

The Redwood City Hassett Hardware, located in the former home of McWhorter’s Stationers, is the second store the family has been able to design from the ground up, Eric says. Some of their priorities, he says, were making it an open, inviting space and making female customers feel comfortable, since women, he says, initiate at least 60 percent of home improvement projects.

The store has a little bit of everything in its 10,000 square feet of indoor space and 4,000 square feet of outdoor space. That big outdoor area sold the brothers on the new store location, Eric says.

It will house a large nursery section, focusing on California natives and drought-tolerant plants, as well as soil amendments, pots, garden tools and almost everything else needed to plant and maintain a garden. It also has room for classes or for customers to work on hands-on projects.

Other special touches in the store, which is open but not completely stocked, include a paint section with a sofa, a children’s play area (which Eric recruited his 6-year-old daughter to help design), and counter space for matching fabric swatches, pillows or other home decor to paint colors. The section is in front of a couple of large windows, so the paint colors can be seen in natural light.

The hardware section, Eric says, has twice as much room for “nuts and bolts and oddball pieces” as most hardware stores. “I wanted this to be the place the robotics team could come,” he explains, proudly pointing out a selection of metric wing nuts. “You’re just not going to find metric wing nuts at your usual store,” he says.

In fact, Eric says, the store will end up having the same number of items as a Home Depot; but just carry fewer of each item.

He attends trade shows, reads a lot in trade publications, and even follows social media such as Pinterest for ideas of what the store should stock.

“Hardware has historically been slow to change,” Eric says. But the customer changes, and products change, so the stores do also, he says. The brothers track their inventory carefully to find out what is selling and what is not.

That means that items that used to be given much more room in a hardware store, such as cabinet hardware or door thresholds, are now given a more compact space while other items — such as home canning supplies or wild bird seeds, feeders and houses — get more space.

Right now, the Redwood City store has about 15 percent of its shelf space unused so the owners can react to needs of the local customers. The store invites customers to suggest items they’d like to see the story carry.

“You can’t really build a house out of my hardware stores,” says Eric, “but you can fix anything in a house.”

For more information on Hassett Hardware, vitit their website.

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