Over the last 42 years, the Paint Shop has established itself as a household name in Newfoundland and Labrador.
Now they’re hoping to do the same elsewhere in Canada.
Earlier this month, the Paint Shop finalized the acquisition of three Paul Susnis Decorating stores in Halifax that will be converted into Paint Shop franchises.
Burnside Decorating, Colourworks, and Acadia and Quigley will now be known as Paint Shop Burnside, Paint Shop Strawberry Hill and Paint Shop Quinpool, respectively.
“We had been talking to him for several years and it got to the point where he wanted to retire and it was good timing for us. We had the kit built to a point where we knew it could scale easily and we worked over the last year to make it happen,” explains Paint Shop president Bob Payne.
The kit Payne refers to is essentially scalable modern infrastructure improvements that allow for easier expansion.
“It’s not necessarily a Paint Shop in a box, but it’s something we could easily put in another province, in another territory, across Canada, south of the border, wherever,” says Payne.
To build the kit, the Paint Shop recruited Rob Simms as its vice-president of sales and marketing. He and his team brought in things like a managed point of sale database, flyer kits for each market, and little touches like 50-inch screens in all stores to promote products and sales.
They also developed a company-wide intranet that allows franchisees to search product information and history, upcoming promotions, and generally maintain communication throughout the network.
“Now instead of all the stores going out and buying a paint brush from a different supplier or whoever they have relationships with, buying is focused and they can get it here quickly through the intranet,” explains Payne.
“We know exactly what’s going in their store, they know where to put it on the shelf and then marketing can put it in the flyer and know that it’s going to be in the store when the customer gets the flyer.”
Like the Paint Shop locations in this province, the new Nova Scotia shops will have exclusive territory rights to selling Benjamin Moore products in the Halifax region. They’ll also offer window treatment services, but flooring won’t be an option for the time being.
Also unchanged will be the staff, something Simms feels is what separates the Paint Shop from the big box stores.
“If you went and visited the majority of our existing paint shops, the folks that are there have been there for a long while. They know the products exceptionally well,” says Simms. “Our strength is in our service and in our people and their product knowledge.”
The Halifax stores are not the first for the Paint Shop franchises outside the province’s borders. Last year, they set up shop in Halifax’s Bayers Lake shopping district and in Moncton to test both the waters and some of the kit concepts. And earlier this year they acquired a new location in Dieppe, N.B.
Also in 2017, the Paint Shop saw a new location open in concert with Petipas Foodex in Whitbourne and a location re-established in Labrador City.
Those moves and the Halifax acquisitions bring the total number of Paint Shop locations to 34 across Atlantic Canada.
Payne says there are newer areas within Halifax that are largely underserviced, and there is potential for both acquiring existing retailers and creating new Paint Shop stores from scratch.
“We’re better prepared to scale and we’ve got lots of contacts across the country through Access Moore,” Payne says of the national buying group for close to 600 independent Benjamin Moore paint retailers that the Paint Shop founded in 2004 and continues to operate to this day. “People know we’re here and the phone rings a little more, sometimes a little more than we can handle, but it’s a good problem.”
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