Welcome to our blog, and we invite you to visit us often. For our first post, we want to share with you a little piece of history behind the birth of Handy Store Fixtures. And this story can actually be considered a classic lesson for any retail business: You must understand your customer’s needs and wants. . .
In the 40s and 50s, Handy was a division of a very successful regional hardware wholesale business. It was also the name that properly identified a small portable, fold-up barbeque grill that was one of a large line of products manufactured under the HANDY label.
It was during this same time frame when mass marketing, which had originated in the 20s thanks to radio and which allows companies to appeal to a wider audience of customers, began to pick up pace again, following the slumping effects of the Great Depression. As a result, more and more companies needed fixtures and shelving products to store and display merchandise for resale.
When the need for metal shelving was greater than the need for small barbeques, the smart business change was made to appeal to the needs of this market. It was also decided that the Handy name would remain because, like the grill, handy perfectly describes the nature of our store fixtures and shelving products, which is well-built and practical for storage and display. Thus, Handy Store Fixtures was born.
The last Handy grill came off the production line in 1959. Ever since that time, our Handy-brand Gondola, which is the standard shelving system of the retail world, has been the backbone of Handy Store Fixtures.