Taking on all comers

FAMILY INSTITUTION: Harry Adler, left, and cousin Marc Adler, of Adler's Hardware on Wickenden Street in Providence, are seen in their store, which has been in their family since 1919. At the counter is saleswoman Wendy Clark. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO
FAMILY INSTITUTION: Harry Adler, left, and cousin Marc Adler, of Adler's Hardware on Wickenden Street in Providence, are seen in their store, which has been in their family since 1919. At the counter is saleswoman Wendy Clark. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO

Harry Adler remembers eating lunch one day in 1987 when he started reading a story profiling a company called The Home Depot in the trade magazine Hardware Age.

“I continued both reading and eating, but it ended up being more reading than eating,” he remembered.

Adler lost his appetite because the story detailed how the emergence of Home Depot, a home-improvement chain store, was running hardware stores in Florida out of business and how it was next coming to New England. Adler, and his cousin Marc – who shares the same last name – own Adler’s Design Center & Hardware Inc. at 173 Wickenden St., Providence.

At the time, Adler’s was a hardware store and an Army-Navy surplus store, which Adler describes as a “little L.L. Bean.” But after reading the article, Adler and his cousin decided it was time to revamp its offerings.

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“The one glimmer of hope [in the article] was that women who were shopping for home decorating [materials] didn’t like shopping for that category at Home Depot and as their income rose, they liked it less,” Adler said.

So Adler’s pivoted. The store shifted its product mix to include home-decorating products, such as paints, fabrics for wall coverings, window treatment, upholstery, wallpaper and more. Adler hired a design specialist to run design services and kept adding new products. By 1995, Adler’s expanded its decorating services and eliminated the Army-Navy surplus side of the store, which wasn’t an easy decision, Adler said.

“It became clear that the Army-Navy business that we started with was taking up way more real estate than it was generating revenue,” Adler said.

Adler’s first opened in 1919 under the directive of Harry and Marc’s grandfather, Fred Adler. At the time, WW I had just ended, so there was a plethora of extra Army-Navy gear, which was the first product sold by Adler’s. The store opened in the same location where it is today, nearly 100 years later.

When big-box store competition entered the Rhode Island market, Adler’s lost about 50 percent of its business, according to Adler. But after about one year it regained approximately 30 percent of what was lost.

“It was sort of like getting into the ring with a much heavier, heavyweight boxer,” Harry Adler quipped. “If you can stand the first couple of rounds you say, ‘That hurts, but it didn’t kill me.’ ”

Sales are now stable, according to Adler. The store joined a co-op of independent retailers who launched a paint brand, C2 Paint, for high-end interior design. The new brand, along with Adler’s willingness to diversify its products, has helped the longstanding staple of Fox Point survive and thrive.

Adler, now in his 60s, says he looks forward to the store’s 100th anniversary coming up in 2019, adding that Adler family members don’t have a great reputation for retiring early.

He also looks forward to figuring out the next chapter of Adler’s.

“Until you do it, there’s no way of actually knowing because you live life forward, but you learn it backwards,” he said. •

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