Over the past five years, Ace Hardware has rapidly expanded its handyman business to 48 states and 5,000 zip codes as of June. And behind this growth is a seemingly simple insight about its customers: Not everyone wants to do it themselves, Karen Bloomfield, VP of marketing of home services at the chain, told Retail Brew.

As customers who previously would have picked up a wrench for a quick repair job are getting older, and new generations are never learning basic home repair skills in the first place, “there’s a huge opportunity for do-it-for-me,” she said.

To meet this demand, Ace Home Services is now available in 400 locations, and while each location varies in its offerings, the range of services include handyman, painting, plumbing, electrical work, heating, cooling, and general home maintenance. 

Ace Hardware has been on a hot streak lately, competing directly with larger rivals, and now services are shaping up to become an important segment of the hardware store’s business well into the future.

• Bloomfield said she sees it as a “growth avenue for us” that is “going to become a large part of Ace’s next 100 years.”

Here come the handymen: Breaking into services in the span of five years, however, required a spree of M&A activity starting in 2019 with the acquisition of Handyman Matters, a Colorado-based franchisor of home repair and maintenance services.

Keep reading here.—AV

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After the phrase “tomato girl summer” emerged last summer, you best believe that fashion brands took notice.

Clothing retailer Lisa Says Gah partnered with Hunt’s on tomato-shaped earrings and a line of apparel, and designers like Rachel Antonoff and Tyler McGillivary are selling tomato-print pants and shirts. Most recently, Staud unveiled a version of its Tommy purse with a beaded tomato print on the front in partnership with the New York-based Italian restaurant Monte’s at the Manor and food brand Monte’s Fine Foods, which has since sold out (but will be restocked in mid-July, per the brand).

“We always love being playful with our designs of the Tommy [bag] and being opportunistic with fun trends that are also on brand for us,” George Augusto, co-founder and artistic director at Staud, told us in an email. “Tomato girl summer,” he added, was the “perfect inspiration” for the design.

PJ Monte, founder and CEO of Monte’s Fine Foods, told us his brand was working on tomato-inspired apparel long before tomato girl summer. Monte’s branched into DTC in 2020, Monte told us, and since then has sold merch and struck up collaborations with apparel brands like Noah NY and Ignored Prayers.

While fashion collabs may seem “untraditional” for an Italian-food brand, he said, the (tomato) juice has been worth the squeeze, leading to press attention and sales for Monte’s.

Keep reading here on Marketing Brew.—KH

While salad chains may owe some of their recent surge in popularity to rising prices elsewhere, it’s no secret that the Chop’t, Sweetgreen, and Just Salad aren’t where you go for lunch if you’re trying to save a buck. It’s easy to think that these places—often criticized for offering an $18 salad—are raking in cash by overcharging you. But the reality is that salad is expensive, no matter how you slice and dice it.

Take Sweetgreen, for example

Despite a flashy IPO, the Holy Grail of fast-casual stops loses millions of dollars every month. For every $15 Sweetgreen makes in revenue from hangry email writers and other desk-salad eaters, it incurs $17.50 in expenses, according to Sherwood Media.

The CEO attributes its high operating costs to two things: ingredients, which the chain sources from farms rather than large-scale food companies, and labor.

Why are salad ingredients so expensive? You can blame nature and the government.

• Salad tends to be pricier than fried food because the ingredients are more delicate than frozen meat.
• But there’s also the problem of the US federal government’s favorite legislation: the Farm Bill, which subsidizes corn, soy, wheat, dairy, sugar, and meat—but not the components of a good salad, such as leafy greens, fruits, and vegetables.

Zoom out: Given these market realities, Sweetgreen plans to get profitable by staffing up with robots.—CC

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