Branding Creation and Stewardship

Throughout her 25-year marketing and sales career, Ginger has led marketing teams in the stewardship of some of the world’s leading brands – Pizza Hut®, Taco Bell®, Prudential®, HomeBase®, Barbie®, Baskin-Robbins®, Korean Air®, American Express®. She knows how to create brands as well, as evidenced by her work at House2Home®, which was a complete reconfiguration of the big-box home improvement retail concept, HomeBase®. After several years experiencing declining sales and rapidly deteriorating market share at the hands of two thriving, aggressive competitors, Home Depot® and Lowes®, HomeBase engaged a consulting firm to analyze their business to determine its best strategic options. The outcome of the extensive study was a recommendation to reinvent the company – in fact, create an entirely new category called Home Decorating Big Box retail, and House2Home was born.

Over a 12 month period, while maintaining the base business to provide cash flow for the re-engineering, we converted 88 100,000 square foot home improvement stores west of the Mississippi to 42 House2Home home decorating stores. Everything had to change – every SKU was different; the store footprint and décor had to change to accommodate the new segments we served; the employees serving the customers because the customers were now women instead of men; the corporate culture to ensure we were leveraging all the talent throughout the company effectively; the financial structure of the merchandise relationships with old and new vendors; everything. The company test marketed five stores in Southern California and Nevada and discovered the concept was wildly successful.