Home Depot Is Betting That America’s Miserable Movers Will Make Good Customers

And Home Depot is hoping they’ll make pretty good customers.

As America enters moving season—over 80% of moves happen between April and September—Home Depot is reaching out to Americans in the process of uprooting their lives to go somewhere else. Starting earlier this month, the 41-year-old home improvement chain started rolling out in-store workshops, how-to materials and social media outreach, all designed to remind miserable movers that they can find both materials and help at the big-box store.

“This is a critically important audience for us,” Home Depot’s vp-brand marketing Lisa DeStefano told Adweek. “We know the market is big, and that’s a sweet spot for us. Our job as a brand is to give them a sense of confidence and help take the stress out of their lives.”

It’s not that movers haven’t made up Home Depot’s target audience before. Last year, it had a New Homeowners Day, for example. But the company decided to apply some marketing muscle to movers in the wake of some routine consumer research it commissioned. Among other things, the data showed that two out of five movers don’t bother to change the door locks in their new home, that three in five elect to patch holes in walls themselves and that most complained that picking out a color to paint a room was harder than actually painting.

In response to these findings, Home Depot has set up a mover’s landing page, and select stores have scheduled live workshops to teach attendees how to change those locks (and patch those walls, and apply til, and put down new flooring, etc.). The retailer has also dispatched some of its popular influencers to the workshops to bring the smarts to a broader audience. The company’s website features a variety of video tutorials—slugged as DIY 101—on these and other tasks, such as removing carpeting and putting in drywall anchors.

To help out with the anxiety of choosing paint colors, there’s also the new ProjectColor app. Consumers snap a photo of most anything they like (say, a bedspread), and the app will then give them the code for the paint that most closely matches it.

Home Depot’s bid to turn the heads of Americans busy relocating not only targets a huge batch of consumers (about 40 million people, according to data from MovingLabor.com), but the effort might well bring in foot traffic well beyond the warm-weather moving season. The Life Storage study found that Americans spend two and a half months preparing for a move and four and a half months organizing themselves once the move is over. So, in theory, even someone who moves this month might still head to Home Depot for paint and supplies in the fall.

The initiative also comes at an uncertain time for the U.S. housing market, whose health has historically had an impact on the 2,289-unit chain. In February, Home Depot indicated it was seeing slower growth in new housing—this on the heels of the Commerce Department’s announcement that housing starts for December had fallen to their lowest level in two years. “As we look to 2019, most housing metrics are trending positive, albeit trending toward stability,” Home Depot CFO Carol Tome told analysts on a call.

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