The stores have owned Ace Hardware since 1973
Founded by Chicago hardware merchants in 1924, Ace was sold to its own retailers in 1973, and independent store owners have held it as a cooperative since.
Oak Brook, IL
Mahin Barker’s store in West Lake Hills, on the outskirts of Austin, Texas, sells screws, drill bits and hammers. It also sells Le Creuset pots, Nest candles, jewelry and truffle chocolates, and it keeps a wedding registry.
“We noticed that a lot of brides don’t necessarily want to get what Aunt May buys for them,” Barker told CNN in 2024. Some engaged couples, she said, would rather register for a grill or plants. The cookware moves too. “We sell a ton of Le Creuset. It’s one of our top performers,” she said.
The store is an Ace Hardware. At the time, Barker owned and operated five Breed & Co Ace Hardware locations around Austin. Ace is a national name with more than 5,000 stores, but the company does not stand above its stores. The stores stand above it. Ace Hardware Corporation has been a retailer-owned cooperative since 1973. Independent retailers became its only shareholders that year, and the company in Oak Brook, Illinois, stayed on as their wholesaler and distributor.
That arrangement sits behind every Ace sign, from a boutique-minded store in Texas to a family business in Illinois that joined Ace when it was 10 years old.
The idea began with buying power. In 1924, Richard Hesse and a few other Chicago hardware merchants joined their stores into a venture called Ace Stores so they could buy together and keep more profit. They named it after the ace fighter pilots of World War I, who overcame all odds.
The company was incorporated in 1928, opened its first warehouse the next year and took the name Ace Hardware Corporation in 1931. By 1933 it had 38 retailers in Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin. The real growth came after World War II. Ace supplied 133 stores by the end of the 1940s and 325 by 1959. In 1954 the member stores agreed to change their names from Ace Stores to Ace Hardware.
In 1961 the company moved its warehouse and offices to Bedford Park, Illinois. Before the decade ended it had built warehouses in Northern California and Georgia to reach stores in the West and the Southeast.
Hesse, the founder and longtime president, retired in 1973. His departure is the hinge of the story. Ace was sold to its retailers and rebuilt as a cooperative, and the corporate offices moved to Oak Brook the following year. In 1975 an Ace opened in Guam, which a Hardware Connection timeline lists as the first international store. In 1976 the shareholders elected a board of directors made up entirely of retailers, and by 1979 Ace had members in all 50 states.
The co-op kept getting bigger. In 1996 it passed Cotter & Company to become the largest hardware cooperative, and in 2001 it passed TruServe to become the largest hardware wholesaler in the country.
Some Ace stores are older than Ace. When the cooperative reached its 100th year in 2024, the trade magazine Hardware Connection noted that more than 100 Ace retailers were already in its Century Club. Some of those businesses predate the cooperative and joined later.
Ziegler’s Ace in Elgin, Illinois, is one of them. The business began as Meehan’s Hardware in 1856. Lyle Ziegler bought it in 1930 and joined the 10-year-old Ace in 1934. His sons, Gregg and James, ran it into the 1970s, and at one point in the 1960s Ziegler’s was the leading purchaser of products from Ace.
The third generation, Brian and David, took over in the 1980s. David also served as chairman of the board of Ace Hardware Corp. That one job holds the cooperative idea: a man who ran hardware stores in the Fox River Valley sat at the head of the company that supplied them. In 2013 David’s son Adam joined, the fourth generation in the business. By 2024 the family had nine stores in northern Illinois.
The cooperative also owns some stores outright. In 2012 Ace bought its largest member, Westlake Ace Hardware. In 2019 it took control of ACO Inc., which then operated 50 Great Lakes Ace Hardware stores in Ohio and Michigan. In 2024 Ace Retail Holdings bought Bishop Ace Hardware, a 13-store operator in central Illinois, with plans to keep the stores open until they could pass to new owners.
The typical Ace is small. CNN reported in 2024 that the stores average 7,000 to 10,000 square feet and carry 25,000 to 30,000 different products. A majority sit in neighborhoods.
Michael Brown, a partner in the consumer products and retail practice at the consulting firm Kearney, put the appeal plainly. “Ace is your local customized, intimate hardware store where I can go in, get something very quickly, talk to people that I know,” he told CNN in 2024.
Barker’s customers in West Lake Hills shop often. She told CNN that soccer moms come in nearly every day. “They have a lot of time and disposable income to spend so we have to keep our merchandise fresh because they’re here so often,” she said. She called the result “a boutique atmosphere,” and she described the bargain in practical terms. “If you want to continue to have that consistent repeat business you got to give them what they want,” she said.
At the corporate end, the talk has also been about service. John Venhuizen was named president and CEO in 2013, the year Ace launched a plan called 20/20 Vision, built around customer service.
In 2019, Ace bought Handyman Matters, a Colorado-based home repair franchise with 57 franchisees in 23 states and about 250 handymen doing carpentry, flooring and painting. The business was to be rebranded as Ace Handyman Services. Venhuizen told Business Insider that Ace customers had been “basically begging” the company to offer that kind of help.
“It’s this natural fit of bringing ‘helpful’ to the home, so that we have a service provider that can actually do it for the consumer,” he told the magazine. “It fits naturally with what we’re known for and the trust that our brand has engendered in these communities.”
The cooperative was growing when much of retail was not. “There are not many retailers in the United States that are opening stores. Many are shutting them,” Venhuizen told Business Insider in 2019. “We opened more than 900 in the last five years and we’ll open more than 800 in the next five.”
The company’s own address changed in 2023, when Ace moved into a 250,000-square-foot headquarters campus in Oak Brook that had once housed the corporate offices of McDonald’s. The building was new to Ace. The ownership inside it dated to 1973.
Back in Texas, Barker counts on a steady kind of customer who never needs a hammer. “Many of our customers are grandparents going to a baby shower and they need a gift,” she told CNN. “We count on people coming in everyday to buy a gift item from us.”