Stadium Hardware expanded one storefront south into the former Campus TV & Satellite space late last fall with little fanfare. As of mid-February, they were still trying to figure out where everything was going to go.

“That’s the biggest reason we’ve stayed kind of quiet about it,” laughs co-owner Skip Hackbarth. He says they hope to have everything where they want it by sometime this month. “We’ve probably changed that room around four or five times already.” Some of his employees have made it clear that moving the same merchandise back and forth is getting a little old, but Hackbarth says “flow” is important, hence the constant shifting. “You look at something, and it’s not flowing right, change it.”

The space became available when Campus TV & Satellite relocated to Pinckney last summer after forty-six years in its Stadium location. Owner Joe Logelin says he moved the business into a building he built on property he owns up there, adding, “My overhead’s lower.”

Stadium’s three partners–Hackbarth, Mark Mayne, and Mike Kruzel–“knew we wanted the space,” Hackbarth says. “We just didn’t have a master plan for it.” The addition took the store from 8,500 square feet to just over 10,000–or four times the size of its original 2,500-square-foot storefront in 1962. It opened in the room that currently houses the store’s collection of nuts, bolts, nails, fasteners, and the like, expanding gradually as neighboring spaces became available.

Hackbarth says they’ve added insulation and a small amount of lumber but mostly are using the new space “to spread out the building materials and get them all in one area.” Construction hardware–things like doorknobs and hinges–is no longer “stuck between plumbing and paint where it didn’t really have a home. It has a home now.”

How has a small independent hardware store been able to not just thrive but expand in an era when even big-box home stores like Lowe’s and Home Depot are closing locations? “It’s all about wanting to help the customer and the ability to help the customer, and the customer knows when they come in they’re important,” Hackbarth says. “If you’re coming in and you’re buying a part and you need a piece soldered, sometimes we’ll go back there [to the store’s workshop] and solder for it for you. If you got a bunch of stuff you need to solder and you’ve never soldered before, we’ll show you how to solder. If it’s something where there’s alternatives, we’ll walk you through a couple of different alternatives.

“If you need to know how to do something, somebody in the store is going to know the information to get you there. I might not be me, it might not be Mike, it might not be Mark, but it’s going to be somebody in the store. It might be another customer.” For instance, he says, a plumber might be standing at the counter when a customer comes up with a plumbing question. Hackbarth might ask the plumber, “‘Hey what’s the plumbing code on this?’ Our customers will chime in information for us on a regular basis.

“That’s a wonderful part of it. You’ve got so many professional people in the building at any given point in time, not just the people we pay but thankfully the people who come in and pay us. It’s a really nice community when you walk in.”

Stadium Hardware, 2177 W. Stadium, 663-8704. Mon. – Sat., 8 a.m. – 8:30 p.m., Sun. 11 a.m. – 5 p.m.