Get Dwell has found a way to offer local hardware stores their “holy grail”: home services.
“Darryl Rose is a renaissance man with good intentions. He’s an honest marketer; a software developer who thinks only of the end-user; and a remodeler. Today, the owner of Get Dwell is leveraging his skills to help Chicagoland’s local hardware stores compete against Amazon and big-box retailers.
Expanding the idea of regular home maintenance, Rose created a company that emphasized repeat business and ease of scheduling to keep things regular and predictable. He founded Get Dwell on principles of learned lessons. “We wanted to earn customer loyalty; to never over-promise but deliver what we do promise; to give homeowners what they needed rather than what was easy to provide.”
It was Ed Sanders, a local hardware store legend, who first got Rose into the hardware store scene. Sanders ran Millen Hardware, a fixture in the northern suburbs since about 1908, and after watching the amount of product Rose purchased, he one day pulled him aside and simply asked, “What is it that you do?” After explaining his business, Sanders, a shrewd judge of character, told him he’d put Get Dwell flyers at the front of his shop.
This was the seed: give hardware stores a means to offer home services the same way big-box stores can. Rose says that home services are the “holy grail” for hardware store owners.
Get Dwell perfected its partnership with Millen while expanding its operation. And while partnerships with hardware stores began as flyers with information for booking Get Dwell’s services, it was Rose’s vision to transition the system into the virtual space. “It took us two years of trial and error to build our scheduling system.”
Today Get Dwell has provides award winning home services for the customers of 45 family-owned hardware stores from Chicago up through the Northern Suburbs and into Wisconsin.