The 2001 Acquisition That Quietly Won Home Depot the Internet

Rick Watson sits down with Mike Hogenmiller, who has spent more than forty years inside home improvement retail and watched the consumer reinvent themselves at least three times.Mike was at The Home Depot in 2001 when the company quietly acquired a 4,000-customer wholesale distributor in Baton Rouge, LA called Your Other Warehouse. That distributor was, at the time, Amazon's biggest and most profitable home-improvement supplier. The acquisition (plus a later decision to stop opening new stores and make existing assets more productive instead) is how Home Depot got roughly 15 years ahead of its closest competitor on digital fulfillment without ever calling it e-commerce.The Watson Weekly interview is sponsored by Avalara - the agentic AI platform automating global tax and compliance for leading eCommerce brands. For more details: https://avalaratax.watsonweekly.com.The story Mike tells about then-CEO Craig Menear is the part most people miss. Home Depot wasn't building an e-commerce business. They were building commerce. The customer decided what they bought, when, where, and how it arrived. Everything else followed from that.We also get into:• Why Walmart's culture survives and Target's didn't • The Sprouts problem and what happens when a specialty grocer stops buying with confidence • Why every "Amazon of [insert vertical]" pitch ignores the customer • Where CPG brands keep going wrong inside the store • The advice Mike gives DTC founders thinking about their first physical stores