Announcement BY Armin

April Fools: The Making Of

Last year, in November, I had the pleasure of meeting Matt Stevens at the Brand New Conference. Matt, as you’ll remember, was the man behind BNAF’10 (Brand New April Fools 2010): Dunkin Donuts. When we met, the first thing (or last thing) I asked him was if he was up for another April Fools joke? He was. So in February we picked up the conversation and he sent me some possible ideas. My reactions are shown in the header image of this post. Even though Home Depot was the last idea on his list and the one that came without any summary of what we could do, that’s the one I knew would be awesome to do. He obliged and went to work (here is his post about the process and our side of the story follows).

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Opinion BY Armin

April Fools: Home Depot’s Home Improvement

Update April 4, 2011: This post is an April Fools. All the design was executed by the talented Matt Stevens. Links to the domain www.myhomedepot.us won’t work as I have released the domain back to the registry. This is what www.homedepot.us looked like on Friday.

Established in 1978 with two 60,000-square-feet stores in Atlanta, GA, and stocking up to 25,000 different SKUs at the time, Home Depot is the world’s largest home improvement retailer, the fourth largest retailer in the U.S., it is ranked number 29 in the Fortune 500, and let’s face it, one of the coolest chain stores ever. Seriously. Where else can you walk out with a bag of screws, a door, and a riding mower? These days, Home Depot has 1,972 stores in the U.S., Canada, China, and Mexico. Each store averages a whopping 105,000 square feet plus an average of 23,000 square feet for the outside garden area. Quite amazingly too, for a retailer of that size, every employee on the floor I have ever asked a question to has been friendly, knowledgeable, and helpful — and I’ve been to a Home Depot in Brooklyn on a Sunday, they are unflappable. This week a picture surfaced on Twitter that indicated a new logo was being tested and, today, that change has been confirmed with the unveiling of a new logo and updated identity system.

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