Two Customers, One Number

01 · The number that stood still

Home Depot was built to teach. The founding promise, in 1978, was simple: come in, and we will show you how to do it yourself. At the peak of that promise, its relationship with the do-it-yourself customer scored 65 out of 100. Today the score is 63, and stays in the same Developing band. On the dashboard, the interpretation is that of a brand holding steady. Dig a little deeper, and there is more to the story.

The composite barely moves because a single blended score is the wrong instrument for a company serving two completely different customer relationships. Home Depot serves two customers who have almost nothing in common: the DIY homeowner it taught to do the work, and the professional tradesperson it now supplies. Averaged into one number, a relationship thinning and a relationship deepening cancel each other out, and the result is a flat line. To a financial analyst, the shift underneath it even reads as progress, toward the higher-margin, repeat Pro customer.

02 · DIY goes digital

Home Depot teaches as well as it ever has, arguably better. The how-to library runs past 3,240 projects, the workshops moved online and now reach customers around the clock, far beyond any store’s footprint. The brand is still cited by economists as a read on the housing market. Home Depot’s teaching DNA held solid, simply moving to digital. One could argue that this was the natural progression in the era of online tutorials and e-learning.

What thinned is the relationship layer around the teaching. Read the slogans in order. “You can do it. We can help.” in 2003. “More saving. More doing.” in 2009. “How Doers Get More Done.” from 2019 to today. The promise migrated from help to productivity, and “Doers” leans toward the Pro. The adult in-store workshop, the peak era’s central teaching ritual, went virtual in 2020 and never returned at scale. Floor help thinned as stores leaned into self-checkout and throughput.

Home Depot’s signature achievement is that it builds real, portable capability. A customer who took the tiling workshop can tile, and can do it again without the knowledgeable floor staff. That is the Empowerment pillar working exactly as intended: the aim is a capable customer, not a dependent one. But a customer you make genuinely self-sufficient over time is a customer who does not need to frequent the store as much. That relationship, often built over the life of a project or several, goes away.

The retention was earned by value, not locked by any contract or switching cost, so when the relationship went from in person to digital, that value began to erode. Not all at once, but slowly. Home Depot’s digital content now competes with a host of other online forums that serve the DIY customer. The difference it once had over a DIY influencer on YouTube was the store clerk, a customer-facing person on the floor who could direct a customer and track the progress of a home improvement project in real time.

It was high-quality retention, and it was unprotected. (Duolingo is the mirror image: it locks the customer into the feeling of capability. At its peak, Home Depot handed over the real thing.)

03 · The bigger move, off the scorecard

While the DIY relationship quietly thinned, Home Depot spent roughly 24 billion dollars in two years building the opposite: a deep, integrated, genuinely locked-in relationship with a different customer. It bought SRS Distribution for a little over 18 billion dollars in 2024, its largest deal ever, and GMS for nearly 6 billion dollars in 2025, assembling a professional supply chain that widens its addressable Pro market by tens of billions. Pro sales now approach half of total revenue. That relationship is real, it compounds, and it is invisible to the homeowner reading the same weekly circular.

So the composite barely moved, and the reason becomes clearer.

Given Home Depot’s shift to Pro, the measurement should change. The Pro turn is a sound one: a move toward a higher-margin, more frequent customer, while the DIY homeowner might take on one modest project a year, if that. On the financials, it adds up. What it creates is a balancing act Home Depot did not have when the Pro business was small, and now, at nearly half of revenue, cannot avoid. Can it hold the DIY customer over the long run, or does it cede that relationship to Lowe’s, Ace, and the open web? Can its digital library stay competitive with steady, useful content?

A single blended score cannot hold both relationships at once. It averages a rise and a decline into one reassuring flat line, and the balancing act vanishes inside the average. The alternative is to stop blending: measure each relationship on its own, set the two side by side, and decide how to weight them. The weight you choose is itself a strategic admission about which customer you are serving.

See how the Four Pillars sits beside the metrics you already run.

04 · Why it matters now

Revenue looks healthy, carried by the Pro. What that figure does not show is the DIY customer migrating online. The risk on that side is not that the homeowner is worse off. It is that Home Depot loses the tie it used to have to that customer. The homeowner learns from the content and buys the materials somewhere closer or cheaper, and every project finished without a store visit is foot traffic Home Depot no longer sees, and a chance to help that it no longer gets. A DIYer who watches the tutorial may never walk the aisle for the lumber, the supplies, or the hands-on second opinion. The open question is whether a competitor fills that void, or builds the hybrid Home Depot has not: online instruction paired with a reason to still come in.

The revenue may not show this for several quarters. The relationship shows it now.

Home Depot recognizes the value on the Pro side of its business, and it is following every publicly traded company’s mantra: maximize shareholder value. Following the Pro is a rational, arguably shrewd allocation of capital, and softening DIY demand is a real headwind. The brand can choose to become the preferred supplier to the professional contractor community, with the understanding that doing so may come at a cost to its retail relationship, the one it was built on.

What management has to weigh is not whether to make that shift, but how much retail ground it is willing to give up, and how fast. Cede too much, and it hands the DIYer to competitors, and in time invites new entrants onto the very Pro side it is trying to own. The risk is not that Home Depot is chasing the wrong customer. It is that a company minding the high-value aisle at the front can lose sight of the back of the store, and the customer it was built on can walk out unnoticed.