Making its choice in one of the thornier issues facing big dealers today, BMC Stock Holdings announced today it is unifying the company's operations and trade names under the BMC brand. The changes include creating a new stock ticker symbol--BMCH--and a single company logo (shown here).
The news signals the end of Stock Building Supply, which itself was an attempt at a brand consolidation effort when the former Carolina Holdings grew dramatically at the start of this century and decided to embrace corporately the name of a Wisconsin-based firm with the Stock name that it had acquired.
BMC and Stock officially merged last Dec. 1, becoming BMC Stock Holdings Inc. Stock was the public company at the time, so shares in the new company were traded on the NASDAQ exchange under Stock's ticker symbol, STCK. But starting Monday, June 6, the new BMCH ticker will take over.
"BMC’s logo represents the company’s mission to be the preferred supplier, employer, partner and distributor in its communities," BMC said in a news release. That release also quoted BMC President and CEO Peter Alexander as saying that "[u]niting under a single banner reinforces our customer focus and commitment to identifying and implementing best practices that enable BMC to deliver industry leading service and profitable growth.”
Exactly how the single-brand concept will play out in every instance could vary. For instance, Stock's Smoot Lumber Co. unit in Alexandria, Va.--which has been in business since 1822--declares on its web page that its new name is BMC Smoot. According to a BMC spokesperson, Smoot will be an exception to the rule. All locations should get the BMC name by the end of 2017, the spokesperson said.
The decision to unify runs against a recent trend to let local brands keep operating under their traditional names. This is what billion-dollar dealers like US LBM, GMS, and SRS Distribution have done lately. And recent indications are that Builders FirstSource will let some ProBuild yards--particularly the more retail-oriented Spenard Builders Supply in Alaska and Dixieline Lumber and Home Centers in San Diego--keep their names for at least the near future.
BMC is the nation's second-biggest full-service lumberyard and ranks No. 3 on the latest ProSales 100, with $2.89 billion in sales last year and nearly 150 facilities serving 17 states.
It was created in 1987 as BMC West out of 20 building material centers then operated by Boise Cascade Corp. of Boise, Idaho. (The BMC stood for "Building Materials Company," the spokesperson said, and now it stands for "Building Materials and Construction Services.") A decade later, it had become BMHC, a holding company that held BMC West as well as a specialty framing business called SelectBuild. BMHC filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy-law protection from creditors in 2009, reorganized, and came out of Chapter 11 in 2010 as BMC.
