True Value opens in St. Marys
A new business has come to the city of St. Marys, with the St. Marys Area Chamber of Commerce welcoming True Value Hardware to the area during a ribbon cutting ceremony on Friday.
The hardware store is not only a new store for the city, but also for the owner and his family themselves. David Bricker has been working hard to open up the storefront in the city, finally getting the property on 1677 Celina Road.
“I’ve been looking for a second store for a while now,” stated Bricker. He’s been wanting to change things up and the location was brought up to him. “My rep at the time helped search for me and he’d come across this one and talked to the previous owner and he was willing to meet with me.”
Bricker has been running his own store in Portland, Indiana for a while and he figured it was about time to expand on his own. He has plenty of experience due to dealing with the tribulations of his first one.
“I’ve been in business for almost 10 years now,” Bricker explained as being the depth of his experience in running his store. “I’ve wanted my own business for a long time and I want something that I could hand down to
kids, so when the hardware store in Portland came up for sale, I looked into that.”
He’d actually worked with the owner of that store beforehand and it gave him an in to make a deal and take it up for himself. He went with the lessons he learned in mind from the first acquisition when going with the second.
“This here took probably four months from the time we started,” said Bricker. It would’ve been less complicated if it wasn’t due to certain issues cropping up along the way. “We had supply chain issues, of course, and we also had a little bit of space, so we were shuffling things around to get this area done to work on another.”
He’s worked hard to get this one up and running and does hope to expand the options it gives to the people of St. Marys as soon as he’s able to. His first store has given him some ideas already due to what he’s been able to experiment with.
“I would like to grow it. I would like to make it into something that is closer to what I have in Portland where I can carry lumber as well,” said Bricker. He has other ideas, but he needs to see what happens in the future first.
“I’m just glad I’m here. The community has been very welcoming to me and we’ve had very good comments from the community.”
Bricker hopes that they’ll be able to keep things going and help the community grow in their own way.