Ace Looks to Regain Its Convenience Crown Amidst Evolving Customer Expectations

While the venue for the Ace Hardware Spring 2026 Convention was new to Ace retailers, the message from the main stage at the General Session was familiar: Ace is the hope of the hardware industry and the company is taking the steps to help retailers better serve their customers through convenience.  

For the first time, the Ace Spring Convention is being held in Louisville, Kentucky, at the Kentucky Exposition Center. Clinton Harris, director of conventions at Ace Hardware, says the company is excited to bring the event to Louisville so retailers can experience a new city with a rich, vibrant history.

“We hope our retailers walk away from Louisville with a host of new and exciting products to bring to their consumers, increased knowledge from many of our Retailer Training Sessions and a renewed sense of excitement that their company continues to work tirelessly to bring the latest innovations, processes and products to our consumers,” Harris says. 

More than 12,000 total attendees are registered for the event, up nearly 1,000 year over year, which includes 4,566 Ace retailer registrations, an increase of 562 compared to the prior spring event. 

Ace Hardware Board Chair Steven Burggraf opened the morning’s general session laying out how the board and management team at Ace corporate differ in their roles with the same goal of making Ace strong. 

“When those roles stay clear, the entire organization moves with efficiency and clarity,” Burggraf says. “I am proud to say that your board and your management team are aligned crystal clear in our roles and united around one purpose: Strengthen the Ace you own because when Ace is strong, your stores are strong.”

Different by Design

Taking the stage to address retailers, Ace Hardware president and CEO John Venhuizen emphasized that Ace is different by design from a corporate and retailer perspective. Venhuizen says that corporate Ace differs in that it doesn’t centralize profits at the top, but rather pushes profits out to retailers. 

“I think another major difference is our purpose. This was a place that was built to make the soul feel great, and I think it’s because of our purpose,” Venhuizen says. “We’re not in the hardware business. We’ve been blessed to be in the business of serving others.”

Venhuizen spoke of several “noble demands” of Ace corporate, including offering both depth of products for reliability and breadth for relevance to serve local retailers without excuse, operating thin with high growth and low margin so owners don’t have to and earning alignment through trust, service and competence, not control. 

“If you want to work for the corporation, you’ve got to be able to deliver enterprise-like world class capabilities, but always do so with owner first economics,” Venhuizen says. “In other words, we’ve got to deliver the best products and services operating methods so that David can best Goliath.”

On the retailers side, Venhuizen says retailers need to embrace high-touch service with modest gross margin by being unmistakably helpful while staying relevant and competitive. They also need take advantage of local autonomy while adhering to brand stewardship and running their stores their way but protecting something bigger than their stores. 

“Finally, retailers have to carry in the modern era of retail that we operate, and it has a lot to do with convenience because you now need to be convenient both in the store and beyond the store,” Venhuizen says. “We need to match helpful faces with modern fulfillment.”

Regaining Footing in Convenience

In recent years, Venhuizen says that Ace has lost its convenience crown. 

“Ace is no longer the most convenient consumer experience at retail, and that’s totally unacceptable,” he says. “We’ve let it slip and we need to do something about it.”

He outlined five ways that Ace is moving to win back the convenience crown, starting with winning with proximity. Currently, 75% of the U.S. is already within 15 minutes of an Ace store, but Venhuizen says the company wants to fill in the gaps where there aren’t stores. 

“Our action plan here is crystal clear: grow prudently, grow responsibly, fill in the white space and put stores where consumers live,” Venhuizen says. “My hope is that most of that growth, if not all that growth, will come from you. Our deference is always for the local Ace retailer to be able to grow organically.”

Second, Venhuizen says they will grow by reducing latency, moving faster as an enterprise and getting product faster to consumers, and third path to growth comes from getting on the marketplaces where customers are, including DoorDash, Instacart and Uber Eats. Ace started with DoorDash in August 2025, and in five months the 3,200 stores on DoorDash made up nearly 20% of all same-store sales growth for all stores for the whole year.

“We need to stop looking at these marketplaces as competition, but rather see them as on-ramps,” Venhuizen says. “They’re delivering us incremental demand from customers who were not coming to us otherwise.” 

The last two ways that Ace will work to regain its convenience crown include removing friction for customers in the last mile. By Q3, Ace plans to release a program to figure out appropriate use cases where it can charge consumers larger margins and where it can’t and work on being fast and free or fast and fair.

The company is also leaning into agentic commerce.

“Our desire here is not just to be searched, but to be chosen online. If we’re not the brand that those agents choose to fulfill rapidly, reliably and locally, we’re not going to get chosen at all,” Venhuizen says. “We’re leaning in now to work with OpenAI, Google Gemini and ChatGPT, so that we can lead while the rules are still being written here.”

“I am convinced to my core that Ace is the hope of the hardware industry, and our future lies primarily in the hands of our local leaders like you.”