Texas Homecare: The History of DIY Part 47

Texas Homecare was established in 1972 by Manny Fogel, who had previously founded the high street specialist paint and wallpaper chain Home Charm. Taking his lead from America, he revolutionised the UK DIY market, with the introduction of the 'DIY shed' style outlet.
Texas specialised in higher volume, lower margin DIY products.

In its final six months of trading, profits for Texas fell by 17% (£2m on sales of £182m). The company had been adversely affected by a recession and depressed housing market in the UK.

Texas was acquired by Homebase from Ladbroke Group plc. Homebase hoped to hold around 10% of the total DIY market in the UK. In May 1995 it was announced that only 26 Texas stores were to close, with limited redundancies. Sainsbury's found that full conversion to the Homebase format was an investment worth making and allowed £50 million for the task.

In 1999, J Sainsbury plc bought the Hampden Group plc, the franchisee of 7 Texas stores in Northern Ireland and 3 in the the Republic of Ireland, which were the last Texas stores to be converted into Homebase stores.

In its early years Texas was famous for its TV advertising sign-off: 'Texas - THE BIG ONE!' In later years Texas used a fictional character called 'Texas Tom' in its advertising. During the early 1990s, this campaign was altered slightly to refer to Tom's place: "Only at Tom's place!"