Hardware Hawaii selling 4 stores, distribution center

Local building materials retailer Hardware Hawaii is seeking a buyer after two generations and 65 years of family ownership, the company announced Friday.

David Lundquist, whose parents started the business in 1954 in Kailua with a partner, decided it was time for someone else to carry on the company with four stores and a distribution center.

“It’s a graceful retirement plan,” said Jeffrey Ashmore, Hardware Hawaii senior vice president. “This is his succession plan.”

Lundquist, 69, has retained Illinois-based MWA Capital Advisors to help with finding a buyer, and he said in a statement that he will be patient.

“We are not in a rush,” Lundquist said in the statement. “I want the right buyer to carry on the business we have built.”

In the statement, Lundquist also said: “I have never felt better and had more fun working with the Hardware Hawaii community. But, I am not getting younger and after more than 40 years as president, now seems the time to look for the right buyer of the company.”

Lundquist’s parents, R. Dana and Mary Lundquist, established Hardware Hawaii as a 2,000-square-foot store at Kailua Shopping Center with James Brittain.

R. Dana Lundquist had started a hardware store in Minnesota in 1940, and moved to Hawaii in 1951 following a family vacation a year earlier. Lundquist bought out Brittain’s interest in the company in 1960, and he died in 1999. Mary Lundquist, a past president of the company, died in 2006.

David, one of four children, was working full time in the Kailua store’s lumber department by 1971 and became majority owner and president of Hardware Hawaii several years later.

The Kailua store grew in size, and was followed by expansion with a new store in Mapunapuna in 2001 and one on Kauai in 2005. A Kapolei distribution center also opened in 2006, and a store was added to this site in 2012 as a replacement for a Kaneohe store.

Last year, Hardware Hawaii reported annual sales totaling $53 million, up from $23 million in 2000 and $8 million in 1990. No asking price has been set for the business.