Tum-A-Lum Lumber Honored with Beacon Award for Best New Store
August 28, 2023, Pendleton, OR – Tum-A-Lum Lumber, a TAL Building Center, was one of four retailers honored as Beacon Award winners during the Beacon Awards banquet held Friday, August 18 at the JW Marriott in Marco Island, Fla. The Beacon Awards are a premier national industry awards program developed by The Hardware Connection magazine and The Hardware Conference to recognize the “best of the best” independent hardware/home improvement retailers.
The Beacon Awards, now in their 11th year, honored the Retail Beacon Award winners for each of the two participating wholesalers, plus two winners for Best New Store. Tum-A-Lum Lumber was honored with the Beacon Award for Best New Store for its Pendleton, Ore. location.
“Tum-A-Lum Lumber is very worthy of its inclusion in the 2023 class of Beacon honorees,” stated Chris Jensen, editor/founder/principal of The Hardware Connection, the hardware industry’s leading digital publication. “They took an abandoned car dealership and reimagined it into something spectacular.”
What follows is an overview of Tum-A-Lum Lumber:
Serving the community since 1924, the original Tum-A-Lum was a 2,000-square-foot building that was beginning to show its age. “We saw an opportunity to expand our reach in this community, and relocating was the best way to do that,” says TAL Marketing Director Katherine Cornelius.
TAL Building Centers worked with Spokane, Wash.-based Bouten Construction and Seattle-based Graham Baba Architects to create a new kind of hardware store and lumberyard that re-envisions the customer shopping experience. This customer-centric design is called placemaking—a people-inspired approach to creating a space where customers want to come in, stay, and work with the Tum-A-Lum team.
In February 2022, Tum-A-Lum Lumber opened the doors to its 10,000-square-foot home center in Pendleton. During the grand opening in April, the store welcomed a thousand people and had a ribbon cutting, VIP night and hosted a community cookout with vendor product demonstrations, activities for kids and raffle prizes.
The Tum-A-Lum building exterior boldly displays word clouds of the store’s expanded assortment. The new store also offers plenty of parking and easy access to the covered lumberyard.
Inside, the most striking feature of the store is a 1,000-square-foot design center. With a sleek, contemporary look, the center showcases cabinets, countertops, doors and windows. “We want to make the design center a destination,” says Billy Cornelius, TAL Building Centers’ director of property, facilities and asset management, who oversaw the Pendleton construction.
With more room in the new store, Tum-A-Lum added a full-service paint center with four aisles featuring Rodda and Miller paints, both popular Northwest brands.
The store layout is emphasized by bright LED lighting, easy-to-read wayfinding and endcaps with side paneling that minimize visual clutter. The framed endcaps provide a consistent, architectural look, and the side panels include names and icons of products down each aisle.
The large windows at the front of the store allow in plenty of light and create a welcoming visual as customers enter the store. This area features elegant wood slats that offer peeks into millwork displays from other areas of the store.
Tum-A-Lum Pendleton’s customer base is about 70 percent contractor, so the store was designed with a dedicated pro sales center that includes multiple desk spaces where contractors can spread out plans. Connecting to the company’s long service to its community, the store displays many large historic photos, like the Tum-A-Lum delivery truck depicted behind this contractor sales desk.
With the new design, the service counter was moved to the front of the store, so each customer can be greeted with a smile. The base of the front counter recreates the previous location’s exterior signage.
A fifth generation, family-owned business, TAL Building Centers has focused on customer experience at their 32 locations in the Pacific Northwest, each tailored to the communities they serve. Such community spirit was especially important for the opening of the company’s new flagship store in Pendleton. “The family has been in this area for a long time and it was important to bring that sense of community with us into the new store,” Katherine says.
The lessons learned creating the new Pendleton Tum-A-Lum Lumber serve as the inspiration for other upcoming store design projects at other locations. Next up, Browne’s Home Center in Friday Harbor, Washington, which will unveil its renovations this fall. Several successful elements from the award-winning Pendleton design will show up in Browne’s revamped look.
“Our goal is to have a positive impact on our community, and to have industry peers acknowledge reshaping and changing the lumber-building materials shopping experience is flattering and an honor,” says Billy Cornelius.
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Tum-A-Lum Lumber and other 2023 Beacon Award winners are featured in the September 2023 issue of The Hardware Connection magazine. For more information on the Beacon Awards, go to www.thehardwareconnection.com.
About TAL Building Centers
Based in Vancouver, Washington, TAL Building Centers is a family-owned company helping to build better communities. At its 32 building material centers located throughout the Pacific Northwest, TAL creates a positive experience for its customers—pros and homeowners alike—by providing guidance for innovative, smart building solutions.
TAL’s family of brands include Badger Building Center, Bayview Building Supply of Elma, Best Built Builders Supply, Browne’s Home Center, Gerretsen Building Supply, Harbor Rental and Saw Shop, Lake Chelan Building Supply, Marson and Marson Lumber, Midway Building Supply, Miller’s Home Center, Mount Vernon Building Center, and Tum-A-Lum Lumber.