COOLIDGE HARDWARE is named after Coolidge Square here in Watertown, Massachusetts. The store has served our community for nearly 100 years, since 1931. Throughout all this history, it has always occupied the same location at 622 Mount Auburn Street.
My family didn’t enter the picture until 1971 when my great-uncle Charlie bought the business. Eighteen years later, in 1989, my dad Manny took over from him. I was in high school at the time, and I was thrilled to spend my nights and weekends helping him get the business off the ground. Little did I know, that was the start of a 35-year journey!
My dad and I still run the store today. You can find us behind the counter most days of the week. Even better, my son Vinny has recently taken an interest in the business. He’s only in his early 20s and is still figuring out where he wants to leave his mark on the world. But there are times when all three of us work together in the store, and those are some of my happiest days at Coolidge Hardware.
It’s remarkable how much remains the same today as it did 35 years ago. We continue to sell the same products to the same community on the same wooden floors. Despite all this consistency, one big change has taken place: our technology. In the '90s, we acquired our first computer and implemented a point-of-sale system to track sales. About five years ago, that system started to crash repeatedly, so we switched to a new system.
Then, about a year ago, a man named Max, who was tall, walked into our store. He was working on a new system called Rundoo, which was designed specifically for hardware stores in the 21st century. He genuinely sought to understand our business, and it was fun to teach him all about our store. In all honesty, we were not interested at first. Our existing system worked fine, and the idea of change felt daunting. But as we learned more about Rundoo, we realized we needed to make the switch. It was modern, easy-to-use, and, ultimately, would create a better experience for our customers. Let me share a few features that stood out to us. The first is excellent search functionality. We have a lot of customers, and they expect us to keep track of their sales history. We store POs, color history, job sites, and more for our customers. Rundoo’s search is incredible—it’s like Google for our data. In one box, I can type PO, job, customer, product, or anything, and the system will show me the best results. The second is industry data. Rundoo maintains a database of all colors and products from various manufacturers. So when we add a paint product, we can start typing the color code or name, and it pops right up with a beautiful swatch. And for all products from popular hardware distributors, an image is displayed to ensure we are working with the correct product.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, is the ease of switching. As we had experienced before, changing point-of-sale systems is risky, and we were nervous. No matter how incredible a system is, it may not be worth it if things go wrong during the transition. But as soon as we signed, Rundoo began preparing for our switch. They transferred all of our data out of our old system and into Rundoo: products, pricing, customers, vendors, and balances came over seamlessly. They spent time with us, walking through our questions, and gave us the chance to test out the new system to ensure we felt comfortable. We could really visualize running our business on Rundoo and how it would transform our operations.
We scheduled the final switch a few weeks later. Max and one of his colleagues, Jonathan, offered to come out in person, which was incredible. They configured the hardware, brought our staff up to speed, and provided a calming presence. They’ve done this dozens of times, and we’ve only switched systems twice! The night before the go-live, Max, Jonathan, and the Rundoo team transferred our final customer balances and inventory. We were ready to rock. And the next morning... everything worked great! Our customers immediately noticed the modern system. We spent the day setting up our customers on the Rundoo app so they could view their entire purchase history and easily pay their bills. Our customers really appreciate the upgrade.
All this to say, I highly recommend Rundoo. Coolidge Hardware is nearing its hundredth year. For all the changes technology has brought in the past hundred years, I’d guess it will be the biggest source of change in the next hundred too. We are confident that Rundoo is the right partner to help us navigate that change.
