90’s advert for TEXAS Homecare.

Texas Homecare is a former chain of DIY stores in the UK . Founded in 1972, it was acquired by J Sainsbury plc in 1995 from Ladbrokes to treble the size of its Sainsbury’s Homebase subsidiary.

Texas Homecare was founded 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.

Texas specialised in higher volume, lower margin DIY products. In its last 6 months, profits for were down 17% at only £2m on sales of £182m, the company having been affected by a recession and depressed housing market.

With its acquisition, 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.

Info taken from Wikipedia