HAMMER DISTRIBUTION
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“There’s a lot of people who remember Hammer and retain a respect for that brand, so it seemed like a natural thing to go back to that name. “We looked if there were negative connotations associated with the Hammer brand but couldn’t find any. Changing the name just felt like a good move for us internally and for the market.” Another consideration was some of the preconceived ideas that come with the Exertis name. “It’s fantastic having a global brand like Exertis behind us, but you then get a lot of preconceived ideas about what you do and how you do it,” Jason explains. “Often, prospective new vendors or customers, particularly in the UK, would assume that we were a broad line distribution player, and that we were operating the same way as Exertis UK in that model of we buy stock, we sell the stock rather than trying to address solutions. But as soon as we said, ‘Do you remember Hammer?’ They would and we could explain we were Hammer but rebranded as Exertis Enterprise. Then people recognised and understood the differentiator, the way in which we conduct ourselves and how we enact our business.” Scale advantage But Jason is careful to emphasise the benefits of being under the Exertis umbrella. “There are various advantages, but the overarching thing is scale,” he says. “Along with scale comes the maturity and development of Hammer over
the years and how it has shaped the organisation. That corporate scale provides a huge amount of governance and compliance and just putting some rigour into how and what we do within the business. This meant that when we rebranded, I didn’t have to reinvent trade compliance programmes because they’ve been created, and I could make use of them. The cost of creating those programmes in any medium-sized business is pretty consequential. “The scale of the Exertis organisation, of being involved with their human resources department and being able to make sure that we’ve got the right policies and reward mechanisms in place for our teams within the business is hugely important. Then there are the outward-facing commercial benefits of how the Exertis name opens doors to vendors and customers.” Different, but the same But while the name has now changed, there won’t be any other outward differences for Hammer Distribution customers. Hammer remains one of Europe’s leading enterprise components distributors, delivering across storage devices, networking, GPUs and CPUs. “The way that we’ve orchestrated the move, the operating model is not going to change,” says Jason. “We’ve been an independent business through the whole journey. The way in which we transact and our interactions with our customers
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But while the name has now changed, there won’t be any other outward differences for Hammer Distribution customers. Hammer remains one of Europe’s leading enterprise
components distributors,
delivering across storage devices, networking, GPUs and CPUs.
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