The Pro took the power. Here is what it does to your catalog.

Why the U.S. and Europe are both chasing the professional, from the operator whose team ran the business that served them.

For nearly twenty years I worked across The Home Depot and its subsidiaries, the largest home-improvement company in the United States. The team I led there built and ran a $750M commercial Pro business that served the builders, contractors and developers this piece is about. I was the market operator over the merchant, not the merchant choosing the SKUs, and with a team that stayed close to its customers we kept our pulse on what the trade actually needed and shaped what the business put in front of them. I am not writing to report a trend. I am writing because we watched it happen from the inside, and most of the advice being sold to European brands about the U.S. is aimed at the wrong person.

Here is the one thing to take from this. The power over what gets bought has moved. It used to sit with the homeowner standing in the aisle. It sits with the Pro now. The U.S. and Europe are both racing to own that person, and the brands still building campaigns for the homeowner are spending money to win a decision that is no longer the homeowner's to make.

What I mean when I say the Pro picks it

This is the part no report will tell you, because it is not in the data. It is in years of watching the decision get made.

The owner still chooses what they see and care about. The color, the finish, the style of the hero product. That is real, and it is where a design-led European brand feels strong. But the owner's reach stops at the surface. On the main product the owner leans on what the Pro recommends. On everything behind it, the fittings, the fasteners, the adhesives, the consumables, the parts of the job the owner never sees and never asks about, the Pro decides outright. Nobody overrules the installer on the bracket.

So when I say the Pro picks it, I do not mean the Pro picks everything with equal weight. I mean the Pro controls the surface by recommendation and controls the rest by default. The research backs what we saw running that business: nearly half of contracting firms have go-to brands they specify without thinking (Home Improvement Research Institute). That default is the most valuable position in the category, and it is won or missed long before any homeowner walks in.

The owner picks the look. The Pro picks almost everything behind it. Build your U.S. strategy on the wrong half of that sentence and the rest does not matter.

The money already followed the power

You do not need to take my word for it. The two biggest companies in the market have already voted with their balance sheets.

At The Home Depot, professional customers are a small share of the count but drive roughly half of total revenue, and Lowe's puts its Pro mix near a quarter (The Robin Report, 2024). Across the U.S. market, under one dollar in five of home-improvement spending is now DIY. The rest flows through Pros (Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies).

Then watch where the capital went. Since 2024 the two chains have spent more than 30 billion dollars combined buying Pro-focused distribution: The Home Depot acquired SRS Distribution and GMS, Lowe's acquired Artisan Design Group and Foundation Building Materials. When companies that size put that much behind one customer, that customer is no longer a segment. It is the strategy. The Home Depot now sizes its Pro opportunity near 600 billion dollars inside a total market above 1 trillion, with the fastest growth in the complex, multi-phase jobs only a Pro can run (Home Depot investor materials, 2026).

And the money sits with the households that hire rather than do. Owners earning 200,000 dollars or more account for about 40 percent of all remodeling spend (NAHB, 2026). The affluent homeowner does not swing the hammer. The Pro does, and the Pro decides what gets carried in.

Why the Pro holds the power, and will not give it back

This is not a cycle you can wait out. It is structure, and I would bet my own business on it not reversing.

The root is supply. The trades are retiring faster than they are replaced. The U.S. needs roughly 439,000 net new construction workers in a single year just to stand still; the median construction worker is 42, and better than one in five are 55 or older and heading for the door (Associated Builders and Contractors; NAHB, 2026). Fewer Pros chasing more work is exactly what hands the Pro leverage over price and over sourcing. A tradesperson with a six-week backlog does not audition your product. You audition for a place in their van.

Three more forces stack on top. High mortgage rates since 2022 locked owners into the homes they now improve instead of trading up, against a housing stock whose median age has reached 42 years (NAHB, 2026). The work got harder: heat pumps, EV chargers, solar and panel upgrades now need a licensed, permitted installer, so the modern project leaves the DIY aisle whether the owner is handy or not. And the country is aging into do-it-for-me, with owners over 65 now better than a quarter of improvement spend (JCHS). None of these turns around on a short horizon.

Europe is running the playbook we already ran

We watch both markets from inside them, and Europe is on the same road, just fueled differently. Europe never leaned on America's 30-year fixed mortgage, so the U.S. rate lock-in barely applies. The accelerant here is policy. The EU's Renovation Wave targets a 60 percent cut in building-sector emissions by 2030, and the revised Energy Performance of Buildings Directive phases out fossil-fuel boilers by 2040 (European Commission). That is government-forced Pro demand with no DIY substitute, on a continent short of the installers to deliver it.

And the work the mandate creates is gated harder than most brands expect. Regulated systems, electrical, heating and gas, need a certified or authorized installer across the major markets, tightest in Germany's Meister system, gating UK grants through MCS certification, looser for general trades in places like Spain. The certified fitter, not the showroom, decides what goes in, and the owner follows.

You can see it in what the big retailers are doing. In the UK, Kingfisher is furthest along: trade reached 30 percent of group sales in its latest year, up from 27 percent, with a 5 billion pound trade ambition and Screwfix already around three-quarters trade (Insight DIY). France is moving fast: Leroy Merlin calls professionals its number-one growth lever, and parent Adeo is renaming its Pro banner Bricoman to Tecnomat to win the trade. Germany is moving more recently: OBI turned toward the professional in 2026 and is building that side now, while Hornbach runs its Pro business through a separate building-materials unit. Different speeds, same direction. The direction is not in doubt, because we have already seen where this road ends.

Where European brands aim wrong, every time

Here is the mistake we watched good companies make, over and over, across the channel.

The instinct in Europe is to win the Pro the way you win a design client: one relationship, one beautiful product, charm applied one job at a time. That is not how the U.S. Pro reaches product. In the U.S. the Pro reaches it through distribution, and the channel decides what is on the truck: the big-box branches, the two-step distributors, the spec desk. Win the channel and you are in ten thousand vans. Win one fitter and you are in one.

And at that counter, available beats admired, every time. We watched beautiful European product get cut from programs it should have won, because an uglier competitor was in stock, on trade credit, available tomorrow, while the beautiful one was six weeks out and wanted a wire transfer. The Pro is running a business with a crew on the clock. They will take the lesser product that shows up over the perfect one that does not. The contest is operational, not emotional: get specced in early, and make yourself the easy choice on the counter, on the jobsite, and on the next order.

The Pro now buys on ease, not only price

The trade coming up runs the whole job from a phone, and judges you on how easy you are to deal with long before the first unit ships. They order at six in the morning without calling a rep, or they order from the brand that lets them. They expect a live digital catalog with the spec, the price and real availability, not a PDF from 2019. They expect a product that installs fast and clean, with the fittings in the box and instructions a crew can follow on site, and packaging that reads at arm's length on a loud jobsite so the right item comes off the rack the first time. For the modern Pro none of this is finish work. It is the line between the brand that gets reordered and the one that gets swapped for whatever is easier to buy.

If you built the company on design and quality, this is not a demotion

Read this if your whole identity is craft, because I know how the above sounds. The Pro is the most quality-sensitive buyer you will ever have, because their name is on the install and a callback costs them the next job. Your craftsmanship stops being the reason an owner clicks buy and becomes the reason a Pro stays loyal for a decade. Design still wins. It just has to win at the spec desk and the Pro counter, not only on the showroom floor.

What this means for you

If you make building or home products in Europe and the U.S. is on your board's agenda, stop asking whether American consumers will like your product. Ask whether the American Pro will reach for it, and whether your operation earns that reach: which Pro you are built to serve, how you get specced in, and whether you have stood up the availability, pricing, credit, digital and support that keep a contractor coming back. Tariffs sharpen that point, they do not change it. A tariff is a price problem you can plan around. Sitting outside the channel is a demand problem you cannot. That is why the brands that commit put stock, assembly or a warehouse inside the U.S., so they are on the truck at all, and build a real U.S. commercial presence.

And if you run a European retailer watching the Pro take power in your own market, the same map applies in reverse, and we have run exactly this build. The winners are standing up the trade proposition now, the credit, the counter, the digital ordering, the fulfillment a contractor rewards with loyalty, instead of waiting for the shift to finish deciding it for them.

The team I led ran the business that served the people who now hold the power. As the market operator over the merchant, I shaped what it put in front of them. That is the seat we bring to European brands winning the U.S. customer, Pro and retail, and to European retailers building the Pro side of their own business. Not a campaign aimed over the Pro's head. The commercial operation built around the person doing the buying.

The power has already moved. The brands and the retailers who win the next decade are the ones who build for the person holding it.

Europe makes it. We make it work in America.

Written by AJ Marcoz, Managing Director of NovusMarc. He spent nearly twenty years across The Home Depot and its subsidiaries, the largest home-improvement company in the United States, where the team he led built and ran a $750M commercial Pro business serving the builders, contractors and developers this piece is about, as the market operator over the merchant. Everything here is drawn from public sources and two decades in the category, not from confidential information about any company. NovusMarc helps European brands win the U.S. customer, Pro and retail, and helps European retailers build the Pro side of their own business. If the U.S. is on your agenda, a 30-minute call is the place to start. Talk to AJ.

Sources

• Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies: DIY share of spend, improvement spend by age (65+), market size (Improving America's Housing 2025; LIRA).
• The Robin Report: The Home Depot and Lowe's Pro revenue mix (2024).
• Home Depot investor materials: Pro total addressable market (about 600 billion dollars) and total market (about 1.1 trillion dollars) (2024 to 2026).
• SEC filings and trade press: SRS Distribution, GMS, Artisan Design Group and Foundation Building Materials acquisitions (2024 to 2025).
• NAHB: remodeling spend by income; median age of owner-occupied homes; construction workforce age (2024 to 2026).
• Associated Builders and Contractors: 2025 construction labor demand.
• European Commission: Renovation Wave (2020) building-emissions target; revised EPBD fossil-boiler phase-out by 2040 (2024).
• Bundesagentur für Arbeit: German skilled-trades vacancy duration and workforce near retirement (2026).
• EHPA: heat-pump installer gap to 2030 (2023).
• Insight DIY: Kingfisher trade revenue mix and trade ambition (FY2025/26).
• RICS: EU building-stock age and energy-performance bands (2020).
• Home Improvement Research Institute (HIRI): contractor brand specification.
• DIY International: Adeo Bricoman to Tecnomat renaming (Italy 2022; France 2025 to 2026).