COMPETITIVE Intelligence By Carla Waldemar
Midwestern moxie ack in 1904, North Side Lumber & Fuel Co. was launched to serve the building and heating needs of its Milwaukee neighbors. A young employee named J.P. Bliffert married the boss’ daughter, and, as they say, the rest is history. Today Eli Bliffert serves as vice president (under his Uncle Fred) of what’s morphed into Bliffert Lumber & Hardware. No longer must he go door-to-door with buckets of coal, the way his grandfather did to survive the Great Depression. No longer do they carry coal, in fact. It’s long gone, replaced by everything one might need to construct a residential or commercial building. The booming outfit now boasts seven Southeast Wisconsin locations, including two serving Milwaukee and its burgeoning suburbs. (In fact, as Eli notes, his are the sole remaining yards within the city.) The city’s core is experiencing a robust come-back, driven in part by Bliffert’s white-and-blue trucks delivering to the sites of office buildings and apartments rising here, a hospital there, and yes, a stadium, among other projects. Eli had gone to college in Milwaukee and was on track to enter grad school until he did the math: four more costly years in a classroom, or answer Uncle Fred’s timely invitation to “take a look”? The choice was a no-brainer. “I started at the bottom. I was a (terrible) driver, then switched to Inside Sales.” Over the years, his greatgrandfather’s enterprise had been split up following his death: “My family had two yards; others went into different companies.” Eli was bent on reunification. From those two yards in
B
FOURTH AND FIFTH generations are now powering seven-unit Wisconsin dealer Bliffert Lumber & Hardware, including VP Eli Bliffert (right), shown with son Devlin, who works full time in the lumberyard of the Chambers Street location.
EACH LOCATION has its own identity, such as its Northside Milwaukee yard.
16
n Building Products Digest n December 2020
Building-Products.com
