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An Internet-based construetion-services company in Los Gatos has reached agreement with Home Depot to sell its offerings through the home-improvement company's vast network of retail stores starting with nearly 50 outlets in the Bay Area that it hopes to reach in the next 18 months.
The deal has the potential to transform Silicon Valley's DirtMarket from a small, largely California company with 16 employees and $4 million in annual revenue to a national firm with reach into all of the places that fifth product, is operating under the name Bulk Express. It allows home owners doing ambitious landscaping projects or small contractors who need basic landscaping materials to order them in quantities as small as a single cubic yard. Bulk Express then delivers the materials to the work site within 48 hours.
"The whole idea is to perfect the process in the Bay Area, to work out the technology and management with the goal ultimately of going nationwide," says Lesley Matheson, DirtMarket president and co-founder.
"No matter what, you're always managing local suppliers [in the construction industry] because you have to get supplies locally, and you have to have someone managing that local network," she says. "But we've worked up this process that we think will scale nationally."
The idea was inspired in part by the gardening mother of DirtMarket's cofounder, David Rossi, Ms. Matheson's husband and DirtMarket's chief executive. Like many avid gardeners, she was habitually hauling plastic bags of mulch and other landscaping materials to her...