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"You probably think of The Home Depot as a great place to buy everything from tools to towel bars, but now the home-improvement retailer&amp;#039;s determined to become your go-to source for a project&amp;#039;s finishing touches, too.   Martha Stewart Living Collection, The Home Depot We&amp;#039;ve admired The Home Depot&amp;#039;s Martha Stewart Living collection of products (cabinets, carpeting, curtains, and more) and so it didn&amp;#039;t come as a surprise to read that the company has been fine-tuning its in-store approach. To get the details, we spoke to Sarah Fishburne, Director of Trend and Design for The Home Depot: Good Housekeeping: I was interested in your take on The Home Depot&amp;#039;s relationship with its female shoppers. Is the company really trying to appeal more to women? Sarah Fishburne: Actually, we&amp;#039;re already at nearly a 50/50 split between male and female consumers, and our research shows that men and women make buying decisions together, so it&amp;#039;s not so much that we&amp;#039;re trying to pull in more women as that we&amp;#039;re working to provide more products, services, and education to our entire audience. GH: What are some of the ways you&amp;#039;re trying to serve your customers better? SF: The biggest way is by offering products for every step of the project. So, if you&amp;#039;re updating your foyer and you&amp;#039;re going to retile the floor and paint the walls, you can buy those products here\u2014but you can also get the mirror to hang next to the front door. Also, we want to help people coordinate the style throughout their entire home, to make it easier for them to get a pulled-together look, which can be hard. The Martha Stewart Living collections are a good example of that. If you pick a Martha Stewart Living carpet for your family room, for example, you can then find matching paint, window treatments, and more just by matching the icons\u2014like a star, or a leaf\u2014on each product. GH: That sounds like a pretty easy system. Does it extend to furniture too? SF: We have some furniture in the stores and online, or we can point customers to our furniture retailer, The Home Decorator&amp;#039;s Collection, which we&amp;#039;ve owned since 2006. A lot of the designs there coordinate with our in-store offerings. GH: Do men and women shop differently? SF: Women tend to browse the aisles a bit more, so we&amp;#039;re trying to bring everything down to eye level, to make it easier to see the products clearly (which of course is good for all shoppers, not just for women!). And, it&amp;#039;s certainly not the case that women only come to The Home Depot to buy decorating products\u2014they&amp;#039;re doing remodeling projects, too. To help them in that area, we offer Do It Herself Workshops in the stores\u2014on topics like tiling or installing a ceiling fan, for example. They&amp;#039;re very popular: 400,000 women signed up for those in 2010 alone!   "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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