This article first appeared in News in the Channel magazine issue#33
A fondly remembered name has returned to the channel with Exertis Enterprise rebranding as Hammer Distribution. As Jason Chibnall explains, for customers, they will get the same great service they are used to – and more.
A familiar name returned to the channel this month – Hammer Distribution. After some teases on social media about an upcoming change, all was revealed on October 1 that the company that had been known as Exertis Enterprise since 2018 was returning to its much-respected former name.
Jason Chibnall, managing director of Hammer Distribution, explains that the decision to rebrand the company to the Hammer name has resulted from a series of events over the past 12 months. For instance, Exertis Enterprise’s parent company, DCC, decided to divest its technology division and subsequently sold Exertis UK and its subsidiaries to Aurelius.
“This was alongside a changing of the longer-term ambitions of the Exertis organisation, from perhaps one corporate brand looking for a global presence, to more of a sense of specialist organisations under an umbrella organisation,” says Jason.
“These changes gave me an opportunity to sit down and think about what we want to be known for and what do we want to become?”
This influenced the decision to change the company’s name back to the one it used up to 2018, which Jason says was still well regarded in the channel. “With every brand or rebranding, there’s always a consideration around the brand values and what those mean to the people that work underneath the brand and within the organisation and how they’re perceived within the marketplace,” he adds.
“It was clear to us that when we talked to customers there was still a very deep fondness for the Hammer brand. People in the channel and within the industry understood who Hammer were and our differentiators.
“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 won’t change.
“Clearly, you will now get an invoice with a Hammer logo rather than a Exertis Enterprise one, but it will be the same systems and the same people. People can expect the same level of trusted advisory services that we’ve always delivered for them.
“What will change is we will be delivering to new customers under our own merits and what we do.”
Rebrand journey
But to get to this point has taken time and a lot of organisation behind the scenes. “We began thinking in anger about rebranding in February,” says Jason. “We’ve then gone through the process of what does that mean and how do we become Hammer?”
Jason adds that there was debate about whether to go back to the previous Hammer branding but eventually decided to go with a new design philosophy and brand colours.
“We have a really cohesive board, and we’ve all got strong opinions and sometimes we take all of those opinions and debate them before making a decision that we are happy to go forward with, and we’ve done that and ended up with something we are very happy with,” he says.
There were various complications that had to be negotiated too, such as re-registering the company in the UK and the six territories in Europe it operates out of as Hammer Distribution.
Jason adds that the rebranding process involves numerous other changes too. “For instance, you’ve got policies written with Exertis logos on them and they all need to be gone through and rebranded as Hammer Distribution and read to make sure that they’re appropriate for our organisation,” he explains. “There are websites to redesign and rebuild. It’s not a simple thing. Emails need to be changed but you must ensure that emails to the old address are still forwarded to your new one. All those technical considerations are all part and parcel of what must be done before it all goes live.
“There’s also been a huge amount of effort from our marketing team. They’ve leveraged some tools, particularly with AI, to create some of the teaser videos about the brand coming that we’ve put out into social media. They have also used AI to help them with the design philosophy of the brand.”
One that was completed, the physical aspects of the rebrand were addressed. “We shut all our offices on the Friday night before the rebrand launched, and we took out anything that was associated with Exertis Enterprise and replaced it with Hammer Distribution, so everybody in our businesses came back into their respective workplaces to experience a whole new environment on the following Monday morning,” says Jason.
Positive response
When that was completed, then came the launch. “We invited 40 vendors to our launch day, and it went down really well,” says Jason. “We started with me running a town hall and talking about Hammer and what we are now. There’s a collection of organisations that we’ve either organically grown or we’ve acquired along the way. We did a slide of what was Hammer in 2019 through to what is Hammer in 2025, and a journey that we took people through there.”
The response to the rebrand has been positive so far. “There was a real heartwarming welcome to going back to Hammer from a large contingent of our vendor community,” says Jason. “Some are less aware of the Hammer brand in cybersecurity and networking because it wasn’t a traditional space for Hammer back in 2017, but we’ve evolved into that, but they are really enthusiastic about the journey and the opportunity that it provides us to single ourselves out in our market and provide that incremental opportunity for them, because that’s what they’re after.
“It’s early days. I can only judge by our own social media and my peer group around my board table. But so far, everybody that knows us has said it is a welcome and timely change. The responses we have got from people about it have been very warm.”
Moving forward
But now the rebrand is live, in some ways the work is only just beginning – now the focus is on growing Hammer Distribution in its various markets and sectors. And there are ambitious plans in place. For instance, sales and commercial expertise will be increased. “We pride ourselves on being an outcome-driven sales organisation,” says Jason. “The best sale that we can make is to understand the end user’s problem, then leverage the technologies that we represent to solve that problem.
“We are investing in a CRM platform to help drive further insight into our markets and our sales account managers and business development managers.
“We’ve also got a technology investment portfolio that we are putting in place to help drive our sales organisations across the UK and Europe.
“Then we’re investing in structural changes. For instance, we’ve doubled our workforce in our sales community in the Netherlands. That is a first step into creating distinct specialisms in the structure that can focus in on components, white box, storage solutions, and cybersecurity and networking products, so that they truly represent our vendor portfolio.
“From a structural perspective, we’re investing in dedicated AI and data centre pods to take what we’ve always done but focus in on AI technologies and AI customer verticals.”
But Jason is keen that Hammer Distribution doesn’t rest on the laurels of a successful launch. “We’ve got to make the brand live and breathe and talk about the values that we believe in,” he says. “There will be lot more activity promoting Hammer Distribution coming from my marketing team.
“But moreover, growing at a business level, using that brand and growing the investments that we’ve chosen to make into a much more profitable and far-reaching organisation over the next two to three years.”
