In a recent interview, Lowe’s CMO Jennifer Wilson shared more details on HomeCare+, laying out what is shaping up to be one of the home improvement industry’s quietest but most consequential strategic plays.
The product is called HomeCare+. For $99 a year, a trained Lowe’s Red Vest Associate will come to a customer’s home twice a year and perform seven maintenance tasks: change all the light bulbs. Change all the air filters. Replace batteries in smoke and CO2 detectors. Change the refrigerator water filter. Lubricate the garage door. Clean the dryer vent. Clean the hot water heater line.
It’s a small subscription, on its face. The strategic implications are not small.
The Numbers Are Working
Speaking with Greg Stuart on the Building Better CMOs podcast, Wilson shared two figures that should grab the attention of anyone in this industry.
First, HomeCare+ is generating a 95% Net Promoter Score. NPS in the 50s is considered strong for most service categories. 95% is generational. As Stuart noted on the podcast, there is not a single suite of home-services providers anywhere near that level.
Second, 4 out of 10 hot water heaters that Lowe’s services through HomeCare+ require replacement. That’s not just a maintenance call — that’s a lead generation engine. The associate is in the customer’s home, has built trust over the course of the visit, and now has a credible, no-pressure conversation about a major appliance purchase. The conversion economics on that are extraordinary.
Wilson framed it directly: “It’s a great example of if you’re in your home, it’s aging, you’re not moving, let us help you take care of it.”
Why This Is Bigger Than a Subscription
HomeCare+ isn’t really about $99 service calls. It’s a piece of a much larger strategic play.
For the past 18 months, the defining shift in this industry has been a single, stubborn fact: the American homeowner has stopped moving. Mortgage rates are too high. Prices are too high. First-time buyers can’t get in. Existing owners with low-rate mortgages won’t trade up. The result is a population locked into the homes they’re already in — aging, needing maintenance, and (for the demographic with disposable income, which skews heavily Boomer) increasingly unable or unwilling to climb the ladder themselves.
Wilson sees that customer plainly: “I may not wish to climb a ladder anymore, I still have disposable income, and I’d love to have Lowe’s come in — a trusted brand — and take care of changing my light bulbs and air filters.”
HomeCare+ is the wedge. The subscription gets a trained Lowe’s associate into the home twice a year, establishes a relationship, generates trust, and creates a recurring touchpoint that the customer is now paying for. Once that relationship is in place, Lowe’s owns the ongoing service conversation: appliance replacement leads, eventual remodel projects, maintenance referrals. The $99 isn’t the business model. The relationship is.
It’s also worth connecting this to Lowe’s other recent moves. Mylow, the company’s AI assistant, is converting online shoppers at three times the rate of non-users. A new HELOC partnership is buying down interest rates on kitchen and bath projects for customers who shop at Lowe’s. The DIY-focused MyLowe’s Rewards program is being layered with new perks.
Read individually, each of these is a piece of marketing news. Read together, they’re a coordinated platform play: a customer comes in through AI guidance, joins the loyalty program, subscribes to HomeCare+, gets financing for the kitchen project, and never has a reason to shop anywhere else. Lowe’s is no longer trying to sell more stuff. It’s trying to own the entire homeownership relationship.
What It Means
For independent hardware retailers, HomeCare+ is the kind of competitive move that should change a few conversations. A few angles:
- The recurring-revenue relationship is now contested ground. The trusted local hardware store has historically owned the “I have a problem, who do I trust to fix it” relationship in many markets. A national chain offering a paid subscription that puts a trained associate in the customer’s home twice a year is a direct play for that relationship. Indies should not assume their position is secure.
- The biggest independent advantage is already what Lowe’s is trying to build. What Lowe’s is engineering at enormous cost — trust, local relationship, knowledgeable in-person help — is what most independent hardware stores already have. The challenge is monetizing it. A retailer who knows half their customer base by name has a recurring-relationship moat. The question is whether they convert it into a structured offering or let Lowe’s structure one around them.
- The 95% NPS is the real signal. That number tells you the underlying demand for trusted in-home maintenance help is enormous and currently unmet. Customers are starved for someone they can trust in their home to handle the small jobs they used to do themselves. Whoever solves that — at any scale — wins disproportionate loyalty.
- Consider your own version. An independent retailer doesn’t need to build a national subscription platform. A simple offering — “We’ll send our most senior staffer out twice a year to check your smoke detectors, replace your filters, and walk through anything that needs attention, for $X” — captures most of the same value with a fraction of the infrastructure. The pricing, the seven services, and the cadence Lowe’s is using are public information. Use them.
- Watch the lead-gen math. The 4-in-10 hot water heater replacement statistic should not be ignored. Maintenance visits are not just service revenue — they’re high-conversion sales touchpoints. The economics of a paid home visit that surfaces real replacement work change the model entirely.
The Bigger Picture
Subscription models have remade industry after industry over the past decade. Streaming. Software. Meal delivery. Razor blades. Car washes. Even pet food. Home improvement has been one of the last big consumer categories not yet reshaped by recurring revenue, largely because the products are durable and the purchase cadence is irregular.
HomeCare+ is the first serious test of whether that’s about to change. If it works at scale — and the early signals say it might — the model will be copied. By Home Depot. By Ace. By True Value. And likely by the most strategic independents.
The retailers paying attention now have a window to design their own response on their own terms. The ones who wait will find themselves matching a Lowe’s offer rather than leading with their own.
The customer who’s staying put for the long haul is now the most valuable customer in the industry. Lowe’s just figured out how to put a $99 subscription on top of that customer’s house. The question for the rest of the industry is: what’s your version?
For the full interview with Jennifer Wilson, check out the Building Better CMOs podcast interview below.
Image Source: https://www.lowes.com/l/about/mylowes-rewards-homecare
