For the latest rebuild, Columbus-based Certified Oil decided to go at it on its own and ended its partnership with Sunoco.
“We wanted to make sure that people knew that it was quality product with quality service … and didn’t want it associated with any other brand than our own,” said Nick Lacaillade, Certified Oil’s third generation owner.
Founded in Piqua in 1939, Certified Oil has 71 stations, 90 percent of which are in Ohio, including Hamilton and Lebanon stations, with about 10 percent in West Virginia and Kentucky, Lacaillade said.
The company’s High Street redo took four months to complete and cost approximately $2 million, an effort meant to improve the station’s image at the same time the city of Hamilton is working to do the same, he said.
“(Local city and business officials) were really, really supportive of it,” Lacaillade said. “They’re trying to gentrify and they’re trying to clean up that whole corridor and, you know, one business at a time, right?”
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The redo is part of the company’s new image and the first build of the company’s latest prototype, one aimed at providing a “fresh, clean inviting look (and) a lot of light” for customers,” he said.
It also doubled convenience store retail space from 1,800 square feet to 3,600 square feet.
“We have expanded coffee, hot food and fountain beverage offerings,” Lacaillade said. “We’ve increased floor space merchandise by two-fold and increased the number of cooler doors.”
The station also now offers seven standalone parking spots, something unavailable in its previous incarnation and a feature that helps keep customer traffic flowing at the pump.
Instead of the original station’s six fueling points, the new one offers 10, each of them with streaming TV and each of them EMV compliant, taking both chip and pin cards, Lacaillade said.
“It’s just a better experience,” he said. “Our plan is to open three or four or even as many as five of these types of stores a year in the coming years under this image.”
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