Helm Paint started as a paint shop in Uptown New Orleans. Here’s how it’s grown.

Joe Helm grew up working in the family paint store on Earhart Boulevard that his father, Ronald “Bunky” Helm, opened in 1970. He learned to mix colors, staff the register and take orders from Helm Paint’s customers, everyone from do-it-yourself homeowners to commercial contractors and high-end decorators.

By the time he finished graduate school in the mid-1990s, the younger Helm was tired of the family business and thought it would be more exciting to forge his own career in marketing.

It didn’t take him long to change his mind.

“I was basically a sales guy,” said Helm, 56. “I realized I could do better and have more control over my own destiny if I came back and worked with the family.”

Nearly three decades later, Joe Helm, his brother Ronnie, their sisters and spouses have grown Helm Paint from three New Orleans locations to a chain of 25 stores in south Louisiana and Texas. Most recently, he bought and rebranded four stores in Baton Rouge in late 2023 and is now looking at other cities in Louisiana, as well.

“You have to keep growing if you want to keep the business alive, bring in another generation and continue serving customers,” he said.

‘A people person’

Joe Helm was just 2 years old, when his father opened the store in a New Orleans that was booming, with new buildings going up in the Central Business District and new subdivisions under construction in Jefferson Parish and New Orleans East.

Young and ambitious, Bunky Helm saw an opportunity to sell paint to residential and commercial customers across the growing city.

“He was a really good people person,” Helm said of his later father, who died in 1997. “He had a lot of contacts all over town.”

Bunky Helm established the store as a Benjamin Moore dealership. Unlike Sherwin Williams, which manufactures and sells its own paint at company-owned stores, Benjamin Moore doesn’t own retail outlets, though it provides its dealers with sales and marketing support.

Today, Helm Paint and Decorating is one of Benjamin Moore’s top dealers in the country and sells its various lines, which range from $100-a-gallon high-end paint, to budget-conscious products that sell for less than $40 a gallon. The store also rents equipment like pressure washers and power sprayers, and has a separate decorating business.

Joe Helm focuses on the financial side of the business, while Ronnie Helm heads day-to-day operations. About 70% of stores sale come from commercial and industrial customers, including large hotels and office buildings as well as public facilities. The other 30% of sales come from residential customers, some of whom go back decades, and still have their paint chips on file in Helm’s storeroom of file cabinets, where literally 500,000 paper paint chips are catalogued in small, metal file cabinets.

“We have it all digitized,” Helm said. “But we also like to keep a paper swatch because a digital image can never match the true color.”

Silver lining

When Katrina hit in 2005, Helm Paint was still in its original location, down the block from its current store. More than four feet of water flooded the building, literally upending the shelves of merchandise and overturning the file cabinets of paint chips.

Two weeks later, Joe and Ronnie Helm returned to the store to assess the damage and saw thousands of their paint chips scattered along Earhart Boulevard.

“We had National Guardsmen over us because it was getting dark and we had to get out of the city,” Helm said. “But we had to collect the paint chips off the street.”

In all, they saved more than 1,000 of the chips. most of the files survived.   

Within a month, the store was back up and running, operating on generator power, and providing clean-up supplies and paint to a city anxious to rebuild. Over the next few years, Helm would go on to open new stores in the Garden District, West Bank, Northshore and Lakeview. it also moved to its new location, a much larger store and showroom, down the block from the original. 

“It was a phenomenal time that really opened up a lot of opportunities for us.”

Worth the risk

In 2017, Helm began looking for ways to expand. At a meeting of Benjamin Moore dealers, he started talking to the owner of Texas Paint, a Dallas chain that had been around since 1947 and was showing signs of age.

“Every time you go to one of these shows, you meet someone who wants to get out of the business because they’re getting old or getting divorced or their kids don’t want to take over.”

He decided to buy the three-store chain and managed to keep most of the employees and customers. In the seven years since, they have opened 10 new Texas Paint stores in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Number 11 is opening later this month.

“It’s a great market, with so much population growth,” Helm said. “It was definitely worth it but there was a lot of anxiety at the time.”

The COVID-era homebuying frenzy also proved beneficial for Helm, driving up company sales 30%. Last fall, Helm expanded its Louisiana footprint with the purchase of four stores in Baton Rouge. He rebranded the four stores as Helm Paint and renovated them. In the months since, sales at the Baton Rouge locations have nearly doubled.

More locations are planned for the Capital Region and the Dallas area. Helm also has his eye on other cities in Louisiana, though nothing he’s ready to discuss at the moment.

“You have to see where other Benjamin Moore dealers are operating,” he said. “You don’t want to step on their toes.”