Hardware With a Feminine Physique

Hammers with smaller handles. Lightweight electric saws. Gloves with reinforced fingertips.

These products and others are coming soon to a hardware store near you--and they’re made specifically for women.

Bowing to the growing number of women tackling home repair and improvement projects themselves, hardware companies and home centers are changing what they sell and how they sell it.

At Lowe’s Home Improvement Warehouses, aisles are wider, free of clutter and well lighted--a design the company says is especially appealing to women. At Lowe’s and the Home Depot, women outnumber men at how-to seminars.

Both companies are responding to a number of studies that show:

* Women accounted for nearly 38% of all do-it-yourself purchases last year, according to the Florida-based Home Improvement Research Institute.

* Women are behind nearly 80% of all do-it-yourself purchases.

* Single women are snapping up single-family homes and condos, making them the fastest-growing segment of the housing market.

But at least one leading hardware manufacturer--the Stanley Works in New Britain, Conn.--has no plans to design or market tools specifically for women.

Instead, the toolmaker said it would continue to redesign products to make them easier for all people to use.

Other manufacturers, however, see redesigning tools--and marketing them to women--as a sound way to grab a larger share of the hardware market.

For example:

* Wisconsin-based RotoZip Tool Corp. is introducing the Solaris, a bright-red power saw that is smaller and lighter than the company’s original model.

* Another saw, the Revolution, comes with “a lightweight frame with a tapered barrel and soft grip to make it ideal for smaller or more delicate hands,” according to the company’s Web site.

* Garden Pals, a California-based manufacturer of lawn and garden products, has designed a lightweight line of gardening tools for women, including pruning shears with handles 3.5 inches apart instead of the standard-size shears that are 2 inches wider. Designers queried women for tips on the shears, as well as trowels and weeders.

* Midwest Quality Gloves Inc. in Missouri is marketing longer, narrower work gloves to fit women’s hands. They have reinforced fingertips to protect fingernails.

But do these companies and others risk alienating or insulting the very shoppers they hope to attract?

No, said Nikki Krueger, a spokeswoman with RotoZip.

“Women are requesting this,” she said.

A marketing expert, though, says manufacturers must be cautious in the way they approach women.

“They have to be careful in how they communicate why they are doing it,” said Caryn Wiley, president of California-based Wiley & Associates, an advertising and communications consulting company.

Wiley said companies such as Stanley risk nothing by not targeting women. “As long as what they are doing is inclusive of women, not exclusive of women,” she said.

Melissa Birdsong, Lowe’s director of trend forecasting and design, said manufacturers have improved on earlier efforts to target women, which included pink handles on hammers.

“Women wanted real tools,” Birdsong said. “They didn’t want tools-light.”