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ST. CHARLES — For decades, appliance retailer Goedeker’s was a tribute to a bygone era.

The chief executive scrubbed the toilet each day after work. Every employee got Sundays off to spend with their families, even after the company went online. And while CEO Steve Goedeker once mused that he could sell a lot more if he pushed people harder, he never did.

Things are a little different now.

Sales staff works seven days a week, the chief executive lives in New York City and the family name is on its way out. New leadership that took the company public spent part of an earnings call Thursday toasting an acquisition making them one of the largest “specialty e-commerce players” in the country. And they made clear they plan to ride a growing wave of online appliance sales to heights the old company never dreamed of.

“Now that the transaction is closed,” CEO Doug Moore said, “we are well positioned to scale and aggressively pursue our intermediate goal of achieving $1 billion in annual revenue while driving stronger profits each step of the way.”

Goedeker’s was founded in 1951 as a small television repair shop in south St. Louis. Over time, the business added furniture and home decor and grew into one of the largest of its kind in the state.

When all of it seemed set to disappear in the 2008 recession, Steve Goedeker prayed for a solution and found a saving grace in online sales. A decade later, most of the Ballwin showroom was operating as a logistics center, and 90% of its $50 million or so in sales were closed online.

New York private equity firm 1847 Holdings paid $6.2 million to take over in 2019. Within months, Moore, a former executive at Sears and appliance chain H.H. Gregg, succeeded Goedeker at the helm and started planning to take the company public.

The pitch to investors was simple, ambitious — and a far cry from the humble old Goedeker’s. In a video presentation last fall, Moore as one poised to disrupt an industry behind the curve on e-commerce and take annual sales from $50 million to $1 billion within five years.

“It’s not enough for us to be a small player in a big business,” he said. “We intend to be the nation’s largest, most profitable direct-to-consumer online appliance company in the U.S.”

In October, the company unveiled the first phase of its plan to get there with the acquisition of competitor Appliances Connection.

The $210 million deal promised to be a game-changer. The Hamilton, New Jersey, firm boasted revenues several times what Goedeker’s had. Executives .

The purchase also bought Goedeker’s a showroom in New York City, a nearby distribution center sure to speed up deliveries in the country’s most populous urban corridor — and a new home base on the East Coast.

Moore has since left his St. Louis apartment for the Big Apple. The old Manchester Road headquarters was mothballed last month. And while the company is planning on adding a showroom at its new fulfillment center in St. Charles’ Millstone Parkway business park, it’s unlikely St. Louisans will ever again walk through a door with a Goedeker’s sign above it.

In a June 9 call with investors after the Appliances Connection deal closed, Moore said the combined company would need to decide on a new brand and made clear the legacy name wouldn’t cut it.

“It’s not going to be Goedeker’s, I just have to tell you point-blank,” he said.

Moore said in an interview that the company’s “nexus” is now in New York. But he noted that St. Louis is still home to a large portion of the company’s employees — it had 102 before the acquisition — and one of its two distribution centers, which doubles as its official headquarters.

“St. Louis is still an important market for us,” he said.

Despite executives’ excitement about the Appliances Connection buy, it has yet to rouse investors.

The company had to sell new shares to raise money for the purchase, and when it did, it priced them well below where its stock had been trading on the open market. Shares tumbled. When Moore spoke to investors after the closing, one said he felt he’d been “given the shaft” on the deal.

Thursday’s batch of quarterly earnings also failed to inspire much confidence despite reporting increases in orders, a rare profit and projections of annual sales — counting Appliances Connection’s numbers before the merger — eclipsing $500 million this year.

The company is struggling with supply chain issues, as is the rest of the industry. Moore told investors Thursday the company is advertising less to avoid attracting orders it can’t fulfill.

But executives say it’s still early, and industry analysts say the opportunity in appliances right now is real.

Homeowners are sitting on record amounts of equity and spending more time at home with COVID-19 at large, making it easier to justify home improvements. More millennials are moving into the housing market.

“All of those things bode very, very well,” said said Joe Derochowski, who tracks the home industry at market research firm NPD Group. “The home space has been really hot, and with the pandemic it’s gotten even hotter.”

There is also a variety of research suggesting more people will be making big home purchases over the internet. Analysts say Goedeker’s will need to shorten delivery times to get customers who need to replace something in a hurry.

Moore told investors this week the company is working on it, with new distribution centers in California, Texas and Florida by the end of the year. The rebrand is set to roll out in the first quarter of 2022.

The company’s best days, Moore told the Post-Dispatch, are ahead of it.

Meanwhile, back at headquarters, a contractor said work on the St. Charles showroom would be done in four to five months. He did not know what name would be on the door.

Goedeker’s shares fell 21 cents or more than 7% to close at $2.61 on Friday.