YouSaid · the spoken record

Joan Barnes

lines on the record: 155
first: 2026-01-19
most recent: 2026-01-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Okay, and so basically tell me what kind of Sort of blueprint you gave to the franchisees. Presumably you gave them like here's how you run a class for this age were there different classes that they would run for different ages and was there a script?”
2026-01-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Gymboree: Joan Barnes. How Building a Beloved Brand Nearly Destroyed Its Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was a great, yeah. How about that? We were in US World News Report and Time and Newsweek, and I mean, it was like I just had to pinch ourselves to realize we were getting all this press.”
2026-01-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Gymboree: Joan Barnes. How Building a Beloved Brand Nearly Destroyed Its Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This was hot. I mean, starting in 1982, it was like you were getting all kinds of crazy attention. I mean, because it kind of coincided with this new... Trend around child development and better understanding of play. And, I mean, this was becoming a thing, especially an affluent communities in the US. At some point, people magazine wrote, move over Romper Room, all the best babies come to Boogie at Joan Barnes' Jimbury.”
2026-01-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Gymboree: Joan Barnes. How Building a Beloved Brand Nearly Destroyed Its Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, first of all, we built out already the Northern California market because I was able to do that on my own even before we were growing. But when we opened in LA, it was a different story. And the LA franchisees were extraordinary and they knew how to get all the press and they were part in the film industry. And so they were on all the fancy, you know, TV shows and they got all the movie stars in their classes. And they had about eight locations. And because of their success, we were able to build out the Southern California market because people who were in their classes would say, I want to do this. So that grew naturally. So the East Coast was where we needed to put our energy, which is when we did the Wall Street Journal ads. I hired a PR firm. They helped us get some big stories. And, you know, we're happening.”
2026-01-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Gymboree: Joan Barnes. How Building a Beloved Brand Nearly Destroyed Its Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we were looking for somebody charismatic who was bright who understood that this was like a marriage. You know, the success of Jimboree was the interaction between the franchisor and the franchisee. And in addition to that, we would also discuss with them how big of a business they wanted. Some of them would have six, seven, or eight locations. Some would only have one or two.”
2026-01-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Gymboree: Joan Barnes. How Building a Beloved Brand Nearly Destroyed Its Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Correct in the Wall Street Journal so that Daddy could read them on his commute to his real job that he had to do to pay for the family and he'd say, oh my God, this is perfect for my wife. And then they would fly out to California on their own nickel, maybe him too, but definitely her. And we would sit and we would spend the whole day with them. They would go to a center. Then the management team and me, we'd all have lunch in my office together. And if any one of the management team of the company thought that this person was not a good fit for us, that was a veto. I was very collaborative.”
2026-01-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Gymboree: Joan Barnes. How Building a Beloved Brand Nearly Destroyed Its Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was sort of, I think, one of our brilliant moments. What we were trying to do is really replicate people like me, but a little bit younger. Now I'm in my early 30s. So we're looking for women in their mid to late 20s who were raising a family but also had ambition for some kind of professional focus. And this was like the perfect business. We had a unique strategy because, again, this is also pre-social media. We knew that the local newspapers were the next best thing to anything. I mean, paid ads, none of that was going to work like having a press endorse you and write a big story on you. So we just went about going to the local press in every community that we were thinking about going to and saying, we're thinking about going here and then some story about the neighboring community with the local franchisee and blah, blah, blah.”
2026-01-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Gymboree: Joan Barnes. How Building a Beloved Brand Nearly Destroyed Its Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Okay, so let's talk about the initial plan. Because from what I understand, the model that you and Bud put together was somewhat different. It wasn't like, hey, you want to own a Taco Bell or a McDonald's? It was you really wanted women actually to be the franchisees. Particularly women maybe who were not working at the time. Tell me a little bit about that model that you start to develop.”
2026-01-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Gymboree: Joan Barnes. How Building a Beloved Brand Nearly Destroyed Its Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We had nothing and no leases either. I mean, it was like I like jazzing. I mean, any one of these churches or synagogues or whatever can say, okay, see you later, you know.”
2026-01-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Gymboree: Joan Barnes. How Building a Beloved Brand Nearly Destroyed Its Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I go to him with a business plan. He says, You got it. And he just makes me an offer. He tells me he's going to put up $300,000 for 30% of the company. He values the company a million dollars, which is sort of ridiculous, I think. But whatever. And he put up the $300,000 and said, you go for it. And so then Bud's now working for me. We're putting up a strategy to run franchises across the country and get a foothold in the media market of New York so we weren't labeled some crazy California phenomenon.”
2026-01-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Gymboree: Joan Barnes. How Building a Beloved Brand Nearly Destroyed Its Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Bud introduces me to the guy who eventually becomes my primary investor, Stuart Muldow. And Stuart had had super success and he was a VC and I met him and I told him what I was doing. He said, I love it. I love you. You go home and write a business plan. If it makes sense, I'll put money in to expand.”
2026-01-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Gymboree: Joan Barnes. How Building a Beloved Brand Nearly Destroyed Its Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, he did. And he liked me, and he was like a dad figure. He was the next generation. He was considerably older than me, 20, 25 years older. And Bud had worked for McDonald's in Chicago. He worked for Arby's. And then he became a franchisee and he owned about 20 Arbys out of the West Coast.”
2026-01-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Gymboree: Joan Barnes. How Building a Beloved Brand Nearly Destroyed Its Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you trademark this name, this new name, Jimboree, and now you're ready to start franchising the business in earnest. And I guess you get introduced to a guy, someone named Bud Jacob, who had experience in franchising. And what? He liked your idea?”
2026-01-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Gymboree: Joan Barnes. How Building a Beloved Brand Nearly Destroyed Its Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the then husband and I, Bill Barnes and I sat with a, wrote down a gazillion names and things like that. And then he calls me from a phone booth where he's running around the Embarcadero and said, Jim Barry. And I just loved it. I just loved the sound of it. I got immediately what it meant. And I thought, okay, now I'm going to hire somebody to find out whether this is a good name, how we get this trademark, how we do this properly. So I found, and so therefore, did all that.”
2026-01-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Gymboree: Joan Barnes. How Building a Beloved Brand Nearly Destroyed Its Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All of it. And we had about four years of operating as kindergy gym, both in the company owned locations and maybe we had, I don't know, four or five franchises at that time. And I thought, you can imagine what I thought. What am I going to do? That's the end of the business. That was sort of the first big trouble.”
2026-01-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Gymboree: Joan Barnes. How Building a Beloved Brand Nearly Destroyed Its Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kinder gym, yeah. So I tried to do that. I didn't have a trademark attorney, I had nobody to fast, you know, make this work for me. So I'm just, I'm just me filling out the damn form for the name. And about a year later or quite a while later, year and a half, I get a rejection. It's generic.”
2026-01-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Gymboree: Joan Barnes. How Building a Beloved Brand Nearly Destroyed Its Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I knew enough to know that one of the most valuable things of the franchise is the name. So I thought, okay, I better register a trademark or whatever it's called, this name.”
2026-01-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Gymboree: Joan Barnes. How Building a Beloved Brand Nearly Destroyed Its Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just thought, okay, I Okay, so you fill out the forms to become a franchisor, to operate a franchise business, but I guess when they asked for the name of the business or how it would be called, you couldn't trademark KinderJim.”
2026-01-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Gymboree: Joan Barnes. How Building a Beloved Brand Nearly Destroyed Its Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had no idea what I was doing. I just thought, okay, I can read, I can answer these questions. I'll figure it out. And I did”
2026-01-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Gymboree: Joan Barnes. How Building a Beloved Brand Nearly Destroyed Its Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so if you go to the FTC office in San Francisco, I'm assuming. And they give you a stack of documents to fill out in order to become a franchisor. And I'm not saying this for any other reason except for I don't think with all of the knowledge I've now gained over 10 years of doing the show that I could fill out those forms. Did you know how to fill out those forms”
2026-01-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Gymboree: Joan Barnes. How Building a Beloved Brand Nearly Destroyed Its Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kai, I didn't even know what the word franchise really meant. And I, you know, I was one thing I will say is that it's best to start a business when you're young and ignorant because I just figured I could figure it out. You know, I mean, when I look back at all the things that I sort of figured out, amazing. So I did. And I went to the... Federal Trade Commission. I got the franchise papers. I was probably the first person, not a corporation, franchising. So I wrote up the whole thing and I got licensed to be able to franchise in California.”
2026-01-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Gymboree: Joan Barnes. How Building a Beloved Brand Nearly Destroyed Its Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nothing just sort of showed up. No, none of this was calculated. You know, I'll get nine locations and then we'll start franchising and we'll be national.”
2026-01-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Gymboree: Joan Barnes. How Building a Beloved Brand Nearly Destroyed Its Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, I imagine that as people start to see how cool this is, people start to approach you to say, hey, can I open one? Can I, like talking to you about potentially franchising, which was not, again, was not part of the idea that you had, right?”
2026-01-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Gymboree: Joan Barnes. How Building a Beloved Brand Nearly Destroyed Its Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a good question. I was trying to remember. I think somewhere around location five or six, I thought, you know what, this is doing well enough and I need to focus on really making this happen. So I left the job.”
2026-01-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Gymboree: Joan Barnes. How Building a Beloved Brand Nearly Destroyed Its Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, they were little tiny businesses, but they were, yeah, they were making a little bit of money. Yeah, I was making some money.”
2026-01-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Gymboree: Joan Barnes. How Building a Beloved Brand Nearly Destroyed Its Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Your investor, Max Shapiro, who had originally given you $3,000, you decide he's a passive investor. I'm doing all the work. I want to try to buy him out. And he agreed to let you buy him out. I think you gave him double what he put in, I think, $3,000 from what I understand. You gave him $6,000 back.”
2026-01-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Gymboree: Joan Barnes. How Building a Beloved Brand Nearly Destroyed Its Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I'm working hard. And when the setup guy doesn't show up to put up the equipment. You know, I'm putting the toddlers in the car and driving down to San Jose and setting up equipment myself. And I thought, this is no way to run an airline. So I make my San Mateo partner, or she was an employee at the time. Now she's running like three of these up in Northern California, up in the northern part of the peninsula. And I have another person down in San Jose who's operating another four or five of these things. And I make them both partners in the business.”
2026-01-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Gymboree: Joan Barnes. How Building a Beloved Brand Nearly Destroyed Its Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I hired somebody who was similar to the teachers I'd hired up in Marin County in the two locations. I hired somebody with preschool background to run the program. And they ran it a bit of a precursor as the franchisees. They put a phone in their home. They run the business part of it and they would teach the classes. They would pick up the calls, get them, you know. And I was able to get a big story in the San Mateo paper same as I had done in Marin. And the same thing. It completely filled up.”
2026-01-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Gymboree: Joan Barnes. How Building a Beloved Brand Nearly Destroyed Its Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That sort of thing. So that was the model. It wasn't like I'm going to get a lease, a space. I'm going to go to a temple or synagogue or a church or whatever. Use their space and pay them rent. And that's where I'm going to start this up.”
2026-01-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Gymboree: Joan Barnes. How Building a Beloved Brand Nearly Destroyed Its Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I open up at a temple. I convinced a temple that we could use their social hall a couple of days a week and that we could store the equipment a little bit here, a little bit, that sort of thing.”
2026-01-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Gymboree: Joan Barnes. How Building a Beloved Brand Nearly Destroyed Its Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, but I was afraid to leave my job, my important $5,000 a year job. So I skipped down to south of San Francisco to the peninsula, we call it, San Mateo. To open up the first one. As a business, calling a kindergarten, none of this trademark or any of that stuff is even, I think about all that stuff.”
2026-01-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Gymboree: Joan Barnes. How Building a Beloved Brand Nearly Destroyed Its Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, so Mac says, hey, there's something here do you want to go into business together? So what did that, what did you then do? I mean, you have two of these centers in JCC's. At that point, it's not your business. So then do you say, all right, I'm going to start a business. It's going to be called Kindergam or whatever. Did that happen at that point?”
2026-01-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Gymboree: Joan Barnes. How Building a Beloved Brand Nearly Destroyed Its Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, before that, I opened a second one on behalf of the Jewish Community Center in a neighboring community, the one I lived in Mill Valley, which was about. So I had two of them, and they were really making money, and they were supporting all the, you know, sort of do-good programs of other things that the center was doing. And that's when the guy who had been running these, he was the president of the board. He was all of 32, and I'm 26. And I think he seems like an old man. But he had run these Rick Berry basketball camps, and he'd sold them, and he was in a non-compete cause. He was looking for something else to do. And he came to me and said just what you said. I think this could be commercial. I'll put up the money. You run them. What do you think? And I was completely naive. No, this was not even, I never even thought of it as a commercial venture. It was all him.”
2026-01-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Gymboree: Joan Barnes. How Building a Beloved Brand Nearly Destroyed Its Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tribble running down my mouth. That's it, you know Those days are so fun. All right, so Joan, you're running this program at the JCC in Marin, and it's a JCC program. You were paid five grand a year running this program. But it was successful enough that I guess at a certain point, maybe a year or so in, the president of JCC approached you and he had been an entrepreneur himself. And he said, hey, I think this could be bigger than something here. Do you want to go into business? How did that work? Did you start to think to yourself, hey, maybe I should turn this into a business? How did you go from running a gym at the JCC to start thinking, hey, there could be something bigger here?”
2026-01-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Gymboree: Joan Barnes. How Building a Beloved Brand Nearly Destroyed Its Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's fine. And then we'd have the teachers say, Hey, out there, how are you doing, guy? You know what I mean? And just, you know, just be triple.”
2026-01-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Gymboree: Joan Barnes. How Building a Beloved Brand Nearly Destroyed Its Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, because we would have the teachers really be very upbeat and positive about whatever your kid's doing is all cool, there's so much freer spirits than we are. Some days we don't feel like doing something and we just go.”
2026-01-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Gymboree: Joan Barnes. How Building a Beloved Brand Nearly Destroyed Its Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that was an army colored parachute and I developed a multicolored parachute, which I did have made that was very kid-friendly. And so every class ended with about 10 or 15 minutes of group time where the kids would run underneath the parachute. We had songs, some of them became propriety songs in the beginning. They were just songs that everybody sort of knew, you know what I mean? And so, you know, and then I was aware that parents. Participating or antisocial or didn't want to be in the group or didn't like or scared of running under the pair of shops. All that sort of stuff. So I wanted everybody to feel positive. I wanted this to be a very uplifting experience.”
2026-01-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Gymboree: Joan Barnes. How Building a Beloved Brand Nearly Destroyed Its Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it wasn't a free flow. And we had the parachute that I had seen at the Berkeley YMCA was the big parachutes that the kids would”
2026-01-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Gymboree: Joan Barnes. How Building a Beloved Brand Nearly Destroyed Its Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I hired preschool teachers because I wasn't a preschool trained. I was an entrepreneur, you know, whatever. And so I developed with them what they would do and how they would set up the equipment. And, you know, I was winging it, man. I didn't know because underneath all that. Guy was really the intent to connect with other moms. And that would happen through having the kids having fun and everybody talking.”
2026-01-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Gymboree: Joan Barnes. How Building a Beloved Brand Nearly Destroyed Its Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, you open, I think you open this up in 1976. It's the first, you open at the JCC. Originally, you're calling it the Kinder Gym And how did you right away people were like, this is amazing. Like they start coming?”
2026-01-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Gymboree: Joan Barnes. How Building a Beloved Brand Nearly Destroyed Its Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and we had pictures of the equipment. We hadn't opened yet, but we had sort of a dry run and we had the anyway, we had a big full page features, you know, 50 years before social media or 3”
2026-01-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Gymboree: Joan Barnes. How Building a Beloved Brand Nearly Destroyed Its Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. Some of it was available for special needs kids. So some of it I could get, some bouncy logs and things like that. And then I found somebody to make our propriety products. And we were lucky, I was pretty savvy because of my husband at the time. I knew how to talk to the press. So I went to the local paper in San Rafael and I got a big feature story in there.”
2026-01-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Gymboree: Joan Barnes. How Building a Beloved Brand Nearly Destroyed Its Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I found somebody. Well, first I had to convince the board to put up, I think it was $5,000 to buy this stuff, whatever this stuff was. But I didn't know it priced out because it wasn't like going through catalogs and saying it's a custom.”
2026-01-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Gymboree: Joan Barnes. How Building a Beloved Brand Nearly Destroyed Its Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did. I thought maybe we could do this at the JCC, but not this. We could have an opportunity for moms and kids to come together. But instead of having it be with full-sized adult gymnastic equipment, we would develop our own equipment that would be scaled down to appropriate size with appropriate kinds of activities to develop because play is how kids learn and I knew that much.”
2026-01-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Gymboree: Joan Barnes. How Building a Beloved Brand Nearly Destroyed Its Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, so you see in this concept something potentially really cool. Now, you are directing the kids program at the JCC in Verin County. And so tell me what you start to think, you start to think hey, maybe I could bring this concept and do it there.”
2026-01-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Gymboree: Joan Barnes. How Building a Beloved Brand Nearly Destroyed Its Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All that stuff. So they sort of improvising a way That kids could kind of play on this stuff. You know, all the moms would get around the big trampoline and somebody would, you know, it was just, and I just thought, this is not really kid appropriate. But it could be. And I could just see all this stuff scaled down in bright colors to little kid size and some really wonderful upbeat music and a really lively teacher. And we would have something.”
2026-01-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Gymboree: Joan Barnes. How Building a Beloved Brand Nearly Destroyed Its Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it was in a gym at the Berkeley Y and they had basically, they were borrowing the UC Gymnastics equipment. So there was full-size trampoline and stuff. And the palm of the palm.”
2026-01-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Gymboree: Joan Barnes. How Building a Beloved Brand Nearly Destroyed Its Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So one of the women on the board had come into our at that time we were operating our offices in a trailer because we were going to build we were building a real JCC and she came in and she said with her then two three-year-old daughter and said she was going to a program called Kindergim at the Berkeley YMCA and maybe I ought to come see it with her because it was really special. So I said, okay”
2026-01-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Gymboree: Joan Barnes. How Building a Beloved Brand Nearly Destroyed Its Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, running an after school program. And basically, this is what you're doing. And I guess at one point you had just by chance you had gone to a class at a YMCA in Berkeley, so on the other side of the bay, to see this like a gym, a gym for kids, for little kids that they were doing at the YMCA there. Tell me remember about that visit”
2026-01-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Gymboree: Joan Barnes. How Building a Beloved Brand Nearly Destroyed Its Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“After school programs, you know, the preschool programs, the family programs, my colleague took all the Jewish stuff and I took the secular programming.”
2026-01-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Gymboree: Joan Barnes. How Building a Beloved Brand Nearly Destroyed Its Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT