YouSaid · the spoken record

John Gabbert

lines on the record: 66
first: 2026-05-11
most recent: 2026-05-11
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

“I mean, I think anybody that's successful, you have to say it was timing, luck, circumstances, that all fit into it. It's not just what you do. And I must say, I believe a lot in that hardship creates opportunity. Life's not about how fast you run or how high you jump, but how well you bounce.”
2026-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Room & Board: John Gabbert. A Broken Deal, a Family Rift, and the Birth of a Furniture Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, exactly. Exactly. The closest thing he came, actually, was this was like the day before he died. Last thing he said to me, no, not the last thing he said to me. Second, the last thing he said to me, my mom said to him, okay, Don, what's going to happen with caberts? Because they were struggling. And my dad said, oh, don't worry, John, I'll buy it. So that was as close as he came to kind of saying, oh, okay, maybe this was a mistake in the whole process.”
2026-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Room & Board: John Gabbert. A Broken Deal, a Family Rift, and the Birth of a Furniture Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think so, in certain ways. He wasn't someone that would necessarily reconcile his differences with people, whether it be as children or his brother or whatever. He kind of goes away, but you don't sit down and really define it.”
2026-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Room & Board: John Gabbert. A Broken Deal, a Family Rift, and the Birth of a Furniture Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it was made more complicated because he struggled running gabberts, to be honest. Sold it for almost nothing in 2008 Roman Board continued to grow and be successful So that's the most complicated one.”
2026-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Room & Board: John Gabbert. A Broken Deal, a Family Rift, and the Birth of a Furniture Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. I mean, I was getting to the age where the question is, what's next? Right. Right. Who's the owner going to be? And we looked at all of the options. We looked at going public. Briefly. We looked at all of the private equity options, as we talked about earlier and the complications and the opportunities within that. And we kept going back to Aesop. And once we came to the acceptance that the way that it makes sense for us to do it is have a 100% owner finance. So there's no bank loan involved. We gave a loan to the employees, basically, the ESOP, to buy the shares from the owners at an established price. And once I got comfortable with that option, that there's no guaranteed payout, right? You just sold your business, but you don't know if you're going to get paid or not because you finance the whole thing yourself.”
2026-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Room & Board: John Gabbert. A Broken Deal, a Family Rift, and the Birth of a Furniture Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, completely. We don't think of our business as a fashion business at all. And much of the industry thinks they're in the fashion business. And I think it's a big mistake. We think we're in the business of good design. So you'll be happy with it five years from now, 20 years from now. But we're definitely not in the fashion business from our point of view.”
2026-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Room & Board: John Gabbert. A Broken Deal, a Family Rift, and the Birth of a Furniture Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I don't think so. I don't think so. I think the decrease in sales across the board. It wasn't specific product that didn't work.”
2026-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Room & Board: John Gabbert. A Broken Deal, a Family Rift, and the Birth of a Furniture Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, exactly, exactly. But part of this is saying that if we generate 8% profit when times are good, sales drop 20%. That basically takes us down to break even, right? No profit at that point. But we didn't have to cut things. We didn't have a profitable year, but we didn't have a loss. So now we're able to move forward, open new stores. A lot of our store openings are related to downturns in the economy.”
2026-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Room & Board: John Gabbert. A Broken Deal, a Family Rift, and the Birth of a Furniture Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, we took a big dip in sales. Okay, so you have to understand the economy drops 2%. Furniture business will probably drop 20 or 25 percent. That's just been the history of as I think through the years. Because it's such a discretionary purchase, it gets put off. First thing, that's what happened back then. But part of our original philosophy was that our goal is to generate an 8% profit.”
2026-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Room & Board: John Gabbert. A Broken Deal, a Family Rift, and the Birth of a Furniture Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, exactly. So it's a huge part of our business. And I say this because as we go to look at other markets, we say, oh, Bozeman, Montana, we're doing... I don't know, $5 million right now, today. We say, oh, at a store, what's the potential? The potential is $9 million. It makes no sense.”
2026-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Room & Board: John Gabbert. A Broken Deal, a Family Rift, and the Birth of a Furniture Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, yes, and that we were profitable the whole way. I mean, early on, we just had no bank debt. Going to operate with no debt And we did have for years and years and years. A part of our story that I think is important is that we develop an online web business early, early on in the process.”
2026-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Room & Board: John Gabbert. A Broken Deal, a Family Rift, and the Birth of a Furniture Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just had no interest in that. I really didn't. I knew they would ruin whatever it is we'd built. I knew they would ruin it.”
2026-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Room & Board: John Gabbert. A Broken Deal, a Family Rift, and the Birth of a Furniture Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One, if you'd looked at their performance generally, they've ruined more businesses that they've grown. They just don't, one, they think they're smarter than the owners of people that created the business the first place. Second, they think they can overleverage this thing, take a lot of cash out first, put debt against it, and make it grow faster than it wants to grow. So they generally cause failures is my general, that's my take on it.”
2026-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Room & Board: John Gabbert. A Broken Deal, a Family Rift, and the Birth of a Furniture Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Important decision in the business. And so we said no. But three years later, we said, Yeah, we can do San Francisco and New York within six months of each other.”
2026-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Room & Board: John Gabbert. A Broken Deal, a Family Rift, and the Birth of a Furniture Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We never talked about growth that way. We never had a plan for specific growth in terms of what kind of volume it should be or how many stores we should add. Because I think you make a bunch of bad decisions when you start doing that through organic growth. You're available to evaluate what your natural growth is and then you're able to take advantage. If it makes sense, you're able to take advantage of opportunities as they come along rather than forcing yourself to say, oh, we got to add a store this year and you make bad decisions. Before we opened in New York and San Francisco, one of the big decisions we made was there was a location in Los Angeles that I fell in love with. And we sat down as a group and said, okay, can we do this? You know, the farthest we go on to Chicago. We didn't know what to do. And we just said, no, we're not ready. And to me, it's an interesting point of view because people remember the decisions that they made where they did something. Sometimes the decisions you made where you did nothing is the most important.”
2026-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Room & Board: John Gabbert. A Broken Deal, a Family Rift, and the Birth of a Furniture Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They can do what they want, but Generally, really happy with our relationship. I mean, we are truly a vertically integrated company through partnership. That's how I think about it. I mean, we care a lot about that seal manufacturer, about how they grow, about are they profitable, about how we balance their business that's effective for them. We work together on new product. I mean, it's virtually as if we own that business, but we don't.”
2026-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Room & Board: John Gabbert. A Broken Deal, a Family Rift, and the Birth of a Furniture Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We haven't, but we know that some of those people have gone to some of our manufacturers, like our seal manufacturers, a good example.”
2026-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Room & Board: John Gabbert. A Broken Deal, a Family Rift, and the Birth of a Furniture Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know, I don't think we thought a lot about comparing ourselves to them. We kind of knew what we wanted to be. We know which kind of product we wanted to sell. We know how we wanted to sell it. So we didn't really stop and compare. We just said what we're doing is working. It's who we are and we're not going to adjust that based upon competit”
2026-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Room & Board: John Gabbert. A Broken Deal, a Family Rift, and the Birth of a Furniture Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where they do the work for us. But if you talk to their employees, they think they're room and board employees. I got it.”
2026-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Room & Board: John Gabbert. A Broken Deal, a Family Rift, and the Birth of a Furniture Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, right. And then you get lousy service, damaged product. You know, if they don't take it into the home for the customer.”
2026-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Room & Board: John Gabbert. A Broken Deal, a Family Rift, and the Birth of a Furniture Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, absolutely. Yes, we do that all ourselves. I mean, it's a really critical part of the business, and it's often treated as a very secondary way. And it's interesting, we talked about, we opened in Chicago, and the surprise in Chicago was Chicago gets a lot of visitors from all over the country. And that store opened and did quite well. And pretty soon we were having to figure out deliveries all over the country because the visitors came to the store and bought product.”
2026-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Room & Board: John Gabbert. A Broken Deal, a Family Rift, and the Birth of a Furniture Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So they got the back end of the business, which is handling the product and delivering to customers. Now you're dealing with these ups and downs because of the sales. Without sales, you've got a pretty steady line of business going through.”
2026-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Room & Board: John Gabbert. A Broken Deal, a Family Rift, and the Birth of a Furniture Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It comes from a basic philosophy of personal philosophy. Say, I want to treat each customer. They're like my best friend Right? That's just like a core approach to think about how do you answer these questions. What would you do that your best friend? You say, oh, you know, if you came in last week, it was going to be 20% lower in price. So everybody's buying product at different price. It just didn't seem like a fair thing to do to customers. So we just said, we're not going to have sales. It's one fair price. And it just makes it simple and easy to have a consistent offer for your customers. It has a side benefit of it. It evens your business pretty. If you have a sale, you're creating peaks in your business.”
2026-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Room & Board: John Gabbert. A Broken Deal, a Family Rift, and the Birth of a Furniture Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we determined that the only advantage you have making it in China is wages, right? It's about a 30% advantage in cost of product. Well, we felt like between freight and quality and a series of other things. We could make up that difference. So we could totally make competitive product in America given the design of the product that we focus on, where it's really more about material. Cost is, you know, there's a there's a ratio always in making something between the material and the labor. So if you're making a simple, classic something out of solid wood, the labor cost is a fairly small percentage of the cost. If you're making something very elaborate, the labor cost gets to be a pretty high percentage and the advantage of making it overseas becomes pretty significant.”
2026-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Room & Board: John Gabbert. A Broken Deal, a Family Rift, and the Birth of a Furniture Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, yes. I think that the whole transition to what Rumenborg is today started with a point of view about design and value. And a lot of that came from what the manufacturer's capabilities were. I mean, obviously one of the big questions we had in the beginning was furniture was not being made in America. By the time we got to this point in our career, imports were the primary way product was made. If you must go anywhere and you buy furniture in American, it's made overseas. And we actually went through a really thoughtful question about can we make product in America that's completely competitive.”
2026-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Room & Board: John Gabbert. A Broken Deal, a Family Rift, and the Birth of a Furniture Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The person that does the upholstered seat is very different than the person that makes the wood chair. So the unique thing we bring to the process is we bring the design and then we have these different manufacturers make the components which actually reduces the cost of the piece because we got these specialists doing what they do really well and it has the bonus advantage of now you've got lots of choice. So now instead of having just two choices for the table, you've got 20 choices for the table because you can have these different tops.”
2026-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Room & Board: John Gabbert. A Broken Deal, a Family Rift, and the Birth of a Furniture Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that's what I bring I brought to the business then not so much now is that inspiration for design just because I'm so interested in it pretty soon you find the right partner and then it gets pretty easy and you do one and then you do more and first you did tables and then he does beds and the way I describe it often if you buy a table and chairs from us it probably is coming from four different manufacturers Because the person that makes the chair well is not the same person that makes a wood top well.”
2026-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Room & Board: John Gabbert. A Broken Deal, a Family Rift, and the Birth of a Furniture Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The initial pieces were a dining table. Right, and you just take two inch by two inch steel. You make classic parsons frame that you have a different levels of tops that sit on it, different kinds of tops that sit on it.”
2026-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Room & Board: John Gabbert. A Broken Deal, a Family Rift, and the Birth of a Furniture Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The way we did that was a process of finding people that could make the product. And seal was actually one of the first great examples. So what we would found actually a security gate manufacturer had tiny little factory and said, how about making some furniture?”
2026-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Room & Board: John Gabbert. A Broken Deal, a Family Rift, and the Birth of a Furniture Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that was, it was a moment that really rum It gave me confidence to take Ruin Board to a different spot. These things that you would not think our customers would be interested in at the price point seem too high and it sold really well and it just told me, oh, this is the time to change. This is the time to move on to the next phase of what it can.”
2026-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Room & Board: John Gabbert. A Broken Deal, a Family Rift, and the Birth of a Furniture Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the spark was Information from our design associates in the store is kind of referring how much people like to know what they just spent a fair amount of money for, what the story is behind it. They like to know that piece of furniture in their home and where it was made and why it was made that way and what the materials are. That's not everybody, but a certain percentage really want to understand that. That's a connection to what they purchased.”
2026-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Room & Board: John Gabbert. A Broken Deal, a Family Rift, and the Birth of a Furniture Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He does a lot of stuff in wood, but also in metal and bronze. You know, simple little things like, I don't remember the art itself, but I remember the framing on some of the pieces was just raw steel. Simple steel that was welded. You can see the weld marks. And I looked at that and it hit me, oh, how perfect for furniture.”
2026-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Room & Board: John Gabbert. A Broken Deal, a Family Rift, and the Birth of a Furniture Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, my favorite of all time is Martin Purrier Who's a sculptor? I actually have several pieces and have given a couple to the walker.”
2026-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Room & Board: John Gabbert. A Broken Deal, a Family Rift, and the Birth of a Furniture Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is Significant museum with a very modernistic point of view. Yes. I mean, I think it's considered the third best contemporary modern museum in the country behind New York and San Francisco. They were in the forefront of doing all kinds of amazing things, especially as artists were developing and coming along. So it was just exposure to a pretty sophisticated point of view of design that was being unusual for Minneapolis.”
2026-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Room & Board: John Gabbert. A Broken Deal, a Family Rift, and the Birth of a Furniture Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, it was a very different look. The focus was really on the wood itself. So it was like classic, simple designs that really focus on the beauty of the solid wood. They have a reference to arts and crafts. They have a reference to some Japanese design. There's been periods of time where there's been a reaction against over-indulgence and too much decoration. And it's more about the simplicity. And that's what this product was about.”
2026-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Room & Board: John Gabbert. A Broken Deal, a Family Rift, and the Birth of a Furniture Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Strangely, one, that there's a furniture market in North Carolina, right, where everybody shows. And usually these little guys don't show. But the state of Vermont, for one market, happened to rent a space for these different Vermont manufacturers. And we happened upon those people about that same time we were going into that space. And that became our initial connection.”
2026-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Room & Board: John Gabbert. A Broken Deal, a Family Rift, and the Birth of a Furniture Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we were aware of a few of these, mostly New England manufacturers, some in the Midwest that made this beautiful quality product.”
2026-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Room & Board: John Gabbert. A Broken Deal, a Family Rift, and the Birth of a Furniture Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. And the decision seemed pretty easy. We moved room and board into this much larger building. And part of what we did is we put Rumabard in and then we created another department, if you will, which focused on better quality, American-made at a considerably higher price. And I think the shock that hit us is our room and board customers once they saw that they bought it. They bought it readily and easily and it just opened our eyes to the fact that this customer we were trying to appeal to, you know, out of college, not a lot of income. They don't mind having the IKEA-like product. Well, now it's 10 years later. And they're established in their job. And they want not temporary furniture, they want permanent furniture. Saw what we had, which was really quite beautiful, American made. And it sold way more than we expected.”
2026-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Room & Board: John Gabbert. A Broken Deal, a Family Rift, and the Birth of a Furniture Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think I had doubts about my choice at Gabbert's, the initial choice, right? I knew that was the right thing to do. I certainly started having doubts about the focus on those different businesses. And that's when I really was about 88, 87, but I turned 40. It's a time when you think about life and you say, what's the rest of it going to be? And that led me to really reevaluating the whole process and making the changes pretty quickly.”
2026-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Room & Board: John Gabbert. A Broken Deal, a Family Rift, and the Birth of a Furniture Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some, but not a lot. And I didn't feel like I was doing something that was important to me. I started having this clear vision of what room and board could be. And as that grew in my mind, it became pretty clear to me that that's way more important to me than doing all of these other things.”
2026-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Room & Board: John Gabbert. A Broken Deal, a Family Rift, and the Birth of a Furniture Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I really asked myself that question today and say, well, what was I thinking? Why did I try those different things? And I look back. It was not a good time from a business standpoint. I was doing too many things. It was just a mistake.”
2026-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Room & Board: John Gabbert. A Broken Deal, a Family Rift, and the Birth of a Furniture Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, strangely enough, not directly for the first years, I kind of avoid it what that was. So room and board stayed what it was, which is more of this ICAO-like product, which didn't compete directly. And I think I subconsciously said that's fine. It's interesting. I spent those next six or eight years. I did a variety of things. I started a business called Bedrooms for Kids. I had a wholesale showroom. I bought a design studio. So I spent, as I look at it now, I kind of wasted eight years doing things instead of building room and board.”
2026-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Room & Board: John Gabbert. A Broken Deal, a Family Rift, and the Birth of a Furniture Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was not an easy time and it was a little more complicated because I owned about 30% of the business. I had three siblings that each owned about 10 And I sat with each of them and said, okay, here's your choice. You can vote with me and I will continue to run the business. And this is my future. Or you can choose not to vote with me. And they all chose not to vote with me. So that complicated it even more.”
2026-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Room & Board: John Gabbert. A Broken Deal, a Family Rift, and the Birth of a Furniture Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. Yeah. And I wouldn't say particle board was the focus, but then there were things made of plastic. There was more innovative. I think people perceived it as temporary furniture.”
2026-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Room & Board: John Gabbert. A Broken Deal, a Family Rift, and the Birth of a Furniture Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, no. I mean, I sat with the attorney and we quickly said, you don't want to do that. That's not something you want to do to your family. It's just disruptive to everybody. So that's how we said, what are some of the alternatives? And we came up with the alternative of just. My vacating gabberts and buying, what was them going to be room on board?”
2026-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Room & Board: John Gabbert. A Broken Deal, a Family Rift, and the Birth of a Furniture Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I went to my attorney and he said, well, this is the deal. It's a clear document. Will take two to three years, but you could win in court if that's what you want to do. But let's talk about what some of the other options are. So my dad's proposal as a solution was I would move to Dallas with my family and run the Dallas store and my younger brother would step in and run the Minneapolis store. And I said, I'm not interested in moving to Dallas. So I went back to him with the proposal that I would buy what was then room and board as a division of Gabbarts And basically trade my stock, I own about 30% of the business, and I would trade that 30% for the full ownership of Ruman Board.”
2026-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Room & Board: John Gabbert. A Broken Deal, a Family Rift, and the Birth of a Furniture Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He thought the things that I was doing was going to ruin the company. I mean, it was his baby. Gabriel's was the business that he built, and I was running it, and I was making changes, and he thought those changes were a serious mistake. And then you add in what was going on in the 70s in terms of the economy, interest rates were crazy. I mean, it was a strange time. We continue to be profit the entire time, but not overly profitable in that period of time. So he just thought it was a big mistake for the business.”
2026-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Room & Board: John Gabbert. A Broken Deal, a Family Rift, and the Birth of a Furniture Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I went simply went to him and said, Here we have the agreement. And he said, I'm not going to do it. I said, we have a legal agreement. And he said, I'm not going to do it.”
2026-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Room & Board: John Gabbert. A Broken Deal, a Family Rift, and the Birth of a Furniture Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it was first came. I was on the national home furnishings association board of directors. I was the youngest member by maybe 15 or 20 years. So we'd have our board meetings. And after the board meetings, you'd sit around and talk and have a beer. And it seems like the conversations for most of the other board members who were in their 40s and 50s evolved to their old man still owns the business. What is the transition like that typical generational transfer? I listened to that and I went back to my dad. This must have been in 77 maybe. And I said, can we agree that I'm going to buy you out? I'm running the business. I'm running the business for a while. Things are going pretty well. And we had a legal document signed that I would buy, enough of his shares of the business. I would have controlling interest”
2026-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Room & Board: John Gabbert. A Broken Deal, a Family Rift, and the Birth of a Furniture Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. I just sat down with a couple of friends and we talked about names and something that was not too specific. So it had some reference to home. I think I realized later that room and board was more of a Midwestern term. In East Coast, it's like Bedon board, but it worked and that's how we got it. It was just a maybe not very thoughtful process, but one that has worked okay.”
2026-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Room & Board: John Gabbert. A Broken Deal, a Family Rift, and the Birth of a Furniture Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT