YouSaid · the spoken record

Kip Tindell

lines on the record: 57
first: 2024-12-23
most recent: 2024-12-23
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

“We loved it. We found something to do that we were good at. We found other people who we loved, who loved us, who are also good at it, and we worked night and day to make it happen. But we certainly had plenty of good luck in spite of all that along the way. I think it takes it all in order to build something of that magnitude. It takes all of the above.”
2024-12-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Container Store: Kip and Sharon Tindell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they're into new people, new era, and it's very interesting to watch. And half the time, we don't even know what's going on with it.”
2024-12-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Container Store: Kip and Sharon Tindell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Frankly, not everybody's interested in what the old founders have to say about how something should be run today. But it's still your kid, you know, if your child goes through a time where it's not doing well, that's painful. And if they're not particularly anxious for you to step in and say, here's how you should correct that, they're not particularly anxious for us to do any of that, and we're not particularly anxious to do it. We did this for 42, 43 years. I'm not, you know, bring out the violin, but I'm not really bragging. But I mean, we loved it. We worked 14, 15 hours a day, six or seven days a week for 43 years. Nobody loved their work more than Sharon and me, but also nobody has enjoyed retirement more than me, the freedom, the lack of stress. And so we're loving life, frankly, more than ever.”
2024-12-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Container Store: Kip and Sharon Tindell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the most fanatical customer is going to make your best employee. We really focused on that. It's a lost art. There's very little of it. You have to compensate people well. You have to train them well. They have to care as much about the business as you do. And I hope it's not a bygone era. And as it pendulums happen in the world as it goes away farther and farther, I think maybe there will be more it'll make more sense for it to come back because people will long for it again.”
2024-12-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Container Store: Kip and Sharon Tindell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's interesting. I spent a long time on the Whole Foods Board and both the container store and Whole Foods and Creighton Barrel and companies like that. We would be the first significant customer to so many vendors. And we would help that little bitty company become bigger and successful. And then unless our relationship was overwhelmingly strong, we would kind of get cut out of the deal as they began to sell the mass merchants and whatnot, which you can't really blame them for. So you almost need to buy equity in these little vendors because as we make them rich and famous, we get squeezed out in favor of the mass merchants. And so you either build a beautiful relationship with those people or in the case of Alpha, we actually bought the company or you phase them out as they become sold at Costco because you can't compete with Costco once that happens.”
2024-12-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Container Store: Kip and Sharon Tindell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Types, they have 15 different advils. They have different sizes, different strengths. He has one. He only carries one. There's a certain beauty and simplicity to that. But Gordon Siegel and Sharon Tintel and Stanley Marcus and I wanted selection. We wanted to have the world's greatest collection of coat hangers. If you needed a trash can, we had the world's greatest collection of trash cans. And the world kind of went to no, no, no, we're going to just only have a big one and a small one. That's it. Just two SKUs and every consultant in the world went around to all the retailers in the world and optimized their SKU count, their stockkeeping unit count, which really meant just destroying their selection.”
2024-12-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Container Store: Kip and Sharon Tindell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's very unusual to get customer service. It was then, it's particularly now, Jim Senegal, the Costco guy, and I had a running debate for years. We had 10,000 products. He said, you should have 1,500 products. So most retailers that carry Advil have 15 or 17 different.”
2024-12-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Container Store: Kip and Sharon Tindell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I want to reiterate that we had 40 years of being the most successful business around. Right. Was giddy. It was crazy, you know, and then this hit us kind of like a tidal wave, this change in retail. And now I think that the employee orientation and the foundation principles and the selling solutions rather than items still apply. But it's hard to weather that kind of storm, frankly, when you're a public company. Wall Street isn't very patient. They're interested in this quarter's earnings and this year's earnings. And we were trying to be Stuart's If you and I had a farm and we only worried about the productivity of that farm this month, this quarter, it may not be a very good farm in five years. So we were accustomed to being private and patient and long-term oriented. And perhaps we didn't react quickly enough to those changes.”
2024-12-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Container Store: Kip and Sharon Tindell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Retail began to change. You had to adapt to it, and it led us to focus more on the high dollar sale and less on the low dollar sale because people still want it to come to us when they were doing something solving a problem. But if they're just picking up three or four items, they would just take the easiest path.”
2024-12-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Container Store: Kip and Sharon Tindell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Amazon, there's no human contact. Everything's transactional. It's quick, easy. There's no great locations. It's an opposite form of retail. The American public was surveyed at that time about who provides the greatest service in retail. I expected Stanley Marcus or the container store or Creighton Barrel, one of those kind of companies to win. It was Amazon. I'm like, they don't provide any service at all. But what they do is they're They make the transactions so easy and so consumer focused. In a way they're more consumer focused than anybody. So people were saying, well, maybe you're out of step because”
2024-12-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Container Store: Kip and Sharon Tindell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, you had kind of a change in retail begin about that time. Most people would say Amazon. Amazon had a lot to do with it. Our average customer drove 21 minutes to get to our store, 21 minute drive time on average. So we began to lose our under $25 sales. Because if you're going to buy three sweater boxes, you might as well just buy it online from Amazon. You know, sweater boxes, sweater box. Now if you're going to redo your pantry, then you drive, you want to come to us. And so everything was more global. Competition was more fierce and Amazon type sales became, of course, bigger and bigger, bigger. So we would hire great people, train them, pay them twice what anybody else would pay them, and then hope that they would interact for an eye.”
2024-12-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Container Store: Kip and Sharon Tindell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's the only way to do it, sadly. And I take responsibility for that. Like I said, our private equity partners were deliriously happy with that decision, but it wasn't them forcing it upon us. And it fit us like a poor fitting suit. There wasn't anything about it that really worked well for us. I don't think that our company, it was difficult for our culture to be a publicly traded company. It did take a lot of key people's time away. Once public, there's not as much focus going into the employee and the vendor and the community. It's primarily focusing on the equity markets. So I think it's a fair statement. You know, I think there's a reason that there's half as many publicly traded companies as there were 30 or 40 years ago. It alters your business to go public.”
2024-12-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Container Store: Kip and Sharon Tindell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That won't let them dilute themselves. And I'm like, that's the only way you can do it. You got to dilute yourself if you want employees to have more ownership. If you're public, it's standard operating procedure. There's stock options. Everybody, you know, you're dealing with a more sophisticated level shareholder, ostensibly. And they certainly understand the concept of getting stock in the hands of employees. That's the major reason we did it.”
2024-12-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Container Store: Kip and Sharon Tindell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, our unilateral decision, they never thought that we would ever agree to that thing. I had been exploring that for 10 years because it's very interesting that even if you have the best partners around, and we have wonderful partners, they were really good people, but it's very hard if you're closely held to get your partners to agree to dilute themselves so that you can get stock in the hands of employees. And Sharon and I were really big advocates of getting more stock in the hands of employees. If you take your best employee, she becomes even better if she's got a piece of the action. If you can look her in the eyes and call her partner, that helps. It's very difficult to do though because even a partner that claims they want to do that, they always have an accountant or a lawyer or a spouse.”
2024-12-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Container Store: Kip and Sharon Tindell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Partners, you know, until then, you're able to focus on employees, product, and customers, and Wall Street banks and equity owners are not a distraction. They're not taking up the key people's time.”
2024-12-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Container Store: Kip and Sharon Tindell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know, Garrett was 10 years older than me and John Mullen was a year or two older than Garrett, and they were looking to sell some of their stock. We were a little Spartan about how we didn't take any money out. We didn't pay ourselves very much at all and we didn't take any money out of the business. And so at some point you have to figure out what to do about that. We interviewed over 100 private equity firms when we chose our private equity partners. I'm told nobody's ever interviewed half that many, but it was the most important decision we've ever made. And then ultimately even went into the public market. Each of those things, each of those steps dramatically changes the business as you begin to worry about things like equity and”
2024-12-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Container Store: Kip and Sharon Tindell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We didn't have much money, we didn't have any experience in acquisitions. It was a David and Goliath struggle. I remember we were like sweating blood trying to win the acquisition because other better finance people were competing with us. But the employees, the people of Elfa love the container store. They were really in favor of it being us. It was the greatest product we'd ever been associated with. It was the ultimate way to design a closet. And it was about 25% of our sales. We were the imported distributor marketing agent and retailer. There were no middlemen. It was our highest volume and our highest margin product. And that is really...”
2024-12-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Container Store: Kip and Sharon Tindell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was scared to death to present this to these employees, most of whom I barely knew. I was afraid of being laughed at or eggs thrown at me or rotten tomatoes or something. And they didn't make fun of me as I feared they loved it. Later on Fortune magazines running around saying we're the best company to work for in America. But the way we measured that was by having single digit less than 10% employee turnover in an industry that had triple digit turnover, people joined the business and they never left.”
2024-12-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Container Store: Kip and Sharon Tindell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh yeah, we would bring them into the solution of every problem. We would share all sales numbers, everything on the P&L, another foundation principle is intuition does not come to an unprepared mind. You need to train before it happens. You're not really genius unless you're not just using logic at work, you're using intuition at work. We want you to use your intuition. We authorize you to be brave enough to make more mistakes, but you'll also be much more genius by using your intuition. So seven such principles is this. And that started with the Houston Store and this foundation principles thing. It was the only way we knew how to deal with the mayhem that we were experiencing every day in that store.”
2024-12-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Container Store: Kip and Sharon Tindell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Communication is leadership. That's one of our foundation principles. So we communicated everything to our employees. I think last two short to deal with opaque people.”
2024-12-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Container Store: Kip and Sharon Tindell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So quickly, we couldn't hire enough people fast enough. We couldn't get the products down. We were flying products down on southwest airlines. It was pretty much mayhem. And so in that turmoil, we began to hire people, but we were just hiring just about anybody that came in the door to try to keep up with the overwhelming business. But we still have to agree on a certain set of foundation principles. And so I reached into my old file, I called it my philosophy, epistle file and these were very almost corny, do unto other type. Yeah, well, tell me what these principles are.”
2024-12-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Container Store: Kip and Sharon Tindell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it was an extraordinary location. It was probably the best retail corner in the south. And that store became so big. It did three or four times the volume that we expected that store to do. And so it was talk about organized and control in a sense of order. There was none of that. It was mayhem. Because it was.”
2024-12-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Container Store: Kip and Sharon Tindell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What you know the mighty Stanley Marcus thinks that what we're doing is worthwhile. What are you talking about? He said, no, I've never seen a retail store. And I said, well, you know, I mean, gosh, what about your retail? He loved it and he was so generous with his time and praise. And we were so early on first month. And then he wanted to be involved with it. He wanted to mentor us.”
2024-12-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Container Store: Kip and Sharon Tindell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, we grew up in Dallas. I think we had met him once or twice, but we didn't know him. He walked into the store the first week or two we were open. And he walked in and he said, you know, this is the greatest retail store I've ever been in. Wow.”
2024-12-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Container Store: Kip and Sharon Tindell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we extended this to working with friends, hiring friends. We didn't have an HR department. We asked our employees to bring us their best cousins and best friends. You know who your good cousins are and who your bad cousins are and who you want to work with. And so work with the people you love.”
2024-12-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Container Store: Kip and Sharon Tindell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sharon was, she's, in my opinion, she's the greatest person I've ever known. I think she's smarter than I am. I just felt privileged to be able to partner with her. I think a lot of it has to do with having that kind of respect for one another. We're well aware of what the other does better than the other, and Sharon clearly could do the product selection, product creation, merchandising at a level that even our mentors like Stanley Marcus admired and loved. So I wouldn't dare try to tell her how to do that. We gave each other a lot of leeway. I may have been the CEO, but I certainly didn't feel like her boss. In fact, I joke to friends that when Sheridan and I disagree, which is not that often. But when we do, I usually find out two years later that she was right.”
2024-12-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Container Store: Kip and Sharon Tindell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We didn't want the bankers involved with the business. It seemed like a lack of control over what we were doing. We figured out that we could grow about 20% per year safely and securely without the RPM needle getting into the red, without screwing everything up. Wow. Faster than that was a little frightening, and there was enough money for us to grow at 20% a year. 20% a year sounds pretty slow now. In those days, it was really considered fast, you know, particularly for retail. That'll get you free cash flow enough to expand your business as rapidly as we wanted to almost.”
2024-12-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Container Store: Kip and Sharon Tindell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally financed by the earnings of the business. We were much more interested in growing the business than we were taking money out and buying a new car for ourselves or something. And we paid each other $700 a month for a long, long time. And then we went to $1,000 a month. We didn't spend money on anything except growing the business. And so that went on for many, many years like that. It never even occurred to us to raise capital by having other equity owners come in and we were afraid to borrow money from the bank.”
2024-12-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Container Store: Kip and Sharon Tindell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know, it's an alien concept, I guess, to the way businesses are developed today. But there's a patience involved to where that's all the money you have. We didn't really want to borrow money even from the bank. We certainly didn't want to raise capital and add new investors. And we didn't do that for many decades. We generated a lot of earnings, and then we put that money back in the business. We just incrementally grew.”
2024-12-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Container Store: Kip and Sharon Tindell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A wire leaf barrel that was made to burn leaves in. We were selling that for toy storage around to keep the soccer balls and basketballs or pool supplies in. I think that worked.”
2024-12-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Container Store: Kip and Sharon Tindell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About as good a merchants as there was anywhere, but we've quickly discovered that Sharon could run circles around us when it came to that.”
2024-12-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Container Store: Kip and Sharon Tindell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sometime during the first week, we had a crude little direct mail mailer go out to parents of the Hakaday School, which is a private school right down the street from where we opened, and the Dallas 500 Club, which is 500 leading contributors to the arts, you know, a couple of very good mailing lists. And it drove curiosity. They laughed amazed and chuckling and happy, and they bought all kinds of things. And the word of mouth took over. And I would say by the second week or something, it was almost scary how crowded our 1,600 square foot store is. We miss the entrepreneurial terror of wondering if we were going to make it. Well, we worried a lot the first two, three, four days, but by the second week, we were thinking about giving numbers to let people in the door because word of mouth is it. That's what human beings do.”
2024-12-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Container Store: Kip and Sharon Tindell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the first day was comprised mostly of friends and family buying stuff out of heartfelt generosity. Garrett's sister bought like a $500 item, a big trunk of some kind or something. And so we weren't very busy.”
2024-12-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Container Store: Kip and Sharon Tindell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, a lot of people said that. My father had a birthday party and I was the bartender and all these Texas oil men who were very distinctly not our target customer. These guys were the opposite of our target customer. They're like, son, you're going to open a store selling empty boxes. You know, that's got to be really hard. Boy, trying to explain it before we actually put the products on the shelves and open the store was embarrassing.”
2024-12-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Container Store: Kip and Sharon Tindell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I tell you, we had so much friends and family support at the beginning. We had no money. We had no experience. You had an English major, a history major, a landscape architect, and an architect in John Mullen, you know, trying to create this thing, and we needed every bit of help and advice we could get from friends and family. We didn't really... Get the store ready to open until about 30 minutes in the morning we opened it. And we had 30 or 40 family members and they were working all night to get everything set up. So yeah, thank goodness for that name. I think it turned out to be a great name. And I think naming a business is an amazing experience.”
2024-12-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Container Store: Kip and Sharon Tindell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, he suggested probably fifty or seventy five names this was one of those. He was a good friend of John Mullen's, the father of his famous sons.”
2024-12-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Container Store: Kip and Sharon Tindell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We had hundreds of names written down. Boone's Box Company, Garrett like that, Boone's Box Company Yeah, and all hundreds of names, one of those names was the container store. And as we finalize the product mix, the container store made the most sense. There was some pushback on it because some people were saying, well, that sounds a little arrogant, the container store. And I was like, no, it's perfect because, I mean, there's no other container stores. We are the container store. There's no arrogance in that. You know, we're the only ones. So we're the container store. And that's what fit the product mix.”
2024-12-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Container Store: Kip and Sharon Tindell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Put in $5,000 Garrett put in $10,000. His parents put in $10,000. And then Garrett's friend, John Mullen, an architect in Dallas, put in $10,000. So we had $35,000, which was really undercapitalized, but there was no borrowing.”
2024-12-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Container Store: Kip and Sharon Tindell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, we open right here in Dallas where we lived right actually in the neighborhood that we lived. And we weren't actually sure we ever wanted a second location. So the first couple of locations or so were in Dallas and then the first out of town location was Austin.”
2024-12-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Container Store: Kip and Sharon Tindell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We didn't have any money, it was a very small capitalized company, $35,000 was all we had to start with. So we would order a dozen from somebody that was used to selling thousands to a big manufacturing thing. But that again is where the relationship with the manufacturers took over. They began to believe in us, try to help us succeed. And they were proud of seeing their products in a retail store.”
2024-12-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Container Store: Kip and Sharon Tindell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, you know, I mean, why are baskets that were used in the poultry business for egg collections or gardening, glass jars and bottles that were used for manufacturers to put their Salsa in. And we also had to teach these manufacturers how to sell to a retailer. It's like No, we're not going to just buy one time from you. We're going to be buying every month or six weeks from you, so you need to give us this price, not the one-time price. It was leading them by the hand, and they were scared. And so it was really relationship building, which was very instructive later on in life when we were competing against the mass merchants, you know, trying to have relationships with manufacturers.”
2024-12-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Container Store: Kip and Sharon Tindell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, they all were like that. And I'd say about half of them. Really, wanted their products to be sold on the retail level to consumers because they love their products and nobody had any earthly idea what they did when they went to work every day and this would give exposure to their beloved products. The other half of them were very worried about litigation and consumers hurting themselves on it. It was difficult to convince them to sell to us because it's just never been done before. So it was a matter of comforting. I mean, you know, we contacted him a half dozen times before we'd finally get them to agree to sell to us. We're trying to buy from them. You know, their experimentation was rewarded because in most cases wound up being one of their biggest customers.”
2024-12-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Container Store: Kip and Sharon Tindell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Furniture and housewares Where it evolved was what in businesses considered material parts in handling. Businesses were interested in saving time and space, but nobody had ever thought about saving time and space for consumers to organize your kitchen, to organize your closet. There were no products to do that. So, the products that we started with were all commercial and industrial in nature. And I would say ninety percent of them had never been retailed before. And we were thrilled by that. It was a completely original idea.”
2024-12-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Container Store: Kip and Sharon Tindell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the products drove the concept. We wrote to hundreds of thousands of different manufacturers from a set of books called Thomas Registry, and it's a list of every manufacturer.”
2024-12-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Container Store: Kip and Sharon Tindell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Commercial products, industrial products, we became distributors for so many of the things we wound up selling in the initial store because nobody had ever retailed them before.”
2024-12-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Container Store: Kip and Sharon Tindell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you're trying to get two or three kids ready for school in the morning and you're disorganized and they're disorganized, it's a disaster. People are late. People are crying. But if you're organized, everything is going beautifully. There's a love note from mom in the lunchbox and the little girl's uniform is pressed perfectly. I mean, there's a zen quality of life to being well organized. It's not saving lives. Lots of businesses are doing things a lot more noble than that, but I think that people are calmer, happier when they experience the joy of being reasonably well organized.”
2024-12-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Container Store: Kip and Sharon Tindell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, when I was at the University of Texas, I couldn't study for an exam until I had the apartment completely clean and organized and kind of a Zen. Then I could sit down and study when everything is in its place. I think your mind works better. I agree. I think life's a lot better with a little bit of organization.”
2024-12-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Container Store: Kip and Sharon Tindell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very weird idea. I mean, you know, we had my father's friends are like, you guys are going to open a store that sells what empty boxes. And, you know, but these were functional, clean, simple designs that did something for you. They saved you space. They organized you. They saved you space. But ultimately, they saved you time. You know, you have no choice but to be reasonably well organized in today's world. And that was kind of a tailwind that we had. Can you imagine how great a pantry looks when everything in the pantry is clear rather than opaque? And you can see the almonds in that jar and you can see”
2024-12-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Container Store: Kip and Sharon Tindell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. That was more fun than running the paint department, right? And so what that led to, Guy, was at first we were thinking that maybe we were going to open a really cool handmade furniture store. And we pursued that for a while. But the problem with furniture stores is that they're boring. There's no traffic and you can hear the drone of the air conditioner. There's no people. There's no air of excitement. So that steered us away from furniture into housewares.”
2024-12-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Container Store: Kip and Sharon Tindell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bent with chairs, butcher block, very innovative thing. And they paid me, I don't know, $400 or $500 a month, which was, you know, for a student. I felt like a millionaire. I had $400 a month to live on.”
2024-12-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Container Store: Kip and Sharon Tindell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT