![]() ![]() Gibbs: It’s important for us to get a lot of eyeballs and the correct eyeballs. We’ve been very fortunate, and we don’t have 1,100 stores or something crazy.įeldman: What have you found is most important in picking a location? We have more and more data about where our online consumer lives. Gibbs: We’ve gotten better at understanding what drives traffic. This year we intentionally dialed back to triple-check the infrastructure. We’re looking to double our store count in the next three years. Gibbs: Next year we’ll probably add 15, then 20 the following year and 25 to 30 the year after that. Gibbs: It let us feel that financially we had more opportunity than we could have on our own and to get some guidance to go from one store to 58.įeldman: How many stores will you add next year? Gibbs: That you won’t get out of them or me.įeldman: Did the investment change things? Gibbs: In 2013 we took on a financial partner, Great Hill Partners. Inside the flagship store in the Soho neighborhood of New York City Courtesy of The Shade Storeįeldman: Do all the stores have the same product?įeldman: How many stores do you have now?įeldman: How have you financed that growth? I wasn’t pretending that it was going to be something different. Gibbs: Going in, we had a pretty good track record. I’m not sure that’s too enticing these days.įeldman: What made you think you could do this profitably when no one else dared to try? We’re in a very high-touch, very subjective, service-oriented business, where if we screw up we’re going to lose our shirts. We had to fully own the process from design to installation. to have the best quality and best reaction time. Our idea was to make it simpler, buy in bulk, commit to 1,300 materials instead of 20,000, and make it in the U.S. That’s been left to the mom-and-pop design shops, these artisan showrooms that have the knowledge, and those guys are closing up. ![]() But if you want to do a one-on-one interaction, no one else has been able to scale it. If you want to supply a commodity product and compete on price, there are tons and tons of people. We were like, What if we simplify this?įeldman: Was anybody else trying to do the same thing? The idea was to completely upend an industry that was exclusionary, expensive and time-consuming. That’s when the other brother and cousin joined. Then we got the idea for the Shade Store and taking it national. Gibbs: I had the store in Port Chester, then one of my brothers opened a store in Soho, and those stores were working really well. Feldman: How did your brothers and cousin get involved? ![]()
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