How I Built This with Guy Raz - Advice Line with Kip Tindell of The Container Store

Episode Date: September 10, 2026

Today’s callers: Juliette in France wonders how to raise awareness of her “magical” cooling device—without a costly ad campaign. Then David in North Carolina looks to grow the wholesale channel of his engraved gifts business in light of thinning retail margins. And Kaitlin in California wants to leverage the virality of her supportive, bordered sheets and create an enduring sleep brand.Plus, Kip reflects on The Container Store’s bankruptcy and acquisition, and plugs patience and persistence as the keys to sustainable growth.Thank you to the folks at CoolaWand, Hazel Grove Customs, and Kaomi Sleep for being a part of our show.If you’d like to be featured on a future Advice Line episode—where Guy and former show guests take questions from early-stage founders—leave us a one-minute message that tells us about your business and a specific question you’d like answered. Send a voice memo to [e-mail] or call 1-800-433-1298.And be sure to listen to The Container Store’s founding story as told by Kip and his wife Sharon in 2024.This episode was produced by Alex Cheng with music by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by John Isabella. Our audio engineer was Jimmy Keeley.You can follow HIBT on X & Instagram and sign up for Guy’s free newsletter at guyraz.com or on Substack.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is brought to you by JustWorks, one platform that handles the complicated stuff, payroll, benefits, global hiring, and makes running a small business one million percent smoother. Stick around. I'll tell you more later in the show. This episode is brought to you in partnership with Airbnb. Not too long ago, I spent a few days in Madrid. It's one of those cities that's just incredibly walkable. You can wander for hours. You can. can duck into a neighborhood cafe or stumble across a tiny wine bar or just spend an afternoon in a museum. And one of the things that made that trip so memorable was the home I booked on Airbnb. It was in a quiet neighborhood with a great kitchen and a little balcony overlooking the street. And every morning, I'd open the windows, make some coffee, and just watch the city wake up. And it made me feel like I was actually living in Madrid instead of just visiting it. That's the thing about booking a stay on Airbnb.

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This is the place where we help try to solve your business challenges. Each week, I'm joined by a legendary founder, a former guest on this show. who will help me try to help you. And if you're building something and you need advice, give us a call and you just might be the next guest on the show. Our number is 1-800-433-1298. Leave us a one-minute message that tells us about your business and the issues or questions that you like help with. All right, let's get to it. Joining me today is Kip Tindal. He's the co-founder and former CEO of the container store. Kip, welcome back to the show.

Thank you. Really happy to be back. We had a lot of fun last time. I hope we can this time. We did. It was great to have you back. So you were first on the show back in 2024. And of course, you told the story of the container store. It's an awesome story. In 1978, you and your friend, Garrett Boone, opened the first container store in Dallas. Your wife Sharon joined pretty soon after. And a lot of people don't understand what a big deal it was at the time because back then people couldn't just get containers or corrugated boxes from moving. You had to like go to the trash bins and find a flattened box. is if you want to move house. And so the idea of a store that sold those things was kind of revolutionary. Fast forward, of course, the business expands massively. I think by 2013, you went public. And today, there are about 100 locations. It's a great story. And as always, for anyone listening, if you missed it, we will put a link to it in the show notes. Go back and check it out. It's really fun. So, Kip, the timing of our original episode was interesting, if you remember, because soon after, you know, we spoke, the container store, which you are not involved with at all anymore, but it announced it was filing for bankruptcy. And then,

I think a few months ago, it was actually acquired by Bed Bath and Beyond for about $150 million. Now, again, I know you and Sharon stepped away a long time ago from the business, but I was wondering, I mean, you have probably infinite thoughts about what happened, how it happened. I'd just be curious to hear. It was the most fun, wonderful, great, successful business for 43 years. Nobody loved their work more. And we retired about eight or nine years ago, and it hasn't done that well since. Like a lot of entrepreneurs, we struggled to find just the right people to sell to and all of that. But retail has also changed, you know, with the advent of Amazon and online. And so it's been interesting.

It is upsetting and painful to watch your baby, which is the thing. This was definitely our baby, you know, 16 hours a day, seven days a week for 43 years, not do too well here recently. But, you know, not that many businesses last for 50 years anymore. No, that's right. And if you look at all the top businesses 20 or 30 or 50 years ago in the New York Stock Exchange, most of them aren't so great anymore. And that's the thing we learn as we get older is nothing is all that permanent. Yeah, indeed. Indeed. Kip, you briefly mentioned this idea when you talked about Amazon, right? So much has changed in retail. What do you see happening in retail today that is even more potentially disruptive? That could be the next thing that is going to shape how we shop.

Well, the whole frictionless, no people involved definition of service. The difference between the container store and Neiman Marcus and companies like, like that where you had this individualized, great salesperson selling a solution, I mean a solution, not an item, that's kind of gone away. And now people are doing it on their own. There's really no people involved. There's no reason to have the highest paid best salespeople in the industry anymore. I mean, we would have people come in that have been driven crazy by their toy storage area of their home for four or five years. And in 45 minutes, we could solve that problem for them. And when they when they left the store, they were elated. But it's hard to do online, and it's not what retail is really all about anymore. Yeah. I mean, you could go into a Home Depot or a container store with what your problem was on chat GPT or Claude and say, tell me exactly what I need to buy, where how I install it. And I guess, you know, it can be done.

Although saying that, I still think that there is an opportunity to really offer excellent human to human customer service. And I think the brands and the stores that do that right might find themselves in a really great position. You know, I have a local hardware store here that I go to that's not as big as Home Depot, but the people who work there are really knowledgeable. And, you know, look, I like Home Depot, but the reality is you go to Home Depot today. It's not always the case of people can really be helpful. Yeah, since I've retired, I really enjoy great food and great wine. And if the waiter is great enough and really understands the food enough, I can really increase the enjoyment of my meal by how much knowledge that waiter has about the food, asking these detailed questions and whatnot. Yeah.

There's still a lot of that in retail, but I hope it doesn't continue to diminish. And I hope that some people take it forward to have more of that because it's a great joy on life when it occurs. You know, a lot of founders, Kip, asked me about growth, right? And there's differing views and changing views on growth now for a while. It was grow, grow, grow, grow, grow. Now there's a lot of focus on profitability, which I think is smart. What is your sort of philosophy around growth in retail? And how do you think about it? I mean, the entrepreneur, be it retail or anything, needs to decide how, you know, how fast they can grow without getting away from what brought them there in the first place. I mean, I always pegged our growth at 20% a year, which in those days, 20% growth was astronomically fast. Now, it's not anymore with technology companies and that type of thing, but at, boy, retail back then, 20%. And I just stopped it at 20% because going faster than that, it would be like the RPM needle getting too far into the red. And we did that for over 40 years.

I read every article I can find where there's sort of a novell, rebellious attitude that you don't have. have to grow at all. Right. It helps to grow a little bit because there is inflation. Yeah. You do want to reward great employees and that type of thing. And so, but this excessive growth is why so many companies, frankly, don't make it. I mean, be humble enough to figure out what your limitations are, grow at that rate, and they'd do it for a long, long time, rather than trying to grow at astronomical proportions in a short period of time.

Yeah. Kip, you know, I think a lot of people, you know, who think about, well, one day, and. you know, I'll have made it and they can retire and here you are. You've done it. What are you prioritizing now? What is, I mean, you mentioned travel, of course, and things that you can do. But what about in a bigger way? What are some of the priorities that you and Sharon have kind of established for, you know, for the rest of your time you're on earth? Sharon and I built this business together and I love, I think you should work with the people you love. People say, oh, you shouldn't work with your spouse. You shouldn't work with your friends. Yes, you should.

that's exactly who you should work. It doesn't always work out, but it doesn't always work out to work with people who are not your spouse and not your friends. And we loved it. I think more than anybody I know love their work. But now we love retirement even more than that. I mean, the freedom, my God, the lack of stress. I feel like a liberal art student trying to decide what I'm going to major in. You know, I could do whatever the hell I want.

I love that. It's just incredible. I love that. I really, I enjoy people. people that say that they enjoy growing older. I'm trying to do that. I think I do. I think the 60s are better than the 50s. I think the 50s are better than 40s. That's got to stop. I doubt the 90s are better than 80s, right? That's got to stop at some point. But so far, we're loving growing older. So I would just submit to anybody listening that I don't care how much you love your work, make time in

your life for a little bit of retirement because it is just gloriously free. I love that. All right. Kip, what do you say? Should we take our first call? Yep. I'd love to. All right, let's do it. Welcome to the advice line. You're on with Kipa Tindal, co-founder of the Container Store. Tell us your name where you're calling from. And just one line about your business, please. Hi, Guy. Hi, Kip. Before we start, I just want to say thank you so much. I've learned so much from listening to how I built this over the past years, and it's quite

surreal to actually be here. Today, I'm Juliette Bruce, and I'm calling from Provence in the south of France. I'm the founder and creator of Cooler Wand. It's a reusable magic wand with a detachable frozen star that calls hot food and drinks pretty much in seconds, and has surprisingly become much more than that. Well, okay, so thanks for calling Juliet and thanks for the kind words. All right. So you are based in France or living in France right now, and you have a, so it's a wand with a freezable star on it and you use it to cool drinks? Yeah.

Am I getting that right? That's absolutely right. The frozen star of the one lives in your freezer whenever food or drinks are too hot or someone needs. Actually, you know, now someone needs to soothe a bump or an egg or an itch. It's there. The frozen star cools in seconds without watering anything down.

I got it. Okay, so now I'm pretty. So this is for children or I guess kid-oriented because it's a wand. with a frozen end and it's designed, I'm assuming it's designed for kids. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, originally my market was towards kids. It's a very magical thing. I obviously designed it for my kids myself. I've got three children and they've always had really big problems with hot food. And it came, the idea just came because I thought it already existed. And I had no idea that something like that didn't exist before.

So you created it? Yeah, absolutely, from scratch. So I'm a stenographer originally. I designed a sonographer. originally. I design windows and I create worlds for luxurious brands like Hermes and I love creating worlds. And so I really thought my kids just needed a magic wand to crawl their food down. And so I just went into production, drew it out and then found, I mean, it was a really crazy road of finding the right people to obviously produce it. And I'm really high on quality. So I didn't want to have it produced with wrong materials because today people really don't want plastics to be badly made.

So I've been really, really tight with the production and we produce in Portugal. Yeah, because Portugal, I remember buying baby food containers that were made in Brazil and Portugal when my kids were, you know, just like 15, 16 years ago because we would freeze baby food and they were BPA-free. So this is basically, it's like when you have a reusable ice cube that you might put in a cocktail, that essentially is the same concept. Exactly. And a kid can get a hot mug of cocoa and just stir that thing in there, and it'll

cool it down instead of putting an ice cube in, which was always our fix, but then it waters down the drinks. How have you been doing? I mean, where are you, I'm assuming you're selling these on your website only right now? So far, I've sold direct-to-consumer through my website, of course, as you said, a place cooler one in nine independent retailers in France and one in Malta right now. I've been initiating discussions with parapharmacies. I've also reached out to cafes, family-friendly spaces, and even hospitals, actually, to test the environments where families can get. a natural experience of it. And actually recently, my son was in hospital, and the first thing he asked me, when they asked him if he wanted cold,

he asked for his cooler one. So I realized that it was actually something very emotional and soothing for him. Yeah. I think the magic of the wand is so cool. And, you know, that's a big part of this. And it also, I chuckled that, you know, I guess with the heat wave views,

you've had in Provence lately, you can't just wait for the food to cool. Not a while. Well, to be honest, Every adult has it out at the moment, I have to say, because calling the temples really helps as well. Juliet, before we dive in further, tell us what your question is for us. Yes. So my question was, I don't have the budget to launch the kind of awareness campaign.

A completely new product category probably needs. How do I create enough opportunities for people to discover it so that it has a chance of becoming part of everyday life? Okay. I want to bring Kip in. Kip, I'm curious from a retail perspective, right, if Juliet was looking to get this into a store. Like if somebody put this in the container store, how would a customer discover it? Well, it would be actually well placed in the container store because you have a very high service level, you know, so that they could relate, you know, the product. I was thinking this is more of a specialty, independent retail store product than a mass merchant where there's no service at all.

it's very interesting. I guess it's BPA-free, yeah, and I think it's so important that you said you really were particular on that. And you just need to make that clear to everybody. I mean, particularly parents, right? And so that's, I would say that you need to just quintuple your efforts to make sure everybody understands that that is the materials that you've used. Yeah, I mean, I think that's absolutely critical. You know, Juliet, I mean, this is a challenge. right with somebody who has, doesn't have a significant budget. But of course, you know, we all have

access to these social media tools. And again, this is something that doesn't necessarily benefit from advertising, but from the demonstration, seeing it in action. You know, and I can imagine, you may already be doing this, but I can imagine literally doing a version of the same video a thousand times, just in different ways. You know, I can even imagine like a video of a mug of hot cocoa and you have a thermometer in there in that mug and you have the kids start stirring it and you watch the thermometer go down and you're and you just you don't even need to comment it's like are you a parent you have this problem every day here's the solution you know you i'm sure you've got social media accounts and just make that a version of that video again and again infinite

video ideas and i'm talking about like low you can literally just put an iPhone on a stand right I love that. That's a great idea. Build up the fun and magic, because God knows we didn't more fun and magic in the world. That, to me, is one way. And then the other way is just seeing if you can identify parents of small kids who are influencers, but not million person influencers, but maybe they have a thousand followers and just message them, see if you can send them one. Yeah, we've had a really, really luck, actually. I had an influencer who's for ADHD children and who I didn't know. And she actually bought the product and then she talked about it. And actually, that really helped a lot because it was so real and true and not forced or not. And that's what I have trouble with is the fact that I just really want people to find happiness in this tool and not try and sell. When you're in this industry and obviously you create dreams for people and this is what we do in retail. or, you know, in advertising and all this, we're very hard on ourselves on basically what we're supposed to achieve. And obviously, this takes, obviously, budget. And I'm getting there. I just, it's about investment and I believe in it. So I mean, Hermes, you know, right, their,

their ad budgets are in the maybe hundreds of millions. I don't even know, tens of millions for sure. But this is, I mean, this could be fun. It could be really fun to just make these very simple videos with your kids or friends of your, you know, kids who are friends of yours. Yeah, our Instagram is doing quite well. I mean, we have quite a lot of traction on there. I mean, I don't know how much it is good traction, but we have a video. It's half a million views and like 12,000 likes. And it's really, they do like that. I'm on that trajectory. I just need to keep pushing and doing what you're saying, like just trying making more and more creative. Lots of times it just takes that relentless pursuit of the things that are working really well right now. And then after what seems like a forever amount of that, you get a few. few breaks where some big things happen and you get a little bit more scale. You know, being patient has a lot to do with being humble and being okay with it taking a while.

And, you know, it actually might take a long time, but that's the surest methodology. And if you do this sure and slow, steady thing, you have much less chance for failure and much better chance, I think, you know, for success. The brand is called Kula Wan, Juliet, Bruce. Thank you for calling it. Good luck. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Thank you. All right, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with another caller and another round of advice. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to the advice line right here on how I built this. Starting a small business is the fun part. Running one, that's where it gets complicated, because all of a sudden you're hiring people. And you've got to pay them on time and figure out benefits. And nobody handed you a manual for any of it. It's a lot to carry, especially when you're already doing five other jobs. That's what JustWorks is for. They take the complex administrative stuff off your plate, payroll benefits, global hiring,

so you can get back to the part of the business you actually wanted to do in the first place, which I'm guessing is not paperwork. So if you're a small business owner trying to figure it all out on your own, you don't have to. head to justworks.com and take some weight off your small business shoulders. That's justworks.com. Stop making it so hard on yourself. Head to justworks.com and start easing those small business worries in just a few clicks. Because you don't have to worry when it just works.

Welcome back to the advice line on how I built this lab. I'm Guy Raz. And my guest today is Kip Tyndall, co-founder of the Container Store. And we are taking your calls. And Kip, are you ready for our next call? I'm very ready. I can't wait. Here we go.

Let's bring in our next caller. Welcome to the advice line around with Kip Tyndall. Co-founder of the container store. Please tell us your name, where you're calling from, and just a line about your business, please. Hi, Guy. Hi, Hi, I'm from Burlington, North Carolina, and I own Hazel Grove Customs. At Hazel Grove Customs, we design, personalized, and engrave giftable items, including kitchenware, home goods, accessories, and novelty goods.

Thanks for calling in, David. Okay, so this is a, you personalized gift and you said home goods and novelty goods. So like, oyster chuckers, knives, my best items are outside of kitchen are going to be golf ball markers and train whistles. Oh, nice. Most of our stuff is laser engraved. And you do all the laser engraving on site in-house? Yes, we do just about everything in-house. Cool.

Tell me about the business. How long have you had it and how is it? How are your sales, what's your expected revenue this year? Yeah. So the business was started in 2012. I ended up buying it in 2016. I was looking for another business. I kind of bought this as a side business at the time.

Then COVID came. And COVID was actually spectacular for the business because we were mainly focusing on online sales at the time. But wholesale is where it's at. Wholesale has been growing significantly year over year. Year to date wholesale is actually just above 50% of the business. Wow. And the margins on wholesale are shockingly actually better than retail

because people are buying a whole lot more. at wholesale and they're not buying like a six or seven dollar item that I have to turn around and ship. So this year I'm hoping for about 350. Last year we did just over 300. We're up about 15% over the year before. Got it. Okay. And your question for us? So like I said, we sell both retail and wholesale sales have increased significantly over the past couple of years and have higher margins and a higher AOV. So how should I determine what the best path to grow wholesale? Is it adding more independent retailers, pursuing larger retail accounts, investing in trade shows, hiring sales reps, corporate gifting, or concentrating more on the channels that are already producing results.

I want to bring Kip Tyndolin. Kip, thoughts, ideas, or questions for David? It sounds like a good business. Remember to enjoy it. It looks like you have a good future ahead of you. Specific to your question, you said, should I focus on adding more independent retailers? Yes. I think that's a good avenue.

Pursuing larger retail accounts? Well, no. I think you should pursue the independent smaller ones, even though the grandiose part of human nature is that you want to, you know, the larger ones will come once they see the independence doing really well. So if you're just patient and humble, which all entrepreneurs struggle with that. But if we're patient and humble, the big things will come. Keep out that stuff that's really working.

the channels that are already producing results. And so I'd say more independent retailers, investing in trade shows. Now, because trade shows are fading, you know, we have wholesale websites and all of that. I wouldn't spend the money and time and effort into trade shows. But you mentioned sales representatives, and I would do those. I have a lot of opinions about sales reps. I mean, sales reps are great if they're on commission because they don't cost anything unless they're selling.

I guess same advice I give everybody, just focus on the things that are really working. I'm kind of boring in that pursuing humble, slower growth, but that's a good way to keep from going out of business too. Kip, I agree with you. I mean, look, he's doing, you're doing now half of your business is coming from wholesale. And I think you want to really analyze who your best wholesale customers are. You know, you want to identify the channels that are produced. like the highest value and also the most loyal accounts because basically that's a proven playbook right and so you when you hire sales reps they are you've already identified who your

ideal wholesale customer is and that's who they're going to be chasing okay and we've already we started we've tried to narrow it down to see who what type of business is a good customer for us so we've been doing a cold outreach to some of these businesses and it's turned into a couple thousand dollars worth of sales over the past month so it's i think there's potential there Yeah. And what about direct to consumer? Direct consumer, our main channel that we use is Etsy. That's where we essentially bought an Etsy business 10 years ago. It does well. Etsy sales are, they're okay, but they've been relatively flat for the past couple years. A lot of competition, too, on personalization on Etsy, yeah. It is. And with that, too, the shipping rates have gone up. So now it's 650 to pretty much send any package at minimum. So I can't be selling those $10 items and charge $6.50. Customers don't want to pay that. So.

Yeah. Corporate gifting, it sounds like your product would be great for corporate gifting, but how do you build the corporate gifting thing? What have you learned about that so far? They, we have some good customers that do corporate gifting, but that's all been inbound. I have not been successful doing any outbound outreach to them. They found us through fair, and they'll come, they'll buy sometimes four, five, six, seven hundred items or units of an item that they weren't personalized. We'll turn it around within a couple days and hopefully they come back. I mean, that inbound stuff is terrific. And the key there, and you know this, is to provide the absolute best customer service possible.

You know, we did an episode recently on the show about a company called Sweetwater, and they are the biggest, they sell more musical instruments than anybody in America. It's the biggest, they sell audio, video equipment. You know, Amazon could crush them, but the secret of that business's success, as you'll hear in the episode, is customer service. They are so good at it. It's like Zappos, that Zappos model. And if you're getting that inbound and people are ordering, you know, 700 golf teas or with the company's logo on it, you want to make sure that you are treating them like a first class customer, you know, like a Michelin three-star customer, right? That's a great way to look at it. And the bigger things come once you do all of the smaller things right.

And if you can remember details, you know, one of the things Sweetwater does is their customer, I think they call them customer service engineers. They have index cards. I mean, they're electronic now on every customer. They ask about their kids. They ask with their families. And people call up and they'll say, oh, isn't your son now old enough for college? And, you know, they'll say, oh, how had the football team do this season? I mean, literally.

And people are blown away by that stuff. No, no, I like that idea. We used to, after 9-11, we had people come in the store just because they'd, needed somebody to talk to. Wow. So we thought we must have a pretty good relationship with our customer that they saw that as, you know, the place to come. And so building that with your customers, it will get hard to do it at that level as

you become bigger. But by doing it that way now, you will become bigger, I think. Yes. Yeah. Steady, steady, steady. David Hiam, his company is called Hazel Grove Customs. Good luck, man. Thanks so much for calling in.

Thank you. All right. Good luck. Yeah. It's a really competitive space, the personalization channel. But, you know, if you get the economics right, it sounds like they have it right. I'm doing most of the stuff in-house with laser engraving. It can be a great business.

I think so. And I somehow have the intuition that they're going to do very well. Yeah. I love this idea also. He mentioned that he bought the business a few years ago. And I'm hearing from more and more younger people, recent college graduates, who are getting interested in the idea of. buying an existing business. Now, this is not a new strategy or tactic, but I think for a long

time people just thought it was boring. But that's really, especially as more and more baby boomers are just looking to retire. A lot of them want to sell their business. And many of them want to sell their businesses for a relatively small amount of money. Sometimes are also willing to mentor whoever buys it. And so there are some really interesting opportunities out there. Yep. If you can do it, it speeds it up a lot. And to do to all yourself, it started is all consuming. All right, we're going to take another quick break, but we'll be right back with another caller. Stay with us.

I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to the advice line right here on how I built this. Welcome back to the device line right here on how I built this lab. I'm Guy Raz, and today I'm taking your calls with Kip Tyndall. He's a co-founder of the Container Store and Kip. What do you say? Next caller. Are you ready? Let's go, Guy.

This ought to be great. All right, let's bring in our next call. Welcome to the advice line. You're on with Kip Tindal, founder, co-founder of the container store. Tell us your name where you're calling from, and just a little bit about your business, please. Hi, Guy. Hi, Kip. My name is Caitlin Kio, and I'm calling in from Orange County, California. I'm the founder and CEO of Kiyomi Sleep, a company creating products that redefine how people experience comfort at bedtime. Our flagship product is the Sherpanus, a fitted bedsheet with soft supportive borders built within the perimeter. Okay, welcome to the show, Caitlin. So

So Kaomi Sleep, this is a, and I'm looking at your website now, and I want to describe this for people who are only listening to the show, which is it's like a soft border, like full rectangular border around your mattress, like baby bumpers in a crib, but for adults, sort of, right? Correct. It's like a fitted sheet that pulls over your mattress and then the borders on top are sewn within the perimeter so they don't move. So as a teenager, I struggled with anxiety, and every night I built a fortress of pillows and stuffed animals around me just to feel safe and secure enough to fall asleep. The problem is that by morning, everything had shifted or fallen off the bed. And that's why I created the Sherpiness because we found that so many other people related to this. So it's like a, I mean, it's not like a weighted blanket, but it's a similar principle, which is you have this kind of comfort around you, right? like that you are surrounded by these bumpers and you're sort of inside the bed. Tell me about the business so far.

You launched this when and how are you, and how has it been doing so far? I launched Kaomi Sleep in November 2025, only eight months ago while attending USC Marshall's full-time MBA program. And in just eight months, we've done $635,000 in revenue. Incredible. Congratulations. Wow. All right. Before we jump in further, tell us your question. So the Sherpa Ness had over 197 million social media views 100% organically, which allowed us to scale through a pre-order model without raising outside capital.

My question is, how do founders turn a viral product into a lasting brand? Okay, that's a big question. Kip, I want to bring you in here. Really cool idea, right? Yeah. I would say that with the exposure you've had, you probably don't need to worry about sales as much. is you need to worry about people copying, you know, what you have because of the, you know, so getting the patent, you know, we, we had a lot of success early at the container store,

and when we had absolutely no money, people were opening stores and calling it Susie's containers and that type of thing. And we didn't have enough money to hire patent attorneys to defend against that. And so I would think really early on, one of the main things you need to do is to find somebody, patent attorneys are like golfers. You know, there's Kip Tendell on the golf course, and there's Tiger Woods in the golf course. You want Tiger Woods, but maybe they could participate with you in a way, since you're not able to spend all your money on patent attorneys right now, maybe they can share in the future gain while protecting you while you're still vulnerable to all that because you can't afford to protect it. Yeah, Kailen, are you, what kind of protections are you working on in the given place? Right now we have a provisional patent for the Sherpa Nest, and then we also have the Sherpa Nest pending a trademark, and we actually have experience a lot of scans. and copyright infringements.

I think we had over 113 different accounts scamming other people using our product and images. And we have been able to successfully take some of them down just by serving them DMCAs. And so that's what we've been doing so far to protect our brand. I'm not sure how scalable or sustainable that is. But I totally agree with you, Kip, that it's something we need to look out for. Yeah. I mean, listen, this is both a good and bad problem to have. Not only what Kipp was talking about, but the virality problem.

Because, you know, we've seen this, and we've had versions of this question on the advice line where you just put something out there and it just hits. And then the concern is how do you capture that for the long haul, right? Because the algorithm changes or, you know, virality is borrowed attention, right? And so the question is, and it's a good question, is how do you, it's not how do you maintain that momentum. You won't be able to get 197 million views again and again and again. Again, but it's how do you capture as much as you can and build a brand around the feeling of what you're talking about and not the product? Because the feeling is security. I guess one of the things I would do aside from just really leaning into as much as many videos and as much of that as you can is other sort of secondary items, right?

like different patterns or fabrics or maybe pillows. Maybe you're thinking about these things already. You know, different kinds of, but I would really start to think about, okay, we're building a sleep brand here. You know, just like eight sleep is a sleep brand, just like calm. You know, these meditation apps are kind of their sleep brands. How can we be a 360 degree sleep brand with this is our hero product? People are spending a lot of money on sleep. and that to me is where the opportunity is.

That's a great idea. Totally agree. I think you have a great tail win in that the world is really interested in getting more sleep now. We've identified that as perhaps the most healthy thing you can do for your health. And the viral thing, great. Embrace it. I still think you should get seven or eight hours sleep. But maybe this is the time that you just really redouble your efforts to relentlessly pursue those things that seem to be working the best.

Forget about the things that you. You haven't thought of yet that you think might catapult it to the next level. Those things usually aren't there or around the corner or they're coming later if you'll just do an even redoubled better job pursuing the things that seem to be working the best, you know, right now. And then you'll maybe hit another viral moment a little bit farther down the road. And when comes to the knockoffs and the copycats, I mean, it's going to happen. I would be really careful not to let it distract you and obsess you because, as we've seen on the show in the past, it can really damage businesses. TRX, you know, that was, they fought copycats for so long. Eventually, it was okay, but it can really consume you.

I would focus really on building the brand as the, you know, the Sleep brand. That's definitely something I'll look into. Yeah, it's a really cool idea. It's the brand's called Kaomi Sleep. Caitlin Keo, thank you so much for calling in. Thank you so much for the advice. Yeah, good luck. I love when people come up with just original ideas,

that, you know, things that you just haven't seen before. And I should be careful when I say original because, of course, you know, everything is derivative of something else, but still, like, this is cool. I haven't seen something like this out there. A cozy, right? Yeah, it's cool.

From her own experience, you know, it's very original, very personal. And I think that's going to help her do very well. Yeah, for sure. Kit, before I let you go a question for you, if you could go back now to when you and Sharon and Garrett were starting out, knowing what you know now about the business, retail business, what would have been helpful do you think? What could you've told yourself back then? That would have been helpful. Everybody said that we were admirably patient. You know, we weren't in a hurry to have a thousand stores or anything like that. We were patient and we were getting it right. And Tiger Woods, when he's leading a golf tournament, I work with a nonprofit group that sponsors a tournament here in Dallas. And when Tiger was winning the tournament, he wouldn't go running around at night like everybody else.

He went to the driving range and practiced more, you know. And so just that type of relentless humility, you know, driving to be even better than you've been in the past. And patience. I think that builds a business more truly than anything else. Yeah, it is great advice. That's Kip Tyndall, co-founder of the container store. Kip, thank you so much for coming back. on to the show. It was great being with you again. All the best to you. It's great to have you. And by the way, if you haven't heard Kip's original How I Built this episode, go back and check it out. We'll put a link to it in the show notes. And here's one of my favorite moments from that interview. July 1st, 1978, the first container store, I guess, is opened. Do you remember people walking into the store in this early day saying, you're charging for empty boxes? Yeah. A lot of people said that. My father had a birthday.

party and I was the bartender and, you know, they're like, son, you're going to open a store selling empty boxes, you know, that's got to be really hard, you know, and it was humiliating. And boy, trying to explain it before we actually put the products on the shelves and open the store was embarrassing. Thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to check out my newsletter. You can sign up for it for free at gairoze.com. Each week it's packed with tons of insights from entrepreneurs and my own observations and experiences interviewing some of the greatest entrepreneurs ever.

And if you're working on a business and you'd like to be on this show, send us a one minute message that tells us about your business, the issues or questions you'd like help with, and hopefully we can help you with them. And make sure to tell us how to reach you. You can send us a voice memo at hibt at ID.wondry.com or call us at 1-800-433-1298 and leave a message there. And we'll put all this in the podcast description as well. This episode was produced by Alex Chung with music composed by Rumptina Arablui. It was edited by John Isabella. Our audio engineer was Jimmy Keely. Our production staff also includes Carrie Thompson, Carla Estevez, Casey Herman, J.C. Howard, Sam Paulson,

Chris Messini, Catherine Seifer, Neva Grant, and Elaine Coates. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This. If you're running a small business and payroll benefits and hiring feel like a lot, you're not alone, and Just Works is ready to help, because you don't have to worry when it just works.