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

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0:29Hello and welcome to the advice line on how I built this lab. I'm Guy Roz. 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 the 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.

0:59Joining me today is Kip Tindall. 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.

1:28And 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 for moving. You had to like go to the trash bins and find a flattened boxes 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 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.

2:20by Bed Bath & 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.

2:49Like a lot of entrepreneurs, we, you know, 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 this was definitely our baby, you know, 16 hours a day, seven days a week for 43 years, not due to well here recently, but, um, you know, not that many businesses last for 50 years anymore.

3:18That'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. 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?

3:43that 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 that, where you have this individualized, great salesperson selling a solution, I mean a solution, not an item.

4:10that'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 left the store they were elated but it's hard to do online and it's not what retail is really all about anymore.

4:38Yeah. I mean, you could go into a Home Depot or a container store with what your problem was on ChatGBT or Claude and say, tell me exactly what I need to buy, how I install it. And I guess, you know, it can be done. Although I'm 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. 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. Look, I like Home Depot, but the reality is you go to Home Depot today and it's not always the case that people can really be helpful.

5:27Since 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. And 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 in life when it occurs. A lot of founders ask me about growth, right?

5:55And 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 fast they can grow without getting away from what brought them there in the first place. I mean, you know, I always pegged our growth at 20% a year, which in those days, 20% growth was astronomically fast. Now it's, it's not anymore, you know, with technology companies and that type of thing, but it, 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. Uh, I read every article I can find where there's sort of a new veil.

6:49rebellious attitude that you don't have to grow at all, it helps to grow a little bit because there is inflation. You do want to reward great employees and that type of thing. 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 then do it for a long, long time rather than trying to grow at astronomical proportions in a short period of time.

7:16Yeah. I think a lot of people who think about, well, one day, I'll have made it and I can retire, and here you are. You've done it. What are you prioritizing now? 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 established for the rest of your time here on earth? Sharon and I built this business together, and I love...

7:44I 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...

8:10a liberal arts student trying to decide what I'm going to major in. You know, I could do whatever the hell I want. It's just incredible. I love that. I really enjoy 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 the 40s. I doubt the 90s are better than the 80s, right?

8:35That'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, it is just gloriously free. I love that. All right. Kip, what do you say? Should we take our first call? Yep. Love to.

8:57Let's do it. Welcome to the advice line. You're on with Kip Tyndall, 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.

9:18Today, 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 cools hot food and drinks pretty much in seconds and has surprisingly become much more than that. Well, okay, so thanks for calling Juliette 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 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, the one lives in your freezer whenever food or drinks are too hot or someone needs actually, you know, now someone needs to sue the bump or an egg or an itch. It's there. The frozen star cools in seconds without watering anything down.

10:09I got it. Okay, 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.

10:33And 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 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.

10:57to cool 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.

11:20Yeah, because in 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. It's the star. 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.

11:49How 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, I play school one in nine independent retailers in France and one in Malta right now. I've been initiating discussions with power pharmacies. 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.

12:20asked 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, that's a big part of this. And it also, I chuckled the, you know, I guess with the, the heatway of use, you've had in Provence lately, you can't just wait for the food to cool. That's going to take a while. Well, to be honest, every adult has it out at the moment, I have to say, because cooling the temples really helps as well. Juliet, um, 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. I'm curious.

13:14a retail perspective, right? If Juliet was looking to get this into a store, like if somebody put this into 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 so that they could relate 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.

13:41It's very interesting. I guess it's BPA free. Yeah. And I think it's so important that you, 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, that you've used. Yeah. I mean, I think that's absolutely critical. You know, Juliet, This is a challenge with somebody who doesn't have a significant budget, but of course, we all have access to these social media tools. Again, this is something that doesn't necessarily benefit from advertising, but from the demonstration, seeing it in action. 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.

14:36I can't even imagine a video of a mug of hot cocoa, and you have a thermometer in there, in that mug, and you have the kid starts stirring it, and you watch the thermometer go down, 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. 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 low...

15:03You 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 need 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 mass, not million person influencers, but maybe they have a thousand followers and just message them, see if you can send them one.

15:32Yeah, 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 find I have trouble with is the fact that I just really want people to find happiness in this tool and not try and sell, you know.

15:57When you're in this industry and obviously you create dreams for people and this is what we do in retail or 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. It's about investment and I believe in it. I mean, Hermes, their ad budgets are in the maybe hundreds of millions. I don't even know, tens of millions for sure. But this could be fun. It could be really fun to just make these very simple videos with your kids or 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 that'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 to make it more and more creative. Lots of times it just takes that relentless pursuit of the things that are working really well right now.

16:56And then after what seems like a forever amount of that, you get a 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.

17:25Uh, the brand is called Kool-A-Wand 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 collar and another round of advice. Stay with us. I'm Guy Ross, 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.

17:58because 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.

18:13That'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.

18:42Stop 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 Roz and my guest today is Kip Tindall, 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.

19:18Let'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, guys. Hi, Kip. I'm David Hyam, and I'm from Burlington, North Carolina, and I own Hazel Grove Customs. At Hazel Grove Customs, we design, personalize, and engrave giftable items, including kitchenware, home goods, accessories, and novelty goods.

19:41Thanks for calling in, David. Okay. So this is a, you personalized gifts and you said home goods and novelty goods. So like... Oyster shuckers, 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 are your sales? What's your expected revenue this year?

20:08So 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're mainly focusing on online sales at the time.

20:25but 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. 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 $7 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.

20:53Got it. Okay. And your question for us? So, like I said, we sell both retail and wholesale, 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 Sindel and Kip thoughts, ideas or questions for David.

21:22It sounds like a good business. I 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.

21:52once 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 a wholesale websites and all of that. I wouldn't, 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 they're selling. Um, I guess same advice I give everybody just focus on the things that are really working. I'm kind of boring in that pursuing.

22:43humble, slower growth, but that's a good way to keep from going out of business too. I agree with you. I mean, look, 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 want to identify the channels that are producing the highest value and also the most loyal accounts because basically that's a proven playbook, right?

23:11when you hire sales reps, 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 started, we've tried to narrow it down to see 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 of thousand dollars worth of sales over the past month. So I think there's potential there. Yeah. And what about direct to consumer?

23:36Direct 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, they're okay, but they've been relatively flat for the past couple of 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 $6.50 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. Yeah.

24:02Corporate gifting, it sounds like your product would be great for corporate gifting, but how do you, 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. Uh, they found us through fair and they'll come, they'll buy sometimes four or five, six, 700 item or units of an item that they weren't personalized. We'll turn it around within a couple of days and hopefully they come back.

24:31I mean, that inbound stuff is terrific. And the key there, and you know this, is to provide the absolute best customer service possible. 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. Amazon could crush them, but the secret of that business is successes. 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 tees 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 the smaller things right.

25:30And if you can remember details, you know, one of the things Sweetwater does is their customer, I think they call customer service engineers, they have index cards. I mean, they're electronic now on every customer, they ask about their kids, ask about 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. Wow. And people are blown away by that stuff. No, no, I like that idea.

25:57We used to, after 9-11, we had people come in the store just because they needed somebody to talk to. Wow. So we thought we must have a pretty good relationship with our customer that they saw that as 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. Steady, steady. David Hyam, his company's called Hazel Grove Customs. Good luck, man. Thanks so much for calling in.

26:26Thank you. All right. Good luck. Yeah. It's a really competitive space, the personalization channel, but if you get the economics right, it sounds like they have it right. They're doing most of the stuff in-house with laser engraving. It could 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.

26:53I'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.

27:20sometimes 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 you all yourself, it started as 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 Ross, and you're listening to the advice line right here on how I built this. Welcome back to the advice line right here on how I built this lab.

28:08I'm Guy Roz, and today I'm taking your calls with Kip Tindall. He's the 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 Tindall, 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.

28:26Hi, guy. Hi, Kip. My name is Kaitlyn Kayo, and I'm calling in from Orange County, California. I'm the founder and CEO of Kayomi Sleep, a company creating products that redefine how people experience comfort at bedtime. Our flagship product is the Sherpeness-affitted bedsheet with soft-supported borders built within the perimeter. Okay, welcome to the show, Kaitlyn. So Kayomi 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.

28:56like full rectangular border around your mattress, like baby bumpers and 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.

29:21The 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 has it been doing so far?

29:49I 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 Nest had over 197 million social media views, 100% organically, which allowed us to scale through a pre-order model without raising outside capital.

30:17My 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 as you need to worry about people copying, you know, what you have because of the, you know, so the getting the patent, you know, we We had a lot of success early at the container store 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.

31:01Patent attorneys are like golfers, you know, there's Kip Tindall in 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, Caitlin, are you, what kind of protections are you working on in the event place?

31:25Right 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 experienced a lot of scams 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 DMCA's and so.

31:50That'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 would Kip was talking about the virality problem because 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.

32:14And 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, but it's how do you capture as much as you can and build a brand around the feeling?

32:41of 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 you, 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, these, these meditation apps are kind of their sleep brands. How can we be a 360 degree sleep brand with this as our hero product?

33:26people 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 tailwind 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 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.

34:21And when it comes to the knockoffs and the copycats, I mean, it's gonna 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.

34:48Yeah, it's a really cool idea. It's the brand's called Kayle Me Sleep. Caitlin Kayle, 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, yeah, it's cool.

35:15from our own experience. It's very original, very personal, and I think that's going to help her do very well. Yeah, for sure. 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?

35:38Everybody said that we were admirably patient. You know, we weren't in a hurry to have a thousand stores or anything like that. Um, we were patient and we were getting it right. And, um, Tiger Woods, when he's leading a golf tournament, I work with a nonprofit group that sponsors a tournament here in Dallas. And when, when Tiger was winning the tournament, he wouldn't go running around at night like everybody else. He went to the driving range and practice more, you know? And so just that type of relentless humility.

36:08you 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 Tindall, co-founder of the Container Store. Kip, thank you so much for coming back onto 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.

36:36July 1st, 1978, the first container store, I guess, has opened. Do you remember people walking into the store in those early days 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. They're like, son, you're going to open a store selling empty boxes? That's going to be really hard. And it was humiliating.

37:04Boy, trying to explain it before we actually put the products on the shelves and opened 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 GuyRoz.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.

37:31And 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.id.wondery.com or call us at 1-800- 4-3-3-1-2-9-8, 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 Rumtina Arablui. It was edited by John Isabella. Our audio engineer was Jimmy Keely. Our production staff also includes Carrie Thompson, Carla Estevez, Casey Herman, JC Howard, Sam Paulson, Chris Messini, Catherine Seifer, Neva Grant, and Elaine Coates. I'm Guy Raaz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.

38:38If you're running a small business and payroll benefits and hiring feel like a lot, you're not alone. And JustWorks is ready to help. Because you don't have to worry when it just works.