Shawny D. ChiefSac

Live on QVC tonight!

Its live....It is TV....Its Q.V.C.  

9pm EST I'll be live on QVC selling the best deal on a Pillowsac Rocker Package that we've had the entire year. Not only will it be a great price, but it'll be broken down into a few easy payments through QVC! 

Why are we finally doing QVC!? For years we have been perfecting and refining our Sactionals. Along the way, they have not only taken over our sales at Lovesac (we sell more Sactionals than Sacs now), but we believe/hope/know that Sactionals is just one of those products that nearly everyone on the planet needs, somewhere in their home--they just don't know about it yet. We believe that Sactionals are the iPod of furniture. That said, we don't have the tens-of-millions to throw at TV ads, billboards, and the like to tell people how they work, as Apple did. 

In thinking about Sactionals, TV seems to be a good fit. They have so many demonstrable qualityies. You can move them around, reconfigure them, rearrange them, change their covers, decorate, accent, makeover, etc, etc. We'd like to explore the idea of doing some kind of direct TV campaign with them...but a nice one, like Bose or Dysons has done. We've discovered that QVC is a great way to test the product's validity as an on-air sale, so just as we were ramping up to do a Sactionals program on QVC, they asked us to put together a Sac gift item for them for the Holiday season. 

Tonight I'll be showing a Pillowsac Rocker Package, complete with the Pillowsac (which turns into a guest-rest), a Pillowsac Cover (Coffee, Latte, or Red Velvish), a Rocker Frame, and two matching Throw Pillows to help tie the Pillowsac into your home decor. If you know anyone who's ever wanted a deal on a Sac, tune in! Call in! Tonight I'll be "that guy."

["Gift hour with Rick and Shawn" 9pm EST which is 8pm Central, 7pm MST, and 6pm Pacific)

-- Shawny D.

10 years. 10 years!

November 17, 2001 at the brand spankin' new Gateway Mall, an outdoor lifestyle center in downtown Salt Lake City, Utah, wizards and witches wandered the cold, outdoor, second level joining their warlock friends waiting in the long lines for the opening of Harry Potter (the first one). Oh, and LOVESAC OPENED ITS FIRST STORE too!!!

 

Honestly, we just wanted to pay off my credit cards. We hoped to sell one SuperSac a day, and maybe after a year or so we could not only pay the rent, but pay down that $55,000+ in credit card bills that I had looming having purchased a Haybuster, Tractor, and 50,000 lbs of foam to stuff 12,000 little Sacs for the Limited Too.  To hear the whole story, click here.

[left: Christian Janke & Shawn on the day Lovesac first incorporated; 2001, SLC]

This time it was my cousin, Tres White's credit cards that had to be maxed...afterall, opening the first Lovesac store was his idea--his solution to our predicament where not one furniture store in the western United States believed they could sell a 75 pound Sac of foam with "our crazy name" on it...even if it was shrunken downt to 1/8th its original size, and available in dozens of washable, changeable covers.  It just wasn't happening. [right: Shawn & Tres, holding their next generation entrepreneurs; 2011]

 

The best part was, after 3 years of working for free, if we somehow COULD sell one Sac per day, we were planning on paying ourselves (and our buddies over in the warehouse who were shredding foam all day) a whopping $5 per hour--marking the first time any Lovesac partner would actually get paid. 

 

Somehow it worked. People didn't just laugh at us--they bought SuperSacs; they bought Lovesac hoodies; they bought everything we could make and on Christmas eve we locked up that store with literally like 6 objects (a few covers, a few T shirts) left on the shelves to sell on December 26th. Thus began the saga that is Lovesac stores. [left: the infamous 2005 SLC Lovesac crew. "The days."]

Along the way Lovesac has been both very fun and very hard to grow. Richard Branson gave me a million dollars on national TV--but we probably owed 6 million in crazy debts having grown to dozens of franchised Sac stores.  We've grown, we've shrunk, we've had to completely re-organize, re-structure, re-locate, re-capapitalize, re-hire, and otherwise struggle to survive, but we're still here. There have been SO many people along the way who I have to blame for our success. From my first partner (and best friend since Jr. High, of course), Chris Janke....to James Hyde, Dave Underwood (who has somehow hung on), John Coltharp (our first "employee," and the only guy to get paid for a while--spending 5 years of his life running our factory, mostly in Mexico!), my cousin Tres (who funded the first store and now has a career in retail location development), my good friend and attorney Scott McDonough (the "adult" in the room),    [right: Jon Coltharp, definition of a Sac'r; Lake Powell, 2005]     my cousin Nate (who just blew us up!), Dave's brother Oly (who just did whatever was asked--and carried a weapon--always handy), people who have invested real $ along the way, only to have it eaten up in our awkward years as we tried (and mostly failed) to grow up; to the entire crew of 40+ down at our headquarters at the Old Hardware Building in SLC...you know who you are. A LOT of people gave up years of their life trying to make this thing work, and while it hasn't worked out exactly as planned, I still recognize how much our very existence is owed to each and every one of those people. I miss most of them dearly. THANK YOU ALL. 

 

[left: Richard Branson makin' moves on my wife after giving me $1 Million; Necker Island, 2005]

Now we have a new HQ, located in Stamford, Connecticut. We have an amazing crew of 20 supporting hundreds of loyal Sac'rs in the field who are the real front-lines of Lovesac. This time of year (for 10 years running) I get out to see all/most of them in the stores and I am always humbled by their hard work and deovotion to our little "cause." Again, THANK YOU.

 

If I have learned one thing over this last decade about building a business, it is that people are all that really matter--people make (or break) it...and I have been blessed to have had some great people along the way.

Today we are 50 stores strong, worldwide, and our new brand/store concept will take us in an entirely new direction. We've sold more than 300,000 Sacs and 100,000 Sactionals Pieces. WE ARE BUILDING A COMPANY & BRAND NAME THAT WILL BE HERE IN 50 YEARS. Lovesac will be a billion-dollar-brand. And if you don't believe me, ask yourself, if I had told you in 1998, as I was sitting on my but cutting up fabric on my mom's vacant dance floor, "We will have 50 stores in the best malls in the United States and employ hundreds and hundreds of people through a recession 13 years from now," you probably wouldn't have believed me either.

 

Thank you to all who have given ANYTHING to the Sac. I owe you my whole livelihood...and when we DO build this into the billion dollar brand it is destined to be, rest assured that I know: IT'S YOUR FAULT.

 

-- Shawny D.

 

[right: celebrating today at Lovesac HQ]

 

 

ADDED LATER:

Every Sac'r in the country will be wearing the approved "Celebrating 10 years" TonoLoveSac T shirt all weekend, selling TonoLoveSacs at 2001 pricing. Except for these two (see image right)....

Introducing............Lovesac

THE RUMORS ARE TRUE!!! Lovesac has a new logo! In fact, Lovesac has a new--lot of things. A new look, a new store design, new products--oh yeah, and a whole new customer base. Somewhere over the last 10 years of retail stores, Lovesac evolved from me and my college buddies making giant Sacs of foam for our college buddies, to a furniture concept that sells entire room set-ups to mostly families and soccer moms. This new customer, often spending thousands with us on a huge Sactionals configuration, a wool rug, end tables, a coffee table and a lamp, also spends hours in our stores working with our staff to design their room--right alongside the endless stream of youth who sometimes make a running leap into our store to jump on a Sac. Lovesac's new store concept is designed to facilitate those design-focused convesations and to "tell" those customers that this unlikely little closet-of-a-furniture-store is for them.   [click photos to enlarge]

Since early 2011 we been working very closely with one of the greatest architectural and branding firms in the world, Pompei A.D., to re-design not only our logo, but our entire store concept and brand ethos. It has been an effort involving the entire design team and nearly everyone at Lovesac HQ. The biggest part effort was in helping Pompei understand this crazy brand and the walking oxymoron that we are in an effort to unearth that core nugget that makes us Lovesac and then from that build out the embodiement of our brand: the new store. This is the result. 

Pompei’s own ethos revolves around creating transformational brand experiences by integrating commerce, culture, and community. This brand ethos aligns well with Lovesac’s own culture and mission statement of "Building the greatest furniture brand for the world putting a Lovesac product in every home; making people's lives more comfortable."  We pride ourselves on building a unique culture where we work hard to create a real commercial opportunity that will be a great thing for the world.

Our first of these new concept stores just opened at the Woodlands Mall, in Houston, TX. At a whopping 1100 square feet (about the size of most of our neighbor's storage rooms) , It is a relatively large Lovesac store in one of the best retail centers in the U.S.

One of the most innovative and unique features of the new Lovesac stores is found in the “consultation area” of the store.  This is the place where we bring a customer after they have experienced the Sac or had a Sactionals demo. This hub table has shelving and drawers loaded with everything from swatch books to Sactionals Blocks, allowing for seamless and easy conversations centered around designing customer’s homes and completing their rooms.

Probably the most valuable products of this exercise has been Pompei’s helping us to crystallize our own brand guideposts. These guideposts not only help describe to us our own customers’ personalities, but they also  will help direct everything from our store design, to  our communications. You can see one practical application of these new brand guideposts in our approach to organizing and showcasing our Custom Order fabrics (see Other New Introductions section above). By way of example, this new approach is an effort not to show the fabrics to customers by like-price, but by like appeal--that is, by grouping them according to the above four guideposts, hopefully our practical-minded customers seeking a “practical” fabric for their family sectional covers will find what they’re looking for within our new practical swatch book--without having to confuse them with too many choices.

Each wall is adorned with selected groupings of Lovesac fabrics that align with our new band guideposts arranged in geometric patterns. This makes our concept of "buy the furniture and choose whatever covers you like" more intuitive and obvious to first-time customers.

The goal is to evolve all of these new fixtures and shelving into products that can actually be sold to cusomters as tables and book-cases, etc, for home use--thus maximizing our compact sales floor, in true Lovesac style.

 

 Lovesac’s new logo is not really a logo at all--but a logo concept. Put simply, it is a word mark using a ketchupa font with a weighted and shaped underline placed inside of either a simple, black icon, or a photographic “portal.” We will see dozens, even hundreds of iterations of this logo over time as it will change with each application and even season--a logo as dynamic as our brand.

There are two more of these new concept stores slated to open in 2011.  Stonestown, in San Francisco, CA in late November, and a re-location of our store in Lenox, in Atlanta, GA in early December. Each of these stores is a different size and shape and we expect to learn a lot from seeing our customers’ reaction to this new store concept in these 3 different markets. 

In 2011 we opened 15 new stores. Our plans for new store openings in 2012 will likely be slightly less ambitious. Rather, we plan to re-fit and remodel many existing stores and focus on the training and development of our people and sytems in an effort to raise our own abilities in customer service, interior design, and even product offering to match the level of these new, more sophisticated stores.

We still have a LONG way to go--but I think we're on our way.

Check it out--let me know what you think.

-- Shawny D.

Conceived 1976

Thanks to my wife and partners for a great birthday dinner at our favorite (and ONLY authentic) Chinese restaurant in all of Connecticut: Lao Sze Chuan, Milford, CT.  Unlikely...but good.

 

I love my friends and family.  But man, I hate birthdays.

 

Oh yeah...that is a braided belt, given to me by my buddy (and CFO) Ryan Johnson. A jab at Lovesac's dress code (which he USED to be regularly dangerously close to violating on a daily basis). "If you show up to work wearing khaki pants and a braided belt with your shirt tucked in, you will be promptly fired." (an actual line from Lovesac's early dress code.

 

--  Shawny D.