Why We Waited 12 Years to Open a Flagship Store

I wanted a store before I had a company to go with it.

This was back when I was designing houses on my own and daydreaming about being the shop around the corner, a la Meg Ryan in You've Got Mail. Instead, we sold our house, moved to Utah, and poured everything we had into building the design firm, then e-commerce. It was the safer path, and one I would choose again. Those years gave us the design expertise, manufacturing relationships, and ability to develop our own products.

The idea of a store came back in 2018 in the most accidental way. Syd was in Costa Mesa buying a surfboard, and I wandered across the street into a small home boutique and struck up a conversation with the owner. A few months after I left, she messaged me to say she was closing the shop: Would we want to take over her lease for a couple of years and find out whether we actually liked retail? We did, and we loved it, though we also learned very quickly that 600 square feet is not a furniture store.

So we started looking for something bigger, found it, and were a couple of weeks from signing when the dreaded March of 2020 arrived. We stepped back and decided to wait for the right time instead of forcing the wrong one.

That wait ended up lasting a few years and bringing more clarity along with it. We knew the flagship store had to be in Salt Lake City, near our headquarters, in the community that has supported us from the very beginning. And we knew it had to be big enough to work as a true showroom, with furniture you can actually sit on and a design studio with consultants on the floor. Doing it right meant finding the right building and, despite all its growth, Salt Lake doesn't have an endless supply of those. I had my eye on Trolley Square, a historic shopping center downtown, but I had no idea how we'd ever end up there.

Then a door opened through a business partnership we’d been building over the last eight years. It is the clearest proof I have that if you do good work and take care of the people you work with, things tend to work out better than you could ever plan on your own.

The space itself had been a Hard Rock Cafe and then a comedy club, with black film covering every window. It was hard to look at. But on the floor plan, I could see a beautiful rectangle hiding underneath it all. And I knew exactly what those arched windows would do for a corner like that once the film and awnings came down. It took a lot of squinting.

I got nervous as we finalized the contract, mostly because of how much work was ahead of us. But I have a long track record of willing things into existence, and I could already see this one when I closed my eyes at night.

I wrote a few weeks ago about this being the year I stopped waiting on the things I want, which is true. But this store felt like the one thing where waiting was the point. Plenty of designers and brands have opened stores much faster than we have, and I won't pretend that didn't get to my competitive streak now and then. In the end, though, I think the timeline was getting us ready rather than holding us back.

We open at the end of September, and last week was the first time I felt genuinely excited because it finally started to look like a store. The lights are going in, the cabinetry is getting installed, and better than all of that, it's starting to feel like a home. That's always the goal for us, commercial space or not.

It still feels risky, and I don’t want to pretend otherwise, because the leases are long, the overhead is high, and some part of me still wonders whether anyone will show up. But Syd and I have been making decisions this size together for twelve years now, and we've finally built the team this store deserves. We probably could have forced a flagship opening five years ago. I'm just not sure it would've been one this good with these people, feeling this confident.

Which is why it doesn’t feel like a finish line at all. We are already looking at the next locations, and I think we’re just getting warmed up.

• Halloween is trickling in at McGee & Co. (I love this witch portrait)

• Want every color in our Sabre silverware.

• This dress I’m also wearing in the photo above.

• Living in these shorts lately.

• Can’t resist a good Texas tee.

Love, Shea