“Not everyone just wakes up one day and says, ‘I do not like my sheets; I’m going to start a company.” – Scott Tannen, co-founder and CEO of the company Boll and the squadsays Entrepreneur. But for Scott and his wife Missy Tannen, co-founder and chief product officer of the couple’s luxury bedding and home goods company, that is exactly how the story began.
Photo credit: Courtesy of Boll & Branch
Ten years ago, when the Tannens upgraded their queen bed to a king size bed and began their search for bedding, they were surprised by all the options on the market – apparently none of them had evolved in a very long time.
Overall, the bedding industry turned cotton into a generic material that may very well be labeled and sold under its own brand, Missy says, noting that “there weren’t really market leaders or brands that people couldn’t wait to buy.” Many other categories, from phones to handbags and more, featured well-known products – why not sheets?
So in 2014, the Tannens began their very own luxury bedding company: Boll & Branch, named after the parts of the cotton plant that support its fibers.
Photo credit: Courtesy of Boll & Branch
Scott, who had a background in brand marketing at Nabisco, took a page from the playbook of one successful brand: Oreo. “Oreo cookies are undoubtedly delicious,” he explains, “and yet they have been around for over 100 years. They hardly change because they don’t have to. They are perfect. So the marketing of this product was about staying on top of thinking about the customer and knowing that every promise you make to the customer, you have a product to back it up.”
“I couldn’t get over the length of the cotton fiber staples.”
Boll & Branch needed to create a product that was “undoubtedly superior in every possible way” compared to its competitors. This began an intensive research phase that involved asking many people about their sheet preferences. Missy’s passion for the product was also key: she studied maths and science at university and loves knowing how things are made. At Boll & Branch, this meant an in-depth understanding of the materials and production of products.
“I couldn’t understand enough about the staple length of cotton fibers, like how long each little fluffy piece was, how that translates into the size of the yarn, how thin or thick it is, and then you construct it, you weave it, and we set up the warp, the vertical yarns, we touch with the weft, we balance the fabric, we finish the fabric, the process it goes through,” explains Missy.
Missy was determined to develop a product that was soft, breathable and improved with every wash – “a true Goldilocks fabric.”
So she experimented with other options on the market: buying a set of pillowcases, taking them apart, marking the inside with a Sharpie (“so you can’t cheat”) and keeping one of the pillowcases fresh while washing. the second 20 times. She went through the process using nearly three dozen pillowcase sets she purchased from factories around the world and gathered feedback from family and friends. By the end, she decided that organic cotton “was the absolute best” for Boll & Branch’s Signature fabric.
The discovery led to the creation of a distinctive set of hemmed sheets and a range of other products, including pillows, blankets and duvets. The Signature fabric is sustainable and boasts Fair Trade and other certifications, as do other fabrics the brand has expanded to include, akin to calico and flannel.
Photo credit: Courtesy of Boll & Branch
Drawing inspiration from nature, Boll & Branch’s color palette is “fresh, clean, relaxing and calm.” “All our colors have a bit of gray in them,” says Missy, “like a bit of dust. Everyone is special to us, [and] this dust soothes.”
“I abused myself to the point where I look back and say, ‘Oh my God, what was I doing?'”
Initially, the Tannens discontinued their direct-to-consumer (DTC) brand, fearing the potential liabilities that enterprise capital would bring. “Initially [we financed the company] with debts and loans,” Scott recalled, “and I took advantage of myself to the point where I look back and say, ‘Oh my God, what was I doing?’ I have three young children at home. Fortunately, it worked.”
However, Boll & Branch’s financial journey has not been without its ups and downs. Early on, the accounting error cost the company $1 million. Scott says it was a easy mistake that might have been caught 99 times out of 100, but it didn’t. Despite the failure, he treated it as a lesson – he found out what went fallacious with the security measures in place and how to avoid it in the future.
Boll & Branch continued to grow and eventually raised money from investors. Nowadays, a brand not has to worry about sales. Boll & Branch boasts annual revenues of greater than $200 million, eight brick-and-mortar locations (it plans to open eight more next yr) and might be found at major retailers akin to Nordstrom and Bloomingdale’s.
The brand makes about a third of its sales between Thanksgiving and mid-December, and this holiday season has already been “chaos in the best way possible.”
“We have defeated our goals [the holiday season]” says Scott. “We expected a strong Cyber Weekend and it was outrageous. Now we have volumes that we did not expect, so I need warehouse workers quickly. We have to work around the clock because we need to deliver our products to customers quickly. I am withdrawing inventory that I may need to sell in January. So I need to talk to my factories. They are delighted with the possibility of further transactions. [But the] “success creates a lot of complexity.”
Photo credit: Courtesy of Boll & Branch
“If you’re still critical in every task, you probably haven’t done a good enough job of building your team.”
Scott now calls each stage of the brand’s evolution a “reinvention.” As a company with a whole bunch of hundreds of thousands in annual sales, $1 million ideas not carry the weight they once did; He says Boll & Branch now needs $10 million in ideas to achieve growth.
Boll & Branch’s success comes from its commitment to maintaining its culture and values, hiring the best people to get the job done, and then going above and beyond to enable them to do so. “Many companies will have difficulty getting out of the startup phase [because] founders never realize it, yes, they were instrumental in starting something, but how critical they are to each task is not the same as it used to be,” Scott explains. “If you are still critical of every task, you almost certainly have not done a ok job of building your team.
In fact, some of Scott’s most vital advice for entrepreneurs relates to just this: a business leader is only pretty much as good as the people he surrounds himself with. “I’m not by any stretch of the imagination the most talented person in this company,” he says, “and I think if I can say that, that’s the mark of a great company.”
“You don’t have to know everything from day one.”
Now, as the Tannens consider the way forward for the brand, the co-founders are excited to maintain their “hospitality mindset” and proceed to meet customers where they are, providing unique experiences that are only possible in person.
For example, every customer in the store, no matter whether or not they buy one set of sheets or tons of products, has the opportunity to design a bed. “We’ll go to your house and get it ready for you,” Missy explains, “steam it [and] make sure you love it. Add everything you need. I just really make the customer so surprised and delighted.”
Photo credit: Courtesy of Boll & Branch
Boll & Branch has come a good distance since its founding – and so have its co-founders, who took a probability on an industry they didn’t know much about but were committed to making a difference.
For aspiring entrepreneurs looking to take their very own leap of religion and build an industry-changing brand, Missy emphasizes the value of pushing through imposter syndrome. “You don’t have to know everything right away,” he says. “You learn a lot along the way, and I think if we realized all the things we didn’t know, we would never have started.”