We’ve all heard the expression, “You’ve made your bed, now lie in it.” Boll & Branch, the linens brand, puts a positive spin on what is otherwise a negative message. If you buy a set of Boll & Branch sheets in their store, a stylist will deliver them to your home and give a hands-on lesson on how to make a bed.
It’s one example of how Boll & Branch approaches making beds so that people can lie in them with a level of comfort and confidence they’ve only dreamed about.
“My father once told me, ‘You’ll never regret the money you spend on your television or sofa because you’ll use them every day,’” company co-founder and CEO Scott Tannen shared with me. “But people spend the most time at home in their bed. Sheets are something we use every day. We should love them.”
Accidental Beginnings
Starting out, Tannen and his wife, co-founder Missy, knew nothing about the linens business. He worked nearly ten years as a marketing executive with Nabisco and Wrigley, then launched his first company designing video games, which he sold to Publishers Clearing House. She was a third-grade school teacher and brought an artist/maker’s eye to the business.
They accidentally happened upon the bedding opportunity after a search for new sheets left them confounded and confused. “We couldn’t figure out the difference between spending $100 or $900 on a set of sheets. I thought buying sheets should be easy, but it’s not,” he explained.
“There’s a lot of confusion in the market – I would say intentional confusion – about thread count and Egyptian cotton claims. Customers had no real mechanism for sorting it out. That was our radical idea.”
They turned that accident into a $200 million company that’s been profitable since year two after opening for business online in January 2014. Besides its flagship digital business, it now operates six stores with 20 more to come over the next two years, and Boll & Branch is the bedding brand of choice at Nordstrom
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Its product line has grown from sheets and bedding to the bath with towels, mats, shower curtains, robes, sleepwear, and bedroom furniture, including its own mattress brand.
The couple took a bottom-up, rather than a top-down, approach to disrupting the $18 billion bedding market. And besides fiercely loyal customers and rave customer reviews, the best testimony of Boll & Branch’s success is its wholesale partners searched them out to carry the brand.
“I said from day one, we were never going to go into wholesale, but then Nordstrom approached us and said, ‘We don’t have much of a home business, but our customers have a magnetism to your brand. We’d love for you to come in with us.’ And with an ask like that, we said yes because it’s still a category that many people want to touch and feel the product,” he shared.
From Seed To Sheets
As industry outsiders, the couple took on the challenge to reverse engineer the entire bedding supply chain that they found bloated with materials moving between too many hands and each taking a cut. They had to start from scratch to produce the quality they demanded and do what is right from an environmental and a human social perspective.
Predictably, the industry experts they turned to early said it couldn’t be done, but they did it.
“We realized we needed to change the system from end-to-end. We’ve invested a tremendous amount of time and money in our supply chain, so that we are the only bedding company fully managed from the source, working directly with family-owned farms and factories using 100% organic cotton,” he said.
Through the process, Boll & Branch has become the first 100% organic Fair Trade Certified bedding company. “We’ve got 50,000-plus people in our supply chain and they’re living above the poverty line for the first time in their lives. I can’t afford to build a business that doesn’t take into account the social challenges that exist in the textiles industry,” he said.
Turning Up The Dial
Tannen admits that untangling the linens supply chain took tremendous effort, so retail expansion had to take a back seat.
“We realized if we didn’t solve the supply chain issues, we were going to scale ourselves into a problem. But now, with upside capacity in place, we are ready to scale and service our own stores and that of our partners,” he said.
After testing a pop-up shop at the Short Hills Mall in Summit, NJ, it opened its first brick-and-mortar store in the fall of 2018. It was an immediate success, but further retail expansion was delayed by the pandemic, so the next Greenwich, CT store wasn’t opened until the fall of 2020.
This year, four others have followed, including Boca Raton, FL, Shrewsbury, NJ, Houston and Dallas, TX. On the board are plans to expand further over the next two years in the Mid-Atlantic, New England, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Tennessee and California.
It is following a hub and spoke model in retail expansion. “When we enter a market, we want to do it in a quality way and go where our customers are so we can service them to the best of our ability. So we plan to have our stores clustered together where we can be part of the local community,” he shared.
Being showcased in selective Nordstrom and Bloomingdale’s stores also adds credibility to the brand.
“As the first 100% organic Fair Trade Certified bedding company, Boll & Branch has many characteristics we love and that appeal to our customers,” shared Bloomingdale’s Kelley Carter, fashion director, home. “Their collection offers a luxurious feel, and layering in their throw blankets and decorative pillows is an easy way to create an extremely cozy bed.”
Here To Stay
As Tannen’s responsibilities have grown with the company’s expansion, he remains as obsessively compulsive as ever on the business and delivering the best product to customers.
“Answering the phones and taking customer service calls is one of my favorite things to do,” he confided. “And one of the interesting questions I get a lot from customers is about the permanence of our business.
“We have a higher-net-income customers who pay attention to the business press. They want to do business with a company that will be around because it makes money, delivering a good product and a good value. They understand that’s how everybody wins,” he concluded.
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