The Magnolia Story (with Bonus Content)

by Chip Gaines

  Then one day Chip showed up with the back of his pickup truck just loaded with old metal letters he’d found at a flea market—big, oddly shaped letters taken from various old signs. They were mismatched and rusty and dented—and I loved them. We tacked them up on the front of the shop, spelling out the name that would come to mean so much: Magnolia. The letters were uneven and looked a little handmade and ragged, but it seemed to work. I loved this sign because Chip designed it and made it with his own two hands. It came together in such an imperfectly perfect way, and I hoped people would get it.

  To this day that sign is one of my proudest accomplishments. I’m no Joanna Gaines, but I certainly see things differently and love design in my own unique way. That first sign really reflected that for me. I would glow when I would hear a customer come in the shop and say, “I saw the sign and just had to stop in.”

  Finally, in October of 2005, the shop was ready to go. In a rush, I hand-painted a dinky little “Open” sign, but I ran out of space for the n, so it dropped down at the end. It was just bad. I didn’t have an advertising budget. I hadn’t done any marketing at all. We’d told plenty of people we knew, of course, and our parents had spread the word, but I was basically hoping that people would see my store when they were driving by and drop in. And yet I put out a sign on my opening day that looked like a four-year-old had drawn it. It was pathetic.

  Inside, the shop was pretty much everything I wanted it to be. In addition to the home décor items, I had a section full of fresh flowers for sale. They smelled so good and looked perfect. When I was in New York, I had lived next to a little flower shop, and I’d loved watching people walk out with fresh flowers wrapped in kraft paper. I wanted to create that same feel in Waco, Texas that I had experienced in New York City.

  So I had the flowers all ready to go. I had the candles burning. I had Frank Sinatra music playing. And at 9:55 a.m., just five minutes before the doors opened, I started to freak out.

  She was hyperventilating. No joke. I thought I might have to take her to the emergency room or something, she was so nervous.

  I just started panicking. “No one’s going to come. Why is no one here?”

  Chip and I had done the math. I needed to make at least two hundred dollars a day in order to pay the mortgage and insurance and electricity. That was two hundred dollars every day we were open just to stay afloat, without any profits. I’d been working so hard getting everything ready that I hadn’t stopped to think about what might happen if the store didn’t make that much money. I was close to a complete nervous breakdown, thinking, What if this doesn’t work?

  Then, just after ten o’clock, a Hummer pulled into the parking lot, followed by a Mercedes, followed by a Suburban and then a BMW. All these rich women showed up out of nowhere.

  They were doctors’ and lawyers’ wives, stay-at-home moms and grandmothers who loved to shop and who did their best to make their homes feel nice. It turned out they’d all been watching my little shop come together during the renovations. They’d been eagerly anticipating my opening day for weeks, and it seemed that my idea of bringing a New York-style boutique experience to a home décor store wasn’t far-fetched at all. There were a lot of people in town who were excited for it.

  My first day open we made $2,800.

  By the way, my dad decided to sell his Firestone shop shortly after this. I went over and helped him clean out the attic one day, and guess what I found up there? The wicker sleigh that I’d fixed up nice with the garland and Christmas lights and put up for sale in his lobby was still there, tucked in a corner. I just shook my head. He bought it himself to give me a little boost of confidence as I got ready to open my store.

  What can I say? It worked. And so did the shop.

  Sometimes when something is meant to be, it’s meant to be. It had nothing to do with how I advertised, and it certainly didn’t have anything to do with my being some kind of an amazing designer or having a reputation, because I wasn’t any kind of a designer at all, and no one knew who I was. I just knew what I liked, and I trusted that other people might like it too. And I was where I was supposed to be. I’d listened to my own intuition and let God guide me toward the plans he’d had for me all along.

  I mean, is there anyone who could possibly imagine that the way to get to your life’s calling would be to marry a guy who showed up an hour and a half late to your first date and then to let that man talk you into opening your own small business in the first year of marriage? But guess what? It all seemed to be working out in that perfectly messy way life works when you trust in God and his plans for your life rather than focusing on your own.

  At that point, I wasn’t anywhere near used to the dynamics of it all. Chip’s impulsive buying of properties, the way I’d hate them at first and then come to love them, only to have to move out again, the unexpected twists and turns and the hardships we’d have to overcome to get ourselves back on course—all of that was still new to me. And as we repeated them over the next few years, moving from flip house to flip house and starting over again and again, there would be a whole lot of tears.

  But the fact that we established that crazy pattern of doing things in our own unique way so early on in our marriage was important. It prepared us for everything that would come later on. And Chip’s decision to move us into that little white eight-hundred-square-foot house worked out exactly the way he said it would. It helped us to get ahead and start making some sustainable income.

  One of the real pluses to that second house was it had a big side yard that we could subdivide, so we could build a whole second house to rent or to sell right next to the one we were living in. I bought that house, lot included, for $30,000, and we probably put $25,000 into it. So we were all-in for $55,000 on that little house, and it turned out beautiful—it really did. And we were able to build a brand-new house next door for about $130,000.

  And of course this was all debt. We didn’t own anything outright. And getting the money to do all this hadn’t been easy. The banks hadn’t wanted to mess around with these little houses at first. They were either small potatoes, or the banks felt I needed to build a reputation first. The few they actually agreed to caused us to go scrambling every month just to make the payments and pay our own bills.

  When it came to remodeling, we never took out any walls or did any major construction at that point. Everything was just cosmetic. But we tried to do things creatively and nice. We updated the kitchen with new appliances. We used the existing cabinets and learned to repaint them. We put in new countertops and a new backsplash when we could. We restored the hardwood floors, and I mean lots of them. Chip literally became an expert in setting tile and wood floor restoration. We took out the bathtub and replaced it with a nice, wide shower with multiple showerheads and some body jets. Honestly, it felt luxurious, like the kind of shower you’d find in a really upscale house or a spa somewhere. Then came the paint, and we were done. And by that point, as I’ve mentioned, I would be in love with the place.

  But it wasn’t just the work we put in that made me love that tiny white house. It wasn’t even the easy vacuuming, though that was a plus. What made that house special was the incredible memories we made there.

  We threw Chip’s thirtieth birthday party in that house’s little backyard. I strung Christmas lights in the trees, and Chip built a firepit that was unbelievable. We didn’t have much in the way of backyard furniture, so I put hay bales all around the perimeter for people to sit on. There was a little old weathered shed in the back, and I lit that up too.

  It looked like something you’d see in a magazine. It was one of the best parties I’ve ever had in my life. It was funny because we were basically poor. We didn’t know how we were going to pay our bills at the end of the month, and we were living in this tiny house, and I invited all of these college buddies to my party who’d gone and started making real money. They came in from Dallas and Austin and parked their Beemers and their Range Rovers up on the lawn of this $3
0,000 property we owned.

  But we were proud of that house. We didn’t think anything of it. We were excited to have all of our friends from college there to see what we’d been up to and to celebrate Chip’s thirtieth birthday together.

  I was thirty years old and still living by the seat of my pants. I probably should have had my life together a little bit more by then. But the thing was, my friends all had these stressed-out lives, and they came to our place and it felt like we were just living this laid-back, beautiful, no-stress life. We made being poor look fun. All these corporate friends of ours were thinking, Well, maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad to stay in Waco.

  It wasn’t just my friends that made that party special, though. My grandma was still alive, and she came to that party too. She was just the sweetest lady in the world. She had single-handedly raised my dad and his brother. And though she had a very tough life, you would have never known it by her attitude. Between my mom and my grandma, I was definitely genetically built for positive optimism. That day with her is one of my fondest memories, because she and I hung out on one of those bales of hay for what felt like hours. It wasn’t but a couple years after that she went to be with Jesus.

  We made all kinds of big memories in that tiny house, and we were just getting started. The fact that we had some profits starting to roll in from my little shop on Bosque only added to the sense of security we were building.

  It’s hard to describe the feeling that comes with starting your own business. It really is so much work in the beginning that you lose yourself in it. You lose your sense of time, and you can’t believe how quickly the days go by because there’s no time to focus on much of anything else. But then you open the doors, and it’s like you’ve given birth to this new thing that didn’t exist before. Then when it starts to flourish, well, that’s just icing on the cake. To get to see it live and breathe and to know that this thing you created out of thin air can put a smile on other people’s faces is such a blessing.

  There were some women who would come into that store and drop fifteen hundred dollars in a single visit. It was unbelievable. But I think one of the favorite customers I had in that first year of Magnolia was a woman who didn’t ever buy a thing. She would just show up now and then and poke around, and she told me one time, “I just come here because I want to be in here. This place inspires me.”

  That was just about the greatest compliment I could ever imagine. She affirmed for me that I had accomplished exactly what I’d set out to do, and that made me even more passionate about creating an experience for my customers. I worked every day to come up with new touches that would make the experience memorable. I never got too comfortable with one particular look or design. I wanted to constantly challenge myself and make it better. If people were going to go out of their way to come into my store, I wanted to make sure it was worthwhile, whether they bought something or not.

  Magnolia was my baby—no doubt about that. But it wasn’t long before I found out it wasn’t the only baby I was going to have.

  SIX

  WHITE PICKET FENCES

  I’ve been asked from time to time how Chip and I manage to juggle all the things we did—and still do. I honestly don’t have a good answer for that, other than to go back to the notion that we seem to energize one another when we’re together. Although one explanation for where we find a little “extra” time in our days is the fact that since we got married we have never had a TV in our own house.

  That is one question I always field on Twitter, “Hey man, why doesn’t Joanna ever set up a TV in any of these homes?” I think they are implying I need to turn in my man card. But this is actually the answer to that question.

  Before we got married, the two of us attended a few premarital counseling sessions with Chip’s friend and one of his mentors, Byron Weathersbee, and his wife, Carla. Byron had played a significant part in Chip’s life as a college student, and since then, Chip sought Byron’s wisdom on lots of things. Chip and I felt that applying that same logic to our marriage—getting advice from these two trusted and seasoned marriage pros—couldn’t be a bad thing. We wanted to start a habit of seeking outside opinions just to make sure we were thinking about everything a new couple ought to think about as we started our new life together.

  One of the things Byron and Carla suggested was that we try to stay focused on each other and spend quality time doing things we loved together, especially when we were at home. That seemed like a no-brainer to us, but they explained that being in the same house and actually interacting with each other are two different things. Sometimes it’s easy for couples to get lost in their own little worlds at home—to be so focused on other things that they aren’t really together, even when they’re in the same room.

  To counter that tendency, Byron and Carla suggested we try to go the first few weeks of our marriage without a TV. The idea was to find other ways to occupy our time, especially in the evenings, with activities we could truly share. It seemed like reasonable advice, and so we tried it.

  Well, six months later, neither one of us had the slightest urge to get a TV. We never even found time to miss it. All our various projects kept us busy during the day. And our evenings were pretty filled up with making dinner and finishing up the day’s business, talking and dreaming together, and making plans for the next day or the next week. We couldn’t imagine setting aside even an hour to sit and watch TV.

  That’s not to say we never slowed down. Reading a good book, flipping through magazines, learning new card games together, taking walks together—we found a million ways to enjoy some down time.

  Now, to be fair, we’ve caught our share of TV at our friends’ homes or at our parents’. Any time there was a big game or a fun show, we would find a way to catch it at a restaurant or make a date of it at a friend’s house. So, we managed to catch up on some of our favorite shows through these outlets.

  We’ve had more than thirteen years now without a TV, and I don’t feel like we’ve missed a thing.

  Just when we thought our lives couldn’t get any busier—just as we’d settled into that little white house and my store was getting off the ground—I received the wonderful news that I was pregnant with our first child.

  Just the thought of having a baby filled me with all sorts of new inspiration, not the least of which was imagining the room I wanted my baby to come home to. The tiny second bedroom in that eight-hundred-square-foot house needed a complete makeover to turn it into a nursery, and thinking about that actually spurred an idea that gave me a new perspective on decorating.

  I had made the décor in our second home more cohesive than the ones in the yellow house. The colors were continuous, and the rooms all tied together rather than each space having its own theme. My store was so busy that I kept finding new furnishings and swapping them in and out between the store and our home, and I felt like I was starting to get a hang of this thing called decorating.

  Once I found out I was having a boy, I zeroed in on earthy tones and a sort of outside-meets-inside theme in the room. Instead of the standard baby blue, I wanted something warm and comfortable that would reflect the rest of that luxurious little retreat we’d created. But I didn’t have a lot of money to spend on that little nursery. Any money we made seemed to go right into another project or investment or just to keep up the payments on all the loans we’d taken out.

  I realized we just couldn’t afford any extra bells and whistles on that room, not even window treatments. I knew that window treatments can be expensive. But I decided to look at our tiny budget as a design challenge. I stood in the nearly finished nursery one day, just staring out the window, and I noticed the little white picket fence we’d put up in the front yard. An idea popped into my head immediately, “Hey, Chip, what would happen if you went and got some pieces of picket fence at the lumberyard and built an awning out of that wood for the inside of the nursery?”

  I sketched it out for him, with the picket fence coming down at
an angle from above the windows, kind of like an awning you’d see on the outside of a restaurant. Chip ran with it and figured out how to tack fencing to another board so he could hang it just so. We painted it, and it worked!

  I stood back when we were done, looked at that room, and realized something big: having a tight budget doesn’t have to mean watering down the design. If anything, it forced me to get more creative, and there was so much joy in that for me. I loved that awning Chip built way more than I ever would’ve loved a store-bought window treatment. It turned out perfect and taught me one of my fundamental design rules: don’t be afraid to think outside of the box.

  People liked those awnings so much that we actually started building them and selling them to our clients. For a season those things were hot!

  Well, that was the other thing that happened. Beyond the house flipping and rental properties, we started picking up clients for remodels and redesigns.

  As my baby bump grew behind the counter at the store, I found that more and more of those moms and grandmothers who came in to browse started bringing me pictures of rooms in their homes and asking for my advice. “I just don’t like this room, and I don’t know why,” they would say. I would look at those pictures and suggest that maybe they could switch the furniture around or put up something interesting on a wall that had nothing but flat picture frames on it. I would recommend changing the wall color or adding a nice lamp in a nook or adding new throw pillows for a pop of color on the sofa.