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Shawn D. Nelson is the founder and CEO of Lovesac, the furniture company known for its modular couches and big ideas. He’s also the author of Let Me Save You 25 Years: Mistakes, Miracles, and Lessons from the Lovesac Story, where he shares the wild ride of building a disruptive brand from scratch. With a BA in Mandarin Chinese and a Master’s in Strategic Design and Management from Parsons, Shawn blends creativity with strategy—skills he later passed on as an instructor. From winning Richard Branson’s reality show to leading a publicly traded company, Shawn brings bold lessons in innovation, grit, and growth to every conversation.

 

 

In this episode, Jason and Shawn discuss:

  • The origin story of Lovesac and how it started as a college project
  • The philosophy of “Designed for Life” and true product sustainability
  • Mistakes, miracles, and lessons shared in Shawn’s book Let Me Save You 25 Years
  • Scaling a company with purpose while remaining humble and authentic
  • Why building the right team is key to lasting leadership and growth

Key Takeaways:

  • A playful idea turned into a powerhouse brand—Shawn’s giant bean bag sparked Lovesac, a company now rooted in durability, innovation, and intentional design. What began as a college experiment evolved into a billion-dollar business.
  • Shawn’s entrepreneurial path wasn’t all smooth—he shares unfiltered stories of painful mistakes (like a team member losing a fingertip) and remarkable triumphs, including taking Lovesac public.
  • “Designed for Life” isn’t a marketing phrase—it’s the core of Lovesac’s identity. The company’s products are built to last and adapt, creating a unique edge in a disposable world.
  • You don’t need to have it all figured out from the start. Sometimes, just surviving long enough opens the door for your true mission to take shape.
  • True leadership isn’t about doing it all yourself. It’s about hiring exceptional people, trusting them to lead, and stepping back so they can thrive.

 


“Once you get to a point—and in my case, it took the better part of 25 years—you can finally wrap your organization around something that matters. Even if it takes a long time to find that purpose, once you do, you can build something way more meaningful and impactful than just a big bean bag or a clever couch company that makes some dude a bunch of money. Because that’s not really what motivates any of us.”

- Shawn Nelson

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Listen to the podcast here:


 

Shawn Nelson-Let Me Save You 25 Years

Hello and welcome everybody to this episode of The Insight Interviews. I think I always say I have a special guest, but today, I have a special guest. There's been a few guests that have fit in this category, but not many guests have been on the show where their product is literally in my home already. And so, when I saw this guest cross my desk, I was like, yeah, I want to talk to this guy. So, I've got the founder of Lovesac on the line today. His name is Shawn Nelson. Shawn, welcome to the show.

Thank you. Glad to be here.

25 years ago, you founded Lovesac. We're going to get into all of that, but you get the same question that every guest gets, because we like to face in a particular direction as we shove the ship off the dock, which is, who or what are you particularly grateful for today?

Oh, well, I have to say, my family. I wear this ring, you know, my updated wedding ring with my six Black Diamonds representing my four kids, my wife, myself, and on the inside, it says everything else is dust. I try to always maintain that frame of mind and the top of mind in everything, and I can get distracted at times but really try hard to remain grateful for my family.

Yeah, thank you for that. Yeah, I'm thinking about my kids and wife now, man. I'm supposed to be asking you questions. 25 years ago, you founded Lovesac. Tell us a little bit about that process, because there's always stories there. So, what do you think about today in 2025 about 25 years ago, when this guy on this podcast asked you that question about your founding story? What sticks out to you?

Oh, well, it's a saga, you know? In fact, so much so I wrote a book about it, right? Let me save you 25 years, because it's 25 years of stories and ups and downs. Like pretty remarkable for a silly bean bag company. I made a big bean bag when I was 18 years old because I thought it'd be funny. This is 1995, and I'm sitting on my parents’ couch watching The Price Is Right, I just graduated high school, I was kind of bored in the summer, and I had this dumb idea, like, how funny would it be to make a bean bag, you know? Like, this big. So I turned off the TV, drove down to Joanne's Fabrics, bought some clearance vinyl pleather, leather, you know, like to make a bean bag out of, brought a home, cut it out and jammed my mom's sewing machine trying to sew it up like a baseball, giant baseball, and took me three weeks to stuff it with beanbag beads. Couldn't possibly find enough. So, this is like packing peanuts old blankets, but our camping mattresses, I took them down to the basement, chopped them up on a paper cutter, and that made it squishy, like a pillow, and everyone loved it. So anyway, got it done, took it out. Everyone loves this thing. People are saying where did you even get something like that? And it would be three years later that I started to make them for friends and family and then three years after that, we opened the first Lovesac store in Salt Lake City, Utah, 2001 on a wing and a prayer to keep the little company we started in college alive. It's 1000 stories I'm skipping over.

 

I bet.

 

But fast forward to today, we have 300 Lovesac's stores around the country in the best malls and shopping centers. You might have seen one. We sell mostly couches, as you might know, these cool modular couches, sectionals. Sactionals, we call them. You can have the rest of your life if you want to. You can you add to them, grow them, change them, rearrange them, wash them in the washing machine, and that's become the best-selling sectional in the United States of America, and it propelled us to become a public company. We're working toward a billion in sales annually and really proud of what we're doing.

I'm just picturing you in your basement chopping up, you know, camping mattresses and stitching together this thing. I will tell you my personal story, and maybe there’s 1000s and 1000s of these stories.

Yeah, I want to hear it.

But we were over at a friend's house, and he had one of your bean bags in his basement. I'd never seen a bean bag that big, and I happened to sit in it that evening, and was extremely comfortable. And I've got a bad back, and always have, and so I'm very rarely comfortable in any seat or couch, especially if it's, you know, squishy or whatever, but I was very comfortable. And I had two young children at the time, very young, and I'm like, I went home that night and figured out a way to buy two. That's not the end of the story. So they resided in our basement, and we didn't have a huge basement, so they took up a lot of room and our kids growing up, they're both adult children now, they're not kids anymore, but they are our adult children, they used them the entire time, and for sleepovers, it was a huge, huge, huge hit. And even now, our son just finished his junior year in college, both of them made it to the dorm, and the roommates love them and everything. So anyways, we're big Lovesac evangelists. We don't have any of the sectionals yet, but that was my story. And dude, I'm not gonna say I was one of your first customers, but I was towards the front. I mean, our kids are in their mid 20s. This was definitely 20 years ago. A year or two before or after that.

Where did you get them? Do you remember? Online?

I don’t. I think it was online. Yeah, I feel like it was online.

That’s so cool. Yeah, they last forever. I mean, it’s cool to hear that story and there's nothing I love more than obviously, hearing people that have had our product for decades, because it can last decades. And therein came the lesson. It has really given us the nugget that will, I think, allow us to grow this company into the many billions and build a brand that people love, because we can make stuff that can last a lifetime. Not just because it's well built, and it is, and our sectionals are the same way. I have sactionals pieces that are older than my children. They're 18 years old, mated with brand new pieces, made with all the new designs, stealth tech, our surround sound system, you can add reverse compatibly. And this way of thinking about product we call design for life is a simple thing. It's making things that are built to last a lifetime but can evolve with you as life changes. So washable, changeable, reconfigurable styles can change, fabrics can change. And with that design framework, we will do all the important things over time to you, and I think ultimately create what we call the apex predator of product in many categories, and we build our brand around that. So, this kind of unassuming thing, like a giant bean bag called Lovesac of all things, has given rise to this design ethos that you would never expect from a silly company like this, that I think will allow us to become a much-loved brand that means something, you know? There will be fewer couches sold on earth because we mess with couches. There will be fewer fill in the blank sold on Earth, because we mess with that product, and in a world where increasingly, everything we buy was designed to die, these living products are a very different way of thinking, and I'm very proud of it. And my point is not to boast about it. My point is to say, even with a dumb starting point, like a giant bean bag that people thought was cool, it can evolve over time to become something that even you couldn't have predicted in the beginning, which is why we keep going with our pursuits. Because I would have never, even a decade in, I would have never imagined this kind of future for Lovesac. It had to evolve this way. And now it seems very clear and very obvious, and I think you know, like a good strategy, but it had to evolve over time.

So, we got some of the origination story. But as I listened to you, you know, at Rewire, we serve all kinds of different industries. One of them is manufacturing, and we help big global manufacturing companies, and I see copycats. I see all kinds of in all kinds of, especially now geopolitical stuff with manufacturing and whatever. What is it about your organization that allows you to continue to grow in IPO and public company? And you've got these bigger sites. Like, why you guys, as opposed to any of your competitors that are out there?

So, we just got news that we are number 19. We are the 19th largest furniture retailer the United States of America, which for a company that only makes two products, is pretty cool.

I would think so. Congratulations.

Well, everyone ahead of us on that list makes everything in your home, and we really only make giant not bean bags and sectionals, at the moment. We just launched a couch line, if you can believe that. Couches, chairs, love seats, that that is really exciting, called Ever Couch. But we are now compared to the best home brands in in the world, in America. Restoration Hardware, Pottery Barn, Crate & Barrell, IKEA, take your pick. And they are fantastic. They are well run organizations that make beautiful products. The key is to be different. There are ahead of us on that list, 18 others, and there are 100 behind us. We started at number 99. I remember when we made the list a decade in.

It was probably a big deal.

At number 98, and we were so stoked to just be on that top 100 list. That felt like we won.

Yeah, sure.

But somewhere in there with, you know, the 100 others and the and the 100 behind that, you have to find a place where you can truly be different and have a competitive advantage. And like I said, we are lucky enough to have unearthed this competitive advantage we call design for life that I just articulated to you, and the reason I share it is, I could be secretive, I guess, but it's such a different way of looking at product. It's very hard to make design for life products. It requires years sometimes of development, of engineering. You know, if you're really committed to making something that's built to last a lifetime, but also evolve with you as styles change, whatever changes, it's going to be a very hard problem to solve.

Yeah.

And so I don't think a lot of others are going to do it, and that's why I talk about it pretty openly. One, I would be a hypocrite if I hid it, because the ultimate goal is true sustainability, like stuff that actually sustains. Everyone's talking about recycled bottles, or, you know, composting. I don't know. We're trying to make truly sustainable stuff. There's not enough talk about that. By the way, I just found out after Walmart and Amazon, we recycle more plastic bottles than any other brand leveraging the reprieve format of Plastic Bottle Recycling. So, and this is little Lovesac, because our stuff is huge and all the upholstery is made out of these recycle bottles. We barely talk about it. The only reason I'm mentioning it is to point out like that's not even how we think of sustainability. So, by just trying to survive, you know, making better bean bags, making better couches, keep the business going, get it profitable, make some money, you know, take it public, eventually grow it, we've evolved to this place over a very, very long time, like a weed through concrete. And when a weed grows through concrete, you know, you ever tried to pull one of those out? You know, it's down in the ground, but it also has very hard skin and a lot of resilience, and I'm very proud of that. So
all of these things, like, we didn't start with this grand vision, but now we have a grand vision, and that's motivating. So now it's easier to recruit talent that want to come here from the best companies in the world, like the biggest brands that you can think of, we are recruiting for our board of directors, for our top management team, and throughout, because they want to be involved with something that means something. But again, the only way we got to a point we meant anything other than just survive and make some money was by surviving and making money for a very long time, until that evolved in that way.

Yeah. I mean, there's such a ton there. How many employees do you all have?

We get to employ over 2000 people. A lot of those are in our stores, which are across the country. We have about 400 at our headquarters in various capacities.

Yeah, yeah. All over the place. From a from a leadership standpoint, and I haven't read your book, I looked as I was preparing, I looked through, you know, kind of the reason behind the book, and why you wrote it, and those types of things, but I now know it's full of stories. What are some things that stick out? I don't want you to give away the goods of the book too much, but what are a story or two that sticks out, that you felt that you needed to write about?

Yeah, well, the book, “Let me save you 25 years”, is really a collection of 25 little lessons, I call them Shawnism’s that I learned along the way, woven through the narrative of the 25-year arc of Lovesac. And in fact, the subtitle for the book is mistakes, miracles and lessons from the Lovesac story, because there's all of those things in there. I have plenty of mistakes that I made that probably would have allowed me to get to where we are a lot sooner had I not made them. Miracles that we wouldn't exist. And lessons. So, I mean, I opened the book the first Shawnism, just do something, and I told you this story. I turned off the TV, drove down to Joanne's, bought some fabric. Had I not done that and had I just had this dumb idea for, like, a really big bean bag and I told my friends about it, or, you know, we wouldn't be here. I wouldn't get to employ 1000s of people. I wouldn't have had the life experience that I've had, and I feel very blessed, even with the mistakes and the painful lessons in there, to have had all these experiences. And so that's Shawnism number one, just do something. And by the way, number two rides on its heels. Just do the next thing. You know, business can seem so intimidating. Leadership, oh my gosh. Finances, like I learned the hard lesson. You know, you asked for some stories. I finally got to pay somebody to stuff Lovesacs on our kind of woodchipper foam shredder thing that this furniture factory let us use in their back room while we were in college and I finally had sold enough I could hire someone to least stuff some sacks. I could go make the deliveries, and I don't know, do the accounting, do whatever else needed to be done. And he promptly cut the tip of his finger off with a kitchen knife we used to slice foam with. And I quickly found out when he visited the hospital to have it stitched back on, that I didn't have workers comp insurance, and I was facing all kinds of trouble. So, you get workers comp insurance, and all of these things that seem like dead ends, difficulties don't need to be, you know? They can be dealt with if you just do the next thing. So, the book's full of dumb ideas like that that I also share on my podcast called “Let me save you 25 years” with super famous people, where instead of just doing interviews, I kind of parachute into conversations around a single Shawnism, and it's really kind of cool to see what I get out of Mark Cuban or Gronk or Gary Vaynerchuk, or some of these people that I've had on my podcast, where we talk about these topics through their lens. But that's what the book's about. That's what the podcast is about.

Shawn, you're very self-deprecating. You've used the word, you've said the phrase, like these dumb ideas a few different times. And what is that? Where does that come from?

I don't know. I try to just keep it real, you know? I mean, I think we live in a world where entrepreneurs are so celebrated and billionaires are all over the place, and now we see them because of social media, and everyone likes to post their private jet and all that kind of stuff, and, like, that's not where I come from. You know, I made a big bean bag in college because I thought it'd be funny, and people liked it, and that's the truth. And now I interact with 100 millionaires and billionaires all the time, and I'm invited to things where I'm expected to be super excited to rub shoulders with people like that and do things like that, and I'm happy to be there, but at the same time though, I'm still a kid who made a beanbag in my parents' basement. And I would stay aware of that. think that one of the reasons the Lovesac story is interesting to people, especially young people, is because, like, I could have done that. When I say I, I mean, you could have done that. Anyone could have done it. I didn't need to be a coder. I didn't need to know AI. I didn't need to go to Harvard, even if I did drop out. Anyone could have done what I did and do, so I think, like anyone could imagine other things that are available to us in the world that can still be thought of. You know, especially, again, with social media, we can get the feeling that everything's been done and everything's hard, and I'm just another one, and who am I to imagine that? So, Lovesac has become something more than what it began as, so with it have my ambitions changed and have grown, and I make no bones about it. Our goal now, besides our purpose, which I kind of said to you, which is to inspire people to buy better stuff, but ultimately they can buy less stuff, and that's the purpose that motivates us. Our mission as a brand, as a company, is different. What are we trying to achieve? We're trying to build the most loved brand in America, which may not be the biggest, because to become the biggest, I gotta con you into buying the same thing every year.

Over and over again. Yep.

And bury their carcasses in African soil, because we don't want to put that toxic stuff in our own soil. God forbid. I don't want to do that. So I think we can get plenty big at Lovesac, but we'll probably never rival the mega caps, you know, the Apples of the world, because we refuse to do business like that. It makes me happy. You know, I'll meet people like you that have had their Lovesac for 20 years. Sometimes they'll even kind of apologize, like, oh, I, should probably buy a new cover or something. Or sometimes I meet people that bought their Lovesac on Craigslist, and they kind of like, are sheepish about telling me. There's nothing that makes me happier, because if you bought your Lovesac or even your sactionals on Craigslist, it means they weren't left at the curb with a sign that said, take me.

That’s right. It’s still alive and well.

They have value because they were well built to begin with.

Yep.

And I love that. And by the way, I'm not worried about my business, back to what I was really getting at. I think we can build this silly company into a multibillion dollar organization that is someday up there with the Nikes and Apples and Teslas of the world, even if not to scale, at least in terms of recognition, love, brand, power, resonance and so the reason I try to remain as self-deprecating as I can, is because I expect that to happen. I expect Lovesac to be into the multibillions, and that will make me probably quite wealthy and all those other things. But meanwhile, I'm just a kid who made a big bean bag. And, as I look at those brands that I mentioned, they were just built by people as well, who just kind of kept going. And so why not me, right? So, I guess what I'm trying to express is I have tremendous ambition, but at the same time, I aim to keep it real, because I still operate in a world of real people. And in fact, you know, you asked me what I'm grateful for. After my family, I mean, I'm also super grateful for the 2000 people that some of them have been with us for decades, a decade and a half, in the same mall, dropping the same lines, selling a lot of the same products that whole time to help us do this, because that's the life path that they're happy to be living. And that makes me incredibly humble and grateful, and I just feel like a pig if I revel in my own grandiosity too much, I guess.

So, with that answer, the things that I know about the organization, and even engaging you right now, I'm getting the sense, and I want you to either confirm or deny or just kind of talk about this a little bit, it seems like the organization is incredibly dependent on you. I'm feeling you're a subtle guy, or at least you come off that way, but I'm feeling that it's just a brand that depends a lot on Shawn Nelson, you know? You wrote a book with Shawnisms. What happens when, I don't know, I know at Rewire, we have a whole thing like, if and when Jason gets hit by a bus, this is what you do, you know, type of thing. How does that work with Shawn Nelson and Lovesac?

I guess I'm honored that you think I am that important, but I certainly hope you're wrong. In fact, I think that you are. I have built a team that runs this company, and I say that at the risk of making myself sound irrelevant. Look, I think I have a job to do. I think those who work with me know what that is and know the value that I add and whatnot. But my business partner, you know, I signed the CEO of Lovesac, my president, I mean, she is 10 times the executive I ever could be. Why? Because, while I was farting around trying to survive for a decade or two, building the company this way, she was learning at the hands of Walmart. She was learning on the dime of L'Oréall, BIC, president of the of all these brands, head of business units in the into the billions. How can I possibly ever know what she knows? Now, she thankfully carries such a heavy operational load at Lovesac. and, by the way, has also a ton of creativity and and is just a great person all around and so, and I'm just still talking about the same person. This is Mary. So, from Mary, throughout the entire top team, I have some of the best, in my humble opinion, best people in the world doing what they do best inside of this organization. And so, I think if I were hit by a bus, I think we could be just fine. I think hopefully there's some people that might miss me or my energy and what I bring to the brand and the invention and everything else, but I'm very proud of the team that I've built around me, and I view that as the number one aspect of my job is to find and retain. It's one thing to find talent. It's another thing to afford them. I couldn't always afford talent at that level. I had to build my way brick by brick in order to get there, right? But it's a whole other thing. To retain it. And to retain it is a confluence of 1000 factors, one of the biggest of which is my own behavior, in many respects, and there's lots of ways that we could unpack that, but that's a big deal. And so listen. If my aspiration was just to make a ton of money, there's probably better ways that I could do that at this point, you know? I could sell all my Lovesac stock and plow it into some other startup that I can own 100% of, and then, you know, who knows. There’s a thousand ways to make a million bucks. It's actually one of one of my podcast topics. But that's not my goal. I told you what my goal is, right? So if I if my goal is to build a Nike or an Apple or a Disney, I must share all of that load and all of that glory with a team that is as good as I can possibly muster. And it comes sometimes at my own personal expense, in some ways, whether that be my own ego or whether that be my imagined control, or whether that be money, but that's my aspiration. So that's how I think about that.

Why the name Lovesac?

I wish I had a better story. After making the original one and having so many people kind of stop me as we, you know, took it to the drive-in movies or the beach or wherever we took this thing, and people loved it, my neighbor finally convinced me to make them one three years later, having seen it drive up and down the street 100 times. And I said, okay, fine. If I'm going to make you one, I'm going to sell it to you. So, I need a business. I need a name. I need a brand. And I just figured bean bag love peace, hate, war, hippie bag, hippie love bag, Lovesac. Oh, that's cool. Paid 25 bucks at the Utah State Tax Commission to register the name Lovesac in 1998, and I had a company all through college. And meanwhile, I waited tables to pay my way through college, because this company just bled me dry, right? The van broke, the shredder broke, and need more fabric, all the things that come with any kind of startup. And I learned all those lessons very early, but thankfully, somehow, we persisted and became what we became.

What am I not asking you that you want to get out there? That I haven't
asked you about yet?

Well, back to the back to the ethos that really drives me, and by the way, my entire team, I think, people need a paycheck to do a job, but the best people also want to do something that means something. And for a lot of years, we found meaning in survival. There is just meaning found in trying to, like, not die, you know? Keep something alive, keep it moving, and Lovesac experienced that for way too long, because I made too many mistakes along the way. But we did survive and eventually found this higher purpose that really had to evolve. And it came about because of comments like yours. People that had their sack for, who knows, a decade or two, and be like, man, I can't believe this thing that I bought on a whim one day is still going when I've already moved on with every other piece of furniture I've ever owned.

Sure.

And inside of that, there's a bit of truth, right? But I can't observe that truth without the passage of time, without the lived experience. You can't just, on day two, conjure up a purpose for a brand that means something necessarily. You can, and by the way, you probably should take a stab at it, because I think it's something that people should have, but you have to be open to letting it evolve, just like life evolves, just like children evolve. So we eventually evolved to this place where we, okay, we can make really good stuff that lasts, but with it, especially with sactionals, which was originally just a couch, in the first Lovesac store, we had a couch in the corner, and it was there to look pretty and display our giant bean bags with a big screen TV playing movies and the music bump and people come in have a good time, like, oh, I want to take a piece that home. And it worked. But every other day, someone's asking, like, well, how much is that couch? We don't sell the couch. No, but I really like that couch, how much is it? So eventually, you know, we couldn't sell the couch because they're too big. We couldn't even fit it through the doorway. How are we going to deliver it to your home? Then we finally did sell it to one guy, and like, he needed the matching armchair and ottoman. And we're like, ah, I don't know, man, sorry, go to you know, Raymond Flanagan. That got us thinking, like, oh, man, if only we could shrink a couch down, like we shrink these sacks down, because we always suck the air out of the as you've experienced out of an eight foot bean bag, and got it down to 1/8 its original size for and that made us internetable right into the meeting. So, we had, we had these strengths that were kind of accidental, and we tried to then make a couch that could do the same thing. And we invented sactionals. Super efficient. Buy a bunch of seats, buy a bunch of sides, build anything you want. Oh, and because it comes apart, we could make these covers fit like a glove, so they look like upholstery, but they're actually machine washable. Not like a floppy slipcover, because those existed, but we really had invented something new that had all these advantages. But again, we sold it for a decade somewhat successfully, not really. It took us a decade to kind of figure out how to compete with the West ELMS and the Pottery Barns and the real furniture companies that didn't call themselves Lovesac, across the hall from some of our stores. We were figuring it out, but again, with the passage of time, observing, why do people like our products? Why do they buy them anyway? And having experience like yours, where they can really last and grow and change with them, and so there it was. It was always there, right? This ethos, again, that we now call design for life, things built to last a lifetime, designed to evolve, and that led us to this bigger purpose, which isn't just pump designed for life products into homes. That that would be a crass way of motivating us. Instead, you know, you flip it, you make it about the person, and it's like, okay, like, can we inspire people to buy better stuff, hopefully our stuff? But let's get beyond us, you know? Like the classic marketing books will tell you, promote the category, not the brand, like Nike in the 70s, where it wasn't just about Nike. They were about jogging. Will Ferrell, the anchorman, I think I'm going to try yaw game. This new thing, you know? But that was Nike promoting the category, not just the brand. And of course, with it, people needed shoes, and they were out there, so Nike grew, and so did all the others. But Nike really is such a good example of that. So, for years, I was like, what's our category? Like, giant bean bags? Like, promote the lifestyle? In fairness, you bought it because you had back issues and, like, it was a comfy seat. So that's cool, like, I could get behind that, but that's pretty niche. And so ironically, again, with the passage of time, even though I had read all the marketing books, because I've been a reader my whole life, those were my mentors. These books behind me and 1000 others. And I was always searching for this category, but it was weird, because, like, I didn't think giant bean bags. I don't even think it was couches. I mean, everyone has a couch anyway. So, the category eventually has become now products that can be built to last and designed to evolve, which we couldn't have had, had we not just made the products first. So, we had the chicken, from the chicken came the egg, and now we have the egg, and now with that egg, I can look around your home and help you imagine anything you want there, from your mailbox to your backyard fence that might be cool if it was built to last a lifetime and designed to evolve. And my point of all this is not to sell you on Lovesac or convince you that we've got it all figured out, is to simply say that once you can get to a point, and in my case, it took the better part of 25 years, you can get to a point where you can wrap your organization around something that matters, even if it takes a long time to find it, and it's just about survival until then. Then you can get traction in the hearts and minds of your consumer. Then you can afford the talent to help you build this into something way more interesting and meaningful and impactful than just a big bean bag or clever couch company that makes some dude a bunch of money.

Yep.

Because that's not really what motivates any of us.

Well, you may have just answered this in in how you answered that question, but is there anything as you look over the horizon, and I don't know what your horizon is, it sounds like it might be a little bit further than most people's, Shawn, but is there anything in particular that you're especially excited about, that we that we haven't talked about yet?

Yeah, I'm super excited just to see if we can do this. Like, what we're aiming to do really flies in the face of the entire product economy. Because whether we want to admit it or not, most of us don't need to be economists or sustainability experts or industrial designers to observe that most things were designed to force us to buy more things.

Yep.

Like, I'll give you funny example that I was thinking about the other day. Did we somehow forget as a civilization how to flip our mattresses over? Is that some magical technology that we lost?

Just buy new one'ses man, come on.

And I challenge you to go find one that you could, and the reason you can't is because they're all pillow tops, and pillow tops are just so nice and cushy. Okay, fine, but I still think it probably could be done. So was it a conspiracy amongst, you know, mattress brands to get there, or was it just a quiet, happy accident that now people have to buy mattresses more often? Because when I grew up, you could just flip it over and get some more life out of it.

That's right.

Okay. So, pick your category. I don't care what it is. Most of the time, the things that we're forced to buy are really just trying to force us to buy more things. So, if I can build this into a brand at scale, one that is in every home that really has the scale to move the needle, because again, if I'm super successful in couches, there will be fewer couches sold on Earth. And that flies in the face of every marketing book ever written that says, expand the category, create a new category. I'm trying to shrink my category, but I want to be super successful along the way. I want to eat it and take a big chunk out of it, but it ultimately will cause us to innovate. And so, to use another example, I think Apple, like, hooray for Apple. They win the biggest company in the world award. I got it. But what have they done, you know? You give me and my team a few 100 billion in cash, and I think we could do all kinds of cool stuff. And I feel like Apple is now giving me better emojis. I think they could have cured cancer, man. I think they could have cured traffic. I don't know. Deploy that resource against something that matters. Instead, they've condescended, buying more crap. Even buying the same thing almost. And we know it. It's not even like some imagined conspiracy. We live it by everything around us. But what I'm trying to do is so much further reaching and meaningful than what you would think by the name Lovesac hanging over the door of a store in the mall, slinging giant bean bags and clever couches. But therein lies the magic of it, because, by the way, if all you did was come in and flop down and have a good time and want to take a piece of that home, we're doing it right.

Yep. Shawn, you've delivered my friend. I have 20 other questions, but we'll save that for a potential round two. How about that? I have a feeling people are going to want to look you up, find you, maybe buy your book, or at least find out more about you. Where do you want to direct our listeners to?

Yeah, I mean, check out my podcast. I think you'll love it if you like podcasts. It's different. It's called, Let me save you 25 years. It's on all the podcast places. Slide into my DMs on Instagram. I'm easy to find. I'm there. It's my real thumbs and fingers talking to you. I talk to customers and employees and friends every day, and I love to be available. And Lovesac.com, of course. Keep track of us.

Perfect. Well, Shawn again, thank you for your time, your expertise, love your humility, love your realness, just the authentic way you do what you do. You don't need this from me, but the best of luck. I wrote a page worth of notes, and I hope you definitely achieve the things that you're looking to achieve with Lovesac. So, thank you again, my friend.

Thanks for having me.

So many insights from my new friend Shawn Nelson, founder of Lovesac. Gosh, just from the things that he was grateful for that he has kind of rings around his finger, about to just the Shawnism’s that he's got. Just do something. Man, I really appreciate that. I know that when we're coaching people, sometimes they're so in their head that taking action and doing something allows them to get out of their head and into some sort of action that just tends to loosen up the thing that's grinding them to the halt. And then his second Shawnism, just do the next thing. I know one of my favorite books is to “Do the right thing”, by Emily P Freeman, and it's just really about what is the next thing to do. And so, I really appreciate that from Shawn. And his mission at Lovesac, inspiring people to buy better stuff so you need to buy less stuff over time. Just really appreciate that. I had so many other insights as well, but as we say at the end of every episode of The Insight Interviews, it doesn't much matter what my insights were as the host, but for you listener, what insights did you have?

 

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