Kip Tindell held The Container Store's growth to 20% a year for more than 40 years, and he set that ceiling deliberately rather than hitting it.
Most founders treat a growth cap as a failure of ambition. Tindell treats excessive growth as the reason most companies do not survive, and he said so to three founders in a row on this call-in episode.
"I just stopped it at 20% because going faster than that, it would be like the RPM needle getting too far into the red."
Tindell opened the first Container Store in Dallas in 1978 with Garrett Boone, took the company public in 2013, and retired about eight or nine years ago. The chain filed for bankruptcy after he left and was bought by Bed Bath and Beyond for about $150 million.
I listened to the full episode so you can skip it. 39 minutes of audio, 17 minutes of reading.
Here are the 7 principles that matter.
👤 Guest: Kip Tindell, co-founder and former Chief Executive Officer of The Container Store, which he and his wife Sharon ran for 43 years before retiring
🎙️ Host: Guy Raz, who created and hosts How I Built This and its call-in Advice Line, where a former guest helps answer founders' questions
👥 Also on: Juliette Bruce, founder of CoolaWand in Provence; David Higham, owner of Hazel Grove Customs in Burlington, North Carolina; and Kaitlin Kao, founder and Chief Executive Officer of Kaomi Sleep in Orange County, California
📰 Published: 10 September 2026 on the How I Built This feed
🟢 Spotify | 🟣 Apple Podcasts | ⏱️ 39 min | ✅ Time saved: 22 min
Key Takeaways
He pegged growth at 20% a year for four decades and calls faster growth the main cause of failure
His image for it is an engine's rev counter pushed into the red
The service model The Container Store was built on has gone, and he says it has taken the wage premium with it
"There's no reason to have the highest paid best salespeople in the industry anymore"
His advice to a founder with no advertising budget was patience, not a campaign
"Being patient has a lot to do with being humble and being okay with it taking a while"
He told a wholesale business to chase small independent accounts and skip the large ones
Also skip trade shows, and hire sales representatives only on commission
To a founder with 197M organic views, he said the risk is copycats rather than demand
His fix is a patent lawyer paid out of future gains, because she cannot fund one now
He was blunt about watching the company fail after he left
"It is upsetting and painful to watch your baby"
His closing advice was to take some retirement whether or not you love the work
"I feel like a liberal art student trying to decide what I'm going to major in"
1. Watching It Fail Afterward
Raz opened on what happened to The Container Store after Tindell and his wife Sharon left: a bankruptcy filing, then an acquisition.
Raz set out the sequence. The pair were first on the show in 2024; soon after, the company announced it was filing for bankruptcy, and a few months ago it was acquired by Bed Bath and Beyond for about $150 million. Tindell has had no involvement for years
Tindell's first answer was about the 43 years, not the ending. "It was the most fun, wonderful, great, successful business for 43 years." He said nobody loved their work more, and that it has not done well since they retired eight or nine years ago
He named succession as the failure, in the same breath as the industry. "Like a lot of entrepreneurs, we struggled to find just the right people to sell to and all of that" — and separately, that retail changed with the arrival of Amazon and online selling
He did not soften what it feels like. "It is upsetting and painful to watch your baby" — a business he described as 16 hours a day, seven days a week, for 43 years
His consolation is an actuarial one. "But, you know, not that many businesses last for 50 years anymore." Raz agreed, noting that most of the largest New York Stock Exchange companies of 20, 30 or 50 years ago are no longer great businesses
2. Where Retail Service Went
Asked what is more disruptive to retail than Amazon was, Tindell answered with a definition rather than a technology.
His answer is the redefinition of service itself. He described "the whole frictionless, no people involved definition of service" as what has changed, against the model The Container Store and Neiman Marcus ran on, where a salesperson sold a solution rather than an item
The commercial consequence is the one that matters for anyone valuing a retailer. "There's really no people involved. There's no reason to have the highest paid best salespeople in the industry anymore"
He gave the transaction that model used to produce. A customer driven mad by a toy storage problem for four or five years would come in, and "we could solve that problem for them" in 45 minutes, leaving elated — which he said is hard to do online
Raz put the substitute to him directly: walk into a Home Depot or a Container Store with the problem already run through ChatGPT or Claude, and ask what to buy and how to install it
Tindell's response was to say the human version is still available as a position. "I still think that there is an opportunity to really offer excellent human to human customer service", and he thinks brands and stores that get it right may end up in a strong position
His example is his own local hardware store, smaller than Home Depot, where the staff actually know the products
He was careful about Home Depot: he likes it, but said it is not always the case that the people there can really be helpful
His analogy since retiring is the restaurant: a waiter who understands the food well enough can raise the value of the meal itself
3. Never Faster Than 20%
Raz noted that founders' views on growth have swung from grow-at-all-costs toward profitability, and asked for Tindell's philosophy.
His framing is a constraint the founder sets, not a number the market gives. The entrepreneur has to decide how fast the business can grow without getting away from whatever brought it there in the first place
The number was 20% a year, and it was a ceiling rather than a target. Tindell said 20% was astronomically fast for retail at the time — not now, against technology companies — and that he capped it anyway
"I just stopped it at 20% because going faster than that, it would be like the RPM needle getting too far into the red." He said the company did that for over 40 years
He said he reads the case for not growing at all. Tindell described a novel, rebellious attitude in what he reads that a business does not have to grow, and gave two reasons some growth is still needed: inflation, and rewarding good employees
The causal claim is the load-bearing part. "this excessive growth is why so many companies, frankly, don't make it"
His instruction to founders is about self-assessment. "be humble enough to figure out what your limitations are", grow at that rate, and do it for a long time rather than trying to grow at astronomical proportions in a short period
4. Work With People You Love
Raz asked what Tindell is prioritizing now that he has retired.
He rejected the standard advice on mixing work and family outright. "I think you should work with the people you love." People say you should not work with your spouse or your friends, and his answer is that you should — "It doesn't always work out, but it doesn't always work out to work with people who are not your spouse and not your friends"
He built the business with Sharon and rates retirement above it. "But now we love retirement even more than that." What he named was the freedom and the lack of stress
His description of the feeling is the line of the episode. "I feel like a liberal art student trying to decide what I'm going to major in."
He is deliberately trying to enjoy aging, and marked the limit of the claim himself. The 60s beat the 50s and the 50s beat the 40s, he said, before noting that "I doubt the 90s are better than 80s"
The advice he drew from it is unconditional. "I don't care how much you love your work, make time in your life for a little bit of retirement because it is just gloriously free"
5. A Wand With No Ad Budget
The first caller was Juliette Bruce, in Provence, who makes CoolaWand — a reusable wand with a detachable frozen star that cools food and drinks without watering them down.
She built it for her own three children and found the category did not exist. Bruce said she assumed the product already existed; she designs windows and creates worlds for luxury brands including Hermès, and drew the wand herself before finding a manufacturer
Quality control is where she spent her effort. She produces in Portugal and was deliberate about materials, on the grounds that people do not want badly made plastics; Raz pushed her to "quintuple" her efforts to make the BPA-free point clear to parents
Distribution so far is small and direct. Direct-to-consumer through her own website, nine independent retailers in France and one in Malta, plus opening discussions with pharmacies, cafes, family-friendly spaces and hospitals
The hospital idea came from her own son, who asked for the product when staff offered him something cold — which she read as emotional rather than functional demand
Her question was the constraint, not the product. "I don't have the budget to launch the kind of awareness campaign a completely new product category probably needs." How does she create enough chances for people to discover it?
Tindell's answer was about channel fit. He said it would be well placed in a store with a high service level, where staff can explain it, and that it reads as a specialty independent retail product rather than a mass-merchant one: "I was thinking this is more of a specialty, independent retail store product than a mass merchant where there's no service at all"
Raz's answer was a demonstration strategy rather than advertising. His prescription was to shoot "the same video a thousand times" in different ways — his worked example being a thermometer in a mug of hot cocoa, children stirring, no commentary — on an iPhone on a stand
His second suggestion was messaging parents with about a thousand followers rather than million-follower influencers, and sending them one
Bruce said the one unpaid endorsement she had was the one that worked. An influencer in the ADHD-children community bought the product and talked about it unprompted, which she said helped a lot precisely because it was not forced
Her own traffic figures: one video at half a million views and about 12,000 likes
Her comparison point for what a campaign costs is Hermès, whose ad budgets she put in the tens or hundreds of millions
Tindell's closing advice was patience as a method, not a temperament. "Lots of times it just takes that relentless pursuit of the things that are working really well right now" — after which a few breaks come and scale follows
"Being patient has a lot to do with being humble and being okay with it taking a while", and he said the slow, steady route carries much less chance of failure
6. Small Accounts Before Big
The second caller was David Higham of Hazel Grove Customs in Burlington, North Carolina, which designs, personalizes and laser-engraves giftable kitchenware, home goods, accessories and novelty items.
He bought the business rather than starting it. Higham said it was started in 2012 and that he bought it in 2016 as a side business. COVID was "actually spectacular" for it because it was mostly selling online at the time
The channel mix has flipped, and so has the margin story. "Year to date wholesale is actually just above 50% of the business." "And the margins on wholesale are shockingly actually better than retail" — because wholesale buyers order in volume rather than a six- or seven-dollar item he has to ship
He gave his revenue trajectory in the round. "So this year I'm hoping for about 350. Last year we did just over 300. We're up about 15% over the year before." His best sellers outside the kitchen are golf ball markers and train whistles, almost all engraved in-house
His question was a channel-allocation question. More independent retailers, larger retail accounts, trade shows, sales representatives, corporate gifting, or concentrating on what already works?
Tindell answered it as a list, and said no to the ambitious options. "Well, no. I think you should pursue the independent smaller ones" rather than large accounts, because the large ones follow once the independents are doing well — the grandiose part of human nature wants it the other way around
On trade shows: "I wouldn't spend the money and time and effort into trade shows", because they are fading now that wholesale websites exist
On sales representatives: yes, and on commission, because "they don't cost anything unless they're selling"
His summary of his own advice: focus on the things that are really working, and pursue humble, slower growth, which he said is also a good way to keep from going out of business
Raz's addition was to define the ideal account before hiring anyone to chase it. Analyze which wholesale customers are the highest-value and most loyal, so a sales representative is handed a proven playbook and knows who to pursue
Higham's own channel detail filled in the rest. Cold outreach to a narrowed target list has produced a couple of thousand dollars of sales in a month; Etsy, the business he originally bought, is flat and increasingly competitive on personalization, with shipping now $6.50 minimum on any package
Corporate gifting has been entirely inbound, found through Faire, in orders of four to seven hundred units, turned around in a couple of days
Raz's answer on inbound was a service argument with a named comparison. He pointed to Sweetwater, which he said sells more musical instruments than anyone in America despite Amazon, and attributed it to customer service — "They are so good at it" — comparing it to the Zappos model
The specific practice he described: customer service staff keep records on each customer and ask about their children, their families and their football team, which he said blows people away
Tindell's version of the same point came from his own store after a national event. "We used to, after 9/11, we had people come in the store just because they needed somebody to talk to" — which told him the relationship with the customer was strong. He warned it gets harder at scale, but that doing it now is what produces scale
His sign-off to Higham: "Steady, steady, steady."
7. Virality Is Borrowed
The third caller was Kaitlin Kao of Kaomi Sleep in Orange County, California, whose flagship product is the SherpaNest — a fitted bedsheet with soft supportive borders sewn inside the perimeter.
The product came out of her own anxiety as a teenager. Kao said she built a fortress of pillows and stuffed animals every night to feel safe enough to sleep, and that it had all shifted or fallen off the bed by morning. Raz described the result as crib bumpers for adults
The numbers are the reason the question is interesting. "I launched Kaomi Sleep in November 2025, only eight months ago, while attending USC Marshall's full-time MBA program." "And in just eight months, we've done $635,000 in revenue."
The growth was unpaid and funded by pre-orders. "The SherpaNest had over 197 million social media views, 100% organically", which she said let the company scale through a pre-order model without raising outside capital
Her question was about durability. "My question is, how do founders turn a viral product into a lasting brand?"
Tindell reframed the risk as copying rather than demand. "I would say that with the exposure you've had, you probably don't need to worry about sales as much as you need to worry about people copying" what she has
His own experience is the cautionary version: early success at The Container Store with no money, competitors opening stores called Susie's Containers, and no budget for patent attorneys to defend against it
His analogy for legal counsel: "patent attorneys are like golfers" — there is Kip Tindell on the course and there is Tiger Woods on the course. "You want Tiger Woods, but maybe they could participate with you in a way", sharing in future gains while she is still vulnerable and cannot spend her money on lawyers
Kao described what she already has and what it has not stopped. A provisional patent on the SherpaNest and a pending trademark, against a scale of infringement she put plainly: "I think we had over 113 different accounts scamming other people using our product and images." DMCA takedowns have worked on some of them, and she is unsure the approach scales
Raz's answer was that attention is rented. He called this both a good and a bad problem, said "virality is borrowed attention" because the algorithm changes, and argued the question is not how to maintain momentum — nobody gets "197 million views again and again and again" — but how much of it can be captured
His prescription: build the brand around the feeling rather than the product, and the feeling here is security
His concrete suggestions were secondary items — different patterns, fabrics, pillows — aimed at becoming what he called a 360-degree sleep brand with the SherpaNest as the hero product, citing Eight Sleep and meditation apps like Calm as sleep brands, and noting how much people now spend on sleep
The reply from the show's side was that the category itself is a tailwind, on the grounds that sleep is now widely treated as the single healthiest thing a person can do
Tindell's advice was to double down rather than diversify, and not to let the copycats consume her. He said to relentlessly pursue whatever is working best and forget the not-yet-imagined thing that might catapult the business, because "those things usually aren't there"
On the knockoffs: "I would be really careful not to let it distract you and obsess you", citing TRX as a business that fought copycats for so long that it was damaging, even though it eventually turned out all right
He also interjected that she should still get seven or eight hours of sleep herself
Bonus Insights
Raz made an unprompted case for buying an existing business rather than starting one. He said he hears it increasingly from recent graduates, that it was long dismissed as boring, and that retiring baby boomers are often willing to sell for a relatively small amount of money and to mentor the buyer
Tindell's agreement was about speed: "If you can do it, it speeds it up a lot. To do it all yourself, starting it, is all consuming."
Tindell's read on the personalization market was that the economics decide it. He called it a really competitive space, and said doing the laser engraving in-house is what makes it a potentially great business
Asked what he would tell his younger self, he named the thing people already praised him for. "Everybody said that we were admirably patient." He and his partners were not in a hurry to have a thousand stores; they were getting it right
His illustration is Tiger Woods at a Dallas tournament his nonprofit group sponsors: while leading, "He went to the driving range and practiced more" rather than going out at night
"I think that builds a business more truly than anything else" — relentless humility plus patience
The archive clip Raz played was about how humiliating the original idea sounded. Tindell said people asked whether he was charging for empty boxes: "My father had a birthday party, and I was the bartender", and guests told him a store selling empty boxes would be really hard. Explaining it before the shelves were stocked, he said, was embarrassing — "it was humiliating"
Tindell's bottom line, repeated to all three founders and to his younger self, is that the reliable way to build a durable business is to cap your own growth at a rate you can actually run, keep doing whatever is already working, and treat patience as a discipline rather than a personality trait.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
The Container Store (The company Tindell co-founded in 1978, took public in 2013, and left eight or nine years ago; about 100 locations, later bankrupt and sold)
Bed Bath and Beyond (Bought The Container Store for about $150 million, per Raz)
CoolaWand (Juliette Bruce's reusable wand with a detachable frozen star; nine independent French retailers and one in Malta, produced in Portugal)
Hazel Grove Customs (David Higham's laser-engraving business, now more than half wholesale, with better wholesale margins than retail)
Kaomi Sleep (Kaitlin Kao's company and its SherpaNest bordered bedsheet — $635,000 of revenue in eight months on 197 million organic views)
Amazon and Home Depot (His examples of what changed retail: online selling, and a big-box store where the staff cannot always help)
Neiman Marcus (Named alongside The Container Store as the kind of retailer that sold a solution through a salesperson)
Etsy and Faire (Higham's direct-to-consumer channel, bought as a going business ten years ago and now flat, and the wholesale marketplace his corporate gifting customers found him through)
Sweetwater and Zappos (Raz's two models for competing with Amazon on customer service rather than price)
Eight Sleep and Calm (His examples of companies that turned a product into a sleep brand)
TRX (Tindell's cautionary case of a business consumed by fighting copycats)
Hermès (Bruce designs windows for luxury brands including Hermès, and used its ad budget as her comparison for what a campaign costs)
Books & Resources Mentioned
The Container Store's founding story (The 2024 How I Built This episode with Kip and Sharon Tindell, which the show's own notes point listeners to and which Raz referred to twice)
The Sweetwater episode of How I Built This (Raz's reference for how a retailer beats Amazon on service; he described the customer-record practice from it)
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