“It’s not everybody that just wakes up one day and says, ‘I don’t like my sheets; I’m going to go make a company,'” Scott Tannen, co-founder and CEO of Boll & Branch, tells Entrepreneur. However, for Scott and his wife, Missy Tannen, co-founder and chief product officer of the couple’s luxury bedding and home goods company, that’s exactly how the story started.
Image Credit: Courtesy of Boll & Branch
A decade ago, when the Tannens swapped their queen bed for a king and began their search for sheets, they were confounded by all of the choices on the market — seemingly none of which had evolved in a long time.
By and large, the bedding industry turned cotton into a generic material that could be privately labeled and sold, Missy says, noting that “there really weren’t market leaders or brands that people couldn’t wait to have.” Plenty of other categories, from phones to handbags and beyond, boasted household name products — why not sheets?
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So, in 2014, the Tannens started their own luxury bedding business: Boll & Branch, named for the parts of the cotton plant that support its fibers.
Image Credit: Courtesy of Boll & Branch
Scott, who had brand marketing experience at Nabisco, took a page from the playbook of one highly successful brand: Oreo. “Oreo cookies are unquestionably delicious,” he explains, “yet they’ve been around for 100-plus years. They’ve barely changed because they don’t need to. They’re perfect. So marketing that product was about staying top-of-mind with a customer and knowing that any promise you deliver to a customer, you have a product that backs it up.”
“I couldn’t get enough of understanding the staple length of the cotton fibers.”
Boll & Branch had to create a product that was “unquestionably better by every possible measure” when compared with competitors. That kicked off an intensive research phase, which included asking a lot of people about their sheet preferences. Missy’s passion for the product was also key: She studied math and science in college and loves to know how things are made. At Boll & Branch, that meant doing a deep dive into product materials and manufacturing.
“I couldn’t get enough of understanding the staple length of the cotton fibers, like how long each little fluffy piece was, how that then translates into the size of the yarn, how thin or thick it is, then you construct it, weave it and set up the warp, the vertical yarns, the weft coming across, balancing the fabric, finishing the fabric, the process it goes through,” Missy explains.
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Missy was determined to develop a product that was soft, breathable and improved with every wash —”the real Goldilocks of fabrics.”
So she conducted an experiment with other options on the market: She’d buy a set of pillowcases, split them apart, label the insides with Sharpie (“so you couldn’t cheat”) and keep one of the pillowcases fresh while washing the other one 20 times. She went through that process with nearly three dozen pillowcase sets, which she purchased from mills all over the world, and gathered feedback from family and friends. By the end of it, she’d decided that organic cotton “was the absolute best” for Boll & Branch’s Signature fabric.
The discovery led to the Signature Hemmed Sheet Set and a variety of other products, including pillows, blankets and quilts. The Signature fabric is sustainable and boasts Fair Trade and other certifications, as do the other fabrics the brand has expanded to include, such as percale and flannel.
Image Credit: Courtesy of Boll & Branch
Drawing inspiration from nature, Boll & Branch’s color palette is “fresh, clean, relaxing and peaceful.” “All of our colors have a little touch of gray,” Missy says, “like a little dustiness to them. Every one is unique to us, [and] that dustiness takes the edge off.”
“I leveraged myself to a point where I look back and say, ‘Oh my gosh, what was I doing?'”
In the beginning, the Tannens bootstrapped their direct-to-consumer (DTC) brand, wary of the potential strings that came with venture capital. “Initially [we financed the company] with debt and loans,” Scott recalls, “and I leveraged myself to a point where I look back and say, ‘Oh my gosh, what was I doing? I have three young children at home.’ Fortunately, it worked.
However, Boll & Branch’s financial journey wasn’t without its ups and downs. In the early days, an accounting error cost the company $1 million. It was a simple mistake that would have been caught 99 out of 100 times, Scott says, but it wasn’t. Despite the loss, he took it as a lesson learned — figuring out what went wrong with the safeguards in place and how to avoid it in the future.
Boll & Branch continued to grow and eventually raised money from investors. These days, the brand no longer has to worry about making a sale. Boll & Branch boasts more than $200 million in annual revenue, eight brick-and-mortar locations (with plans to open eight more next year) and can be found in major retailers like Nordstrom and Bloomingdale’s.
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The brand does about one-third of its sales between Thanksgiving and mid-December, and this holiday season has already been “chaos in the best possible way.”
“We have obliterated our goals for [the holiday season],” Scott says. “We expected a strong Cyber Weekend, and it was outrageous. Now we have volumes that we weren’t expecting, so I need warehouse workers fast. We’ve got to work around the clock because we’ve got to get our products to the customers quickly. I’m actually pulling forward inventory that I might’ve needed to sell in January. So I’ve got to talk to my factories. They’re thrilled for more business. [But the] success creates a lot of complexity.”
Image Credit: Courtesy of Boll & Branch
If you’re still critical to every task, you probably haven’t done a good enough job building a team.
Nowadays, Scott calls each step of the brand’s evolution a “reinvention.” As a business seeing hundreds of millions in annual sales, $1 million ideas don’t carry the same weight they once did; Boll & Branch needs $10 million ideas to achieve growth now, he says.
Boll & Branch’s success stems from its commitment to maintaining its culture and values and hiring the best people to get the job done, then stepping out of the way to let them do it. “A lot of companies will struggle to ever get out of that startup phase [because] the founders don’t ever realize that, yes, they were critical in getting something started, but how critical they are to every task isn’t the same as it used to be,” Scott explains. If you’re still critical to every task, you probably haven’t done a good enough job building a team.
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In fact, some of Scott’s top advice for entrepreneurs goes back to just that: a business leader is only as good as the people with whom they surround themselves. “I am not the most talented person in this company by miles,” he says, “and I think that’s a mark of a great company when I can say that.”
“You don’t have to know everything day one.”
Now, as the Tannens consider the brand’s future, the co-founders are excited to maintain their “hospitality-first mindset” and continue meeting customers where they are, curating some standout experiences that are only possible in person.
For example, every in-store customer, whether purchasing one sheet set or tons of products, has the option for a bed design. “We’ll go to your home and set it up for you,” Missy explains, “steam it out [and] make sure you love it. Add anything you need. Just really making the customer so surprised and delighted.”
Image Credit: Courtesy of Boll & Branch
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Boll & Branch has come a long way since its beginning — and so have the co-founders, who took a chance on an industry they didn’t know much about but were committed to making significantly better.
To aspiring entrepreneurs who want to take their own leap of faith and build an industry-altering brand, Missy stresses the value of pushing past imposter syndrome. “You don’t have to know everything day one,” she says. “You’re going to learn so much along the way, and I think if we’d realized all the things we didn’t know, we would have never started.”
