Aug
Fab & One Kings Lane & Mutual Respect & Managing Hyper Growth
Bradford and I had the pleasure of having breakfast this morning with Susan Feldman, founder of One Kings Lane.
We love Susan and we have a ton of appreciation and respect for what she and Ali and Doug and their team have built.
While the casual observer might expect there to be some competitive juices flowing between Fab and One Kings Lane, that’s not the case. We’re actually big mutual admirers. We are both disrupting huge markets for home and lifestyle products. We’re more quirky and modern. They’re more traditional. We both know our respective missions and target customers really well and we’re both laser-focused on our own one thing.
The Fab and One Kings Lane stories both share a lot of commonalities. We both have two founders. Bradford and Susan are both merchandising visionaries. Bradford and I took a huge flyer on Fab, pursuing a hope and dream that we could make inroads into the design market. Susan and Ali did the same for home products.
And, we’re both growing like crazy.
Between Fab and One Kings Lane, we’ll do more than $300M in sales this year. Think about that. That’s more than $300M in online sales of home and lifestyle products that was done elsewhere just a couple of years ago. We’re disrupting big, big markets. And, we’re both just getting started.
We both also now each have more than 400 employees. That’s 800 people who have been put to work the past few years because of Fab and One Kings Lane.
We also both have worked with thousands of thousands of designers, manufacturers, and makers. That’s thousands of people who have seen a boost to their own sales and to their own business because of Fab and One Kings Lane. We’re market makers.
A lot of our chat today was about merchandise. Bradford and Susan both choose products that they love, not just products that they think will sell well. That’s a big reason why Fab and One Kings Lane are so successful so far. The products we sell are the authentic representation of Bradford’s and Susan’s unique points of view.
And, we spoke a lot about managing hyper growth. Here are a few things we discussed:
- Pace. Very few companies operate at the pace of Fab and One Kings Lane. We both effectively create and launch an entirely new store each day, 365 days per year. Think of your favorite offline store redoing the store window and the merchandise inside each day. That’s what we do. It’s fast. We have to make sure we hire people who can keep up with the pace while also not burning our teams out.
- Perspective. As fast and as big as Fab and One Kings Lane have grown, we’re both just small fish in a much bigger pond. Tens of millions of people have never heard of either of us. We know we have a long long way to go to become long-lasting businesses. I like to say that we have Ikea-sized ambitions at Fab. Take Fab + One Kings Lane and multiply sales by 100 and you start to approach Ikea size. We have a long way to go.
- Culture. The key to managing rapid growth is maintaining consistency in company culture. That’s not easy. It’s actually very, very hard. But so important as we grow.
- Leadership. We spent the most time talking about how we work differently now vs. a year ago (or a few years ago in Susan’s case). Bradford and I have actually found a way to have more control over the important details while controlling less of the overall work that gets done. That’s a key to our success. We are more in control than ever while at the same time empowering more than ever. Susan expressed a similar sentiment.
It’s just awesome to see how both Fab and One Kings Lane have come out of nowhere to have such a big meaningful impact on our industry.
And, we’re both really just getting started.
Smile, you’re designed to.
9 Notes
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