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SWAGGER MAGAZINE
Drew Williams
Stephen Foster
Nick Dauk
Mario Vega
Kristen Anzelc
The only difference is that the Shawn Nelson of this story started a company that has done more than $500,000,000 over the trailing 12 months in sales through Q1 of this year and is valued at over one billion dollars when the public markets aren’t in disarray.
And what you don’t know is that the last thing Nelson wants is for Lovesac to become the Apple of sofas. He doesn’t think you need the newest Sactional every two years. He doesn’t even want you to buy a new Sactional – he’d rather you keep the same one for decades.
So what could you possibly learn from a guy who doesn’t want to sell you more stuff, but rather, inspire you to buy less stuff?
What’s the purpose of creating and evolving a product if you aren’t championing capitalism? What’s the endgame of running a billion dollar company that hopes – nay, prays – that its customer only purchases a single one of its products and keeps it forever?
What’s the point? It’s the most important question I had for Shawn Nelson in our exclusive interview.
“What’s the point?” Nelson repeated with a smile. “That question has evolved for me so radically.”
Radical is a fair description of Nelson’s twenty-five-year career. It began in his parent’s basement as a college side hustle.
The product: Bean bag chairs. The consumer? His friends, who wanted a comfortable place to sit – and makeout – while camping. The audience grew, but the demand from retailers didn’t, forcing Nelson to open his own store.
“No one wanted to carry it,” he said. “So we opened our own store in 2001. We set up a display in the corner with a Lovesac and couch to give people an idea how it could fit into their own living rooms. Everyone kept asking about the couch, so I thought, what if we could shrink a foam-filled couch down like a Lovesac and ship it just as easily.”
Thus, the Sactional was born, and with it came an epiphany.
“Lovesac grew as I was growing up,” he reminisced. “My kids were learning how to walk by holding onto the cushions. All of a sudden, the Sactionals took on a new meaning.”
“The couch is at the nucleus of your life,” Nelson continued. “It’s the literal ground zero of where you’ll spend time with your family and watch your kids grow up. This item should not be ‘part of the furniture’; it should be part of your family and it should be able to change with your family.”
The Nelson family has had the same Sactional for the last fifteen years, and that’s no coincidence. Shawn Nelson designed a product that could reinvent itself as its owner moved from place to place. Sactionals are reconfigurable, they can fit in any room or car, and they’re designed to last a lifetime.
Despite having only a one-percent share of the couch market, Lovesac is on track to be the best-selling couch in the United States this year. Nelson is stoked to take his product to the next level with StealthTech: a complete home audio system that integrates invisibly into all Lovesac Sactionals.
And while Shawn Nelson enjoys a life that involves appearing on CNN in the morning and dirt biking through the red sandstone trails of St. George, Utah, in the afternoons, getting to this point wasn’t easy.
Life – and Lovesac – left him like a couch on the curb time and time again.
“Even fairly recently, I wanted a way out of Lovesac,” he said. “It was eating my life. Dragging others down, too. I remember around my 30th birthday, it seemed like the company would never get over the hump. I wanted to sell it all and walk away with something for my decade of work, time, and effort.”
Here’s what Shawn Nelson’s life looked like as he approached 30. At 27, he won Richard Branson’s The Rebel Billionaire, outlasting a competitive field that included Spanx founder, runner-up Sara Blakely. Lovesac was approaching 100 million in sales as Nelson was made acting president of Virgin Worldwide. Then, his VC’s forced Lovesac to declare bankruptcy.
“One day, I was a hero in my hometown. The protege; Richard Branson’s ‘chosen one’, according to public perception. The next minute, it looked like I was done for.”
The sole factor that kept him going? Embracing economic pressure as the drive to survive. He recalled the extreme highs and lows of generating millions of dollars in revenue then owing millions back to the bank.
Now, at 44, Shawn Nelson has built a company worthy of the NASDAQ. He could buy a private jet, but he’d rather ride his dirt bike.
He could live the bottle-popping lifestyle with his millionaire and billionaire friends, though he’d always choose nights in with his wife and kids.
And that’s the point.
“There are people I know personally who are billionaires and most would trade places with me,” he said.
“To be in their first marriage, to have loving kids, to have the bandwidth to coach soccer teams. I’ve lived long enough to know that ‘what’s the point’ changes over time for everyone. It’s a personal question, and sadly, many people allow the world to tell them what the point is. What I can tell you is that it doesn’t matter what the point is; it matters that you find it and recognize it in that moment because it will evolve.”
So… what’s the point for Shawn Nelson right now? To inspire consumers to buy less stuff and to buy better.
“I’m going to spend the rest of my life trying to shrink the tumors of capitalism,” he said passionately. “We’re going to shrink categories by building the best. We’re already doing it with Lovesac. Our Sactionals follow the Design for Life ethos; we recycle more plastic bottles than any company in the United States and create millions of yards of fabric. My Sactional is 15 years old and it's on its tenth set of fabric covers. Why can’t other things, like my phone, last for a decade or more? We’re going to branch out into other areas of the home to change the things that we live with from being dead the day you brought it home and slowly decomposing, to being designed for life.”
But to paraphrase Shawn Nelson himself, the point will continue to change as we age. Today, his mission is to lead the most beloved furniture brand in the world. Will it change tomorrow? Maybe. Which is why I asked him, in ten years when his 54-year-old self is looking back on life, what decisions today will make him the most proud.
He didn’t take even a moment to think about it.
“I prioritize my wife and kids. I know that whatever happens with Lovesac, I won’t regret that. I’m grateful for that insight and that I got it early enough in life.”
Maybe that’s the whole point of being an entrepreneur, of running a business, of striving for success. It’s not about becoming the next Apple – or even becoming the next Shawn Nelson. It’s about living your life in a way that leaves you with no personal regrets, no matter how successful or unsuccessful you are professionally.
For more visit the Lovesac website!
SWAGGER Magazine is North America's Men's Luxury Magazine. We focus our content on everything men love. Gear, Tech, Fashion, Rides, Sports, Health & Fitness, Food, and Feature Men and Women who possess SWAG.
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