Crate & Barrel: Gordon Segal

In 1962, Gordon Segal — with his wife Carole — opened a scrappy Chicago shop called Crate & Barrel. That store turned into a housewares empire that has shaped the way Americans furnish their homes. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Every store we opened, between our opening in '62, our first built store in '65, our Plaza de la Casa store in '68, our Oakbrook store in '71, every time was betting the company.

• 0:15Guy Raz?

  Every time.

• 0:16Speaker 00

  Every time. And every time we knew if we failed, the company might go down.

• 0:27Guy Raz?

  From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 0:41Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and on today's show, the story of how Gordon Segal and his wife Carol built the housewares empire Crate and Barrel from one little scrappy storefront in Chicago, and how that single shop helped change the way we furnish our homes and apartments.

• 1:02Guy Raz?

  So there's probably a good chance that you have a piece of Ikea furniture somewhere in your house or apartment, and it probably looks pretty good, right? You know, nothing fancy, but functional, well-designed, kind of European-looking. And the main thing is, it's affordable. But back in 1961, if you wanted vaguely European-looking furniture, or plates, or whatever, in America, you had to be rich. And in 1961, Gordon Segal and his wife Carol were definitely not.

• 1:35Speaker 00

  We got married in the summer of '61. Now, for our wedding gifts, we really didn't get any of the kinds of things we loved. We'd shop the department stores and see beautiful Dancq designs and the new Danish look and whatever, and none of our relatives had the money or the taste to buy us those kind of wedding gifts.

• 1:55Guy Raz?

  So you just figured, we just can't afford that, so yeah, so we'll just move on?

• 2:00Speaker 00

  That's right. So we got married in, like I say, in June of 61, and we went on our honeymoon to the Caribbean. And in the Caribbean, we noticed there were some really nice stores. There was one Scandinavian store in the Virgin Islands. My wife picked up some of the items and said, "How can you have Danish 18-8 stainless at the $2.95 a place setting? You know, it's so much more expensive in America." And the Danish merchant there said, "We have salesmen from Europe come here, and we buy direct from factories." And the very essence of that common stuck in our minds as we bought a whole bunch of things. We got back to Chicago, and I was in the real estate business, she was teaching school.

• 2:43Speaker 00

  We were both sort of bored. And then about in February of 62, one night, I was washing dishes, and I was, these dishes we had bought. I said, "You know, Carol, there had to be other young people like ourselves with good taste and no money. We should open a store."

• 2:57Guy Raz?

  And what did Carol say?

• 2:58Speaker 00

  Well, she looked at me sort of like I was crazy. I said, "No, no, I mean it. We should open a store."

• 3:04Guy Raz?

  And you were young. You guys were like, what, 20?

• 3:06Speaker 00

  We were 23.

• 3:07Guy Raz?

  And you just thought, you know, we bought these beautiful things, these plates and Cookware, this store in the Caribbean, and if they can do it, why not sell it in the US?

• 3:18Speaker 00

  Exactly. That's right.

• 3:19Guy Raz?

  And what made you think, like, what gave you the confidence that you could pull off running a business?

• 3:24Speaker 00

  Because, you know, we had grown up, her family had actually been in the retail business, apparel business, and we were both very good at selling. My family had been in the restaurant business. And in all of those businesses, it's all about service. It's all about selling. And in a sense, my, you know, I grew up with an immigrant father and mother, and the whole family on busy days had to work in the restaurant. So there was this background that we both had, and was, we loved beautiful things. Obviously, the motivation of going into business was to find beautiful things for other young people. But if we could buy things from Europe directly, and just mark them up normally

• 4:06Speaker 00

  as if you bought them domestically, not take a big margin, but take a short margin, we could offer dramatically better pricing at more unique product, you know, that people had never seen before.

• 4:18Guy Raz?

  So, I mean, how did you even start?

• 4:20Speaker 00

  We thought about it. And visited trade commissioners and we found they had all sorts of factory references.

• 4:27Guy Raz?

  Trade, you went to trade commissioners? How'd you, how'd you find?

• 4:30Speaker 00

  Well, the Danish government would have a trade commissioner in every major city. The Swedish government would-

• 4:35Guy Raz?

  Wait, you went to like their offices in Chicago and you, and you were like, hey, we want to open up this Danish shop and can we, like, can we talk to you?

• 4:42Speaker 00

  That's right. That's exactly what we said.

• 4:44Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 4:44Speaker 00

  And they had books about, you know, factories in Europe that made specific items like glassware. And they referred us to some people we might want to visit and gave us names of factories. And then we started, you know, where are we going to find a retail space? And we were driving around looking for anything. And finally, it so happened, my father mentioned to us, there was an area on Wells Street, North Wells Street, where there was an old dumb waiter factory that was actually moving. And I rented a space for three years for $350 a month.

• 5:27Guy Raz?

  So at that point, I mean, after you visited these trade reps and you decide, okay, we're going to open a shop, how did you come up with the cash to do it? Did you have any, did you guys have any money?

• 5:38Speaker 00

  Well, we had saved, made a little money. We had some wedding gifts. So we had about $10,000. And we figured, well, we really need $20,000. And I spent six months running around to everyone I knew who had any wealth and offering them half the business for $10,000. There was no such thing as venture capital in those days. There was no such things as startups in those days.

• 6:02Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 6:03Speaker 00

  And I literally couldn't find anyone who'd invest $10,000.

• 6:06Guy Raz?

  You could have bought half of Crate and Barrel for $10,000 in like 1963.

• 6:10Speaker 00

  That's right. The end of the day, the only person who gave us the money was my father.

• 6:16Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 6:16Speaker 00

  Who lent us $7,000. Probably all the money he had in cash.

• 6:20Guy Raz?

  Wow. So you have 17,000, which of course, I'm assuming you need to like, order stuff to sell in that store, right?

• 6:29Speaker 00

  So we needed $10,000 for inventory, and we only had $7,000 for, to build the store. And consequently, we had to come up with a clever way in taking this dirty old elevator factory and turning it into a Scandinavian feeling place. And the walls were all torn up and damaged, and we couldn't afford someone to sheet rocket. So we went out and found a lumberyard where we found crating lumber, which we knocked up vertically on the walls and covered the walls. And we literally did it ourselves.

• 7:02Guy Raz?

  And how did you guys identify the stuff that you wanted to sell? I mean, did you just go through the catalogs?

• 7:07Speaker 00

  That's right. Each factory, a glass factory would have maybe an inch and a half, two-inch catalog, or a ceramics factory, or whatever. And we were just ordering from these catalogs and having them ship the stuff. Maybe we had four dinnerware patterns. We had a very narrow selection of merchandise. We only had $10,000.

• 7:28Guy Raz?

  And what, like you were just like getting these huge crates of stuff delivered, like shipped to you in Chicago, and you weren't even open yet?

• 7:34Speaker 00

  Still not open. It opened the 7th of December of 1962. But it took, we didn't get into the space till like November 15th. We only had about three weeks.

• 7:48Guy Raz?

  So you were like hammering boards to the wall?

• 7:51Speaker 00

  Hanging light fixtures, ordering a sign.

• 7:55Guy Raz?

  Were you working all night?

• 7:56Speaker 00

  We worked from early in the morning till late every night. And we were just enthusiastic. I mean, the value of being very young is you have a lot of energy and passion and no wisdom.

• 8:10Speaker 00

  And so being that young was a great advantage and we had no children. We were 23. We had all the energy in the world and because we had no money for fixtures, we basically turned over to packing crates. The merchandise was coming in. We came up with a way of stacking. We found some importer who had some more uniform crates. We had some big barrels full of china and about two weeks before we were to open, we just still didn't have a name, and a friend of ours walked in and looked around and I remember I was in the basement doing some paperwork and my wife came down and said, "Our friend suggested we call this place Barrel and Crate, but Gordon, maybe we should call it Crate and Barrel. I think

• 8:51Speaker 00

  that's better." And approximately two weeks before we opened the store, we named it Crate and Barrel. So on opening day, what happened? How'd it go? It was the opening weekend and this area called Old Town had developed this over a decade, this sort of week, the first week in December, they called it the Christmas Walk. And we opened that Friday of the Christmas Walk and we'd forgot to buy a cash register. And so we actually used a cigar box. And it wasn't until the following Monday or Tuesday that actually my father found an old, old NCR cash register, the ones you used after crank up to open the amount.

• 9:36Speaker 00

  Was business pretty good like right away? We had calculated that we needed to do about $100,000 to take out $100 a week to live on. And that first Christmas, we did $8,000. So you're thinking, "We're well on our way to a $100,000 year." Absolutely, because 8 times 12 is 96. Yeah. But then January of 63 came along and we did $4,000. We got a little scared. And then February of 63, I remember was probably one of the snowiest months in Chicago's history. And we had one day where we did $8 and the whole month was only $2,000. Oh, man. So were you freaking out? We were very scared that we would lose my father's money in our savings. But you know what? When you're young, you know you can start over. Yeah.

• 10:21Speaker 00

  Slowly, that spring came around. Old Town became more popular. They put gas lights up on the street and people said, "Boy, did you see that counterculture store down on Well Street? They're selling nice things out of crates and barrels." And it was nice merchandise. And we had ended up, because we didn't know how to price merchandise, about half the product we sold, we sold at cost.

• 10:43Guy Raz?

  You were selling your product at cost?

• 10:45Speaker 00

  Yeah. So not only were we importing it directly, the fact that we didn't know what we were doing and we were mispricing the merchandise also made it even more exciting.

• 10:54Guy Raz?

  How did that happen?

• 10:56Speaker 00

  We had some major vendors who hadn't gotten us the proper invoicing, so.

• 11:00Guy Raz?

  You were just guessing the price?

• 11:02Speaker 00

  We were guessing the price. And our customers loved it.

• 11:05Guy Raz?

  That's.

• 11:09Guy Raz?

  Hey, stay with us. We're going to be back in just a minute with more from Gordon Segal and how he took Crate and Barrel National. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR.

• 11:32Guy Raz?

  It's How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. And on the show today, we're talking with Gordon Segal about how he and his wife Carol built the retailer Crate and Barrel. So it seems that the business kind of took off pretty quickly, right? I mean, even though you had some tough months, it kind of took off.

• 11:50Speaker 00

  Well, the first year, we did 100,000. But we did end up, at the end of the year, doing 100,000. The second year, 200, 225. The third year, 300,000.

• 11:59Guy Raz?

  What was it like that in those early days that was making you guys successful? I mean, did you have to kind of create a market for this stuff? Or did people just come in and say, oh, this is cool. Let's buy it?

• 12:11Speaker 00

  Well, what happened was we were very fortunate. One, you know, America was then getting wealthier in the early 60s, 70s. Two, there was a lady named Julia Childs that came along and made cooking fashionable. Three, jet travel was beginning, especially to Europe. And many more people were doing it. These events started all of a sudden making people aware of French cooking.

• 12:36Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 12:36Speaker 00

  And it was a big difference in the way, you know, they looked at dining. And food was very important. Chefs were important. America in those days, cooking wasn't sure. It wasn't something people loved to do in dining and serving on a dinner table. You know, I remember in Chicago in the early 60s, we had maybe three good restaurants. Boston, I remember Craig Claiborne was once asked when he was up in Boston, where do you, he was the food critic for the New York Times.

• 13:04Guy Raz?

  Yeah, for the New York Times, yeah.

• 13:05Speaker 00

  Where do you go when you want a good meal? He says, I go to the airport and I get on the first flight to New York. So, you know, it's hard to believe that today because Boston and Chicago got great restaurants. Because people now, there's a major food culture and dining culture, and that didn't exist when we were starting.

• 13:24Guy Raz?

  And did you, because I think I read that at a certain point, you and Carol decided that instead of like, just ordering from catalogs, that you should actually go to Europe and visit factories.

• 13:35Speaker 00

  That's right. The first year, 1963, our first full year in business, we didn't have time to go to Europe. But 1964, we went to Europe for three weeks. By then, we had two or three staff members, and we left the company to them. And we went and we traveled all over Europe. We started in Belgium and found a great glass factory. We went to the German trade fairs in Cologne and Frankfurt and found all sorts of interesting products. It was incredible. Nothing like that existed in the United States. We spent a lot of time walking the streets and seeing special stores and looking at stores and seeing what were they doing in Europe? Why were we so excited? What was it? It was the visual display, it was the way they used color, it was the way they did the

• 14:20Speaker 00

  storefront, it was the way they did their lighting. And we became students of retail. And Carol, by the way, the company never would have succeeded without her efforts. She was not only talented in helping select product, but she was very talented at visual display. And we were both very good at selling.

• 14:38Guy Raz?

  So, when you were in Europe, were there any, like, were there moments where, you know, because you were like in your mid 20s, did you ever have situations where these factory owners looked at you and said, you guys are, who are you, you know, right?

• 14:51Speaker 00

  There were many people who had doubts, but, you know, we had letters of credit, we had ability to buy. We found us an agent in Sweden who was, knew a lot of people who helped us introduce us to factories. And I don't, you know, they believed in us. We met Torben Orsko of in Copenhagen, who introduced us to Mari Metko and introduced to us a lot of Danish factories. And he sold us beautiful product, also wooden things and textiles and leather goods. And this guy influenced our lives. He and his wife remained friends for the next 50 years.

• 15:31Guy Raz?

  So how did you guys start to really grow the business? Because you didn't have outside investors at this point, right?

• 15:38Speaker 00

  We never had outside investors until the, you know, many years later.

• 15:42Guy Raz?

  So how are you guys able to expand without any outside money?

• 15:46Speaker 00

  Well, we basically, in those days, you'd go to a bank and you'd borrow money. I remember our first loan was $10,000. The second loan was $25,000. When we opened the store in 65 through 68, we still had only one store. We were doing $500,000, which like today is like a little store doing $2 million. So it was profitable by then.

• 16:06Guy Raz?

  So when you guys decided to open that second store, this was 1968, is that right?

• 16:12Speaker 00

  Right.

• 16:12Guy Raz?

  So then you got a bank loan. And in a way, you were, I mean, I guess you were betting the company, right? Because you, I mean, with that leverage, if the second store failed, the whole thing would go under.

• 16:23Speaker 00

  Every store we opened between our opening in 62, our first built store in 65, our Plaza de la Casa store in 68, our Oakbrook store in 71, every time was betting the company.

• 16:36Guy Raz?

  Every time?

• 16:38Speaker 00

  Every time. And every time we knew if we failed, the company might go down. And then in 1975, we got the opportunity to open our first Michigan Avenue store. And if we failed here, that would certainly, we had to invest a lot of money, take a big risk. But that store opened in 1975. And after three months, we knew it was very successful. And from then on, the pressure was a lot less. Then it wasn't betting a company because by then. You know, we were doing enough volume and creating enough profits. But we didn't want partners. We didn't want investors.

• 17:13Guy Raz?

  Why not?

• 17:13Speaker 00

  Well, because we felt they would have different motivation. We love being merchants. We love talking to customers. We love inspiring staff. And we love searching for the product. Our goal wasn't to build a chain store. Our goal was to find the best merchandise at the best price that would excite our customers and excite our staff about what we were doing.

• 17:35Guy Raz?

  So I was reading about about the expansion of the company. And I guess it took like 25 years for you guys to go from one store to 17 stores.

• 17:44Speaker 00

  Right.

• 17:45Guy Raz?

  Which was in 1985.

• 17:46Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 17:47Guy Raz?

  But then, but then by like 1995, you had expanded to 60 stores. So what like what happened? How did you guys? Why did you decide to grow so much faster?

• 17:56Speaker 00

  Well, we reached a different era where it was important to have scale, to do the things we had to do with buying merchandise. So you had a guarantee to a factory, you'd buy a certain amount of a product to make sure we were the only people in the United States that would be carrying it. And you got a sense that you needed scale to get there. And that's what we started doing. In 1990, we built a flagship store in Chicago, which really helped launch our expansion because then every landlord, every shopping mall wanted a crate and barrel building. And we were a big attraction because we drew in a lot of customers. And what happened, starting in that big expansion, was landlords started paying for a lot of

• 18:39Speaker 00

  the build out of the store, the building of the building and whatever. So our, we didn't have to take as much of our financial risk ourselves because the landlords built these stores, a lot of these stores for us.

• 18:51Guy Raz?

  So it sounds like things were going pretty well for you without having any outside investors. So what, what made you decide to eventually? Bring in outside money. Like, what was your thinking when you made that decision?

• 19:05Speaker 00

  I had thought by the time I was 65, I was then about 60, I said, "I'd probably want to retire." And some intelligent guy had said, "You know, if you're going to sell your business, do it five years before you retire, so you can help the transition and whatever." And I owned the responsibility to both my family and to my staff to make sure the company was well-financed and could take risks and could go through trauma and survive. And I also realized that at that time, the company was relatively, very strong in retail, but relatively weak in direct marketing, which at those days was catalogs.

• 19:45Guy Raz?

  Catalogues, yeah.

• 19:45Speaker 00

  And we actually spent a year and a half looking around the world for a partner. And we finally found Auto, the Auto Group in Hamburg, Germany. And they were the second-largest mailer to company in Europe. And today, they're, after Amazon, they're the biggest internet company in the world. And in 98, we sold them about two-thirds of the company. And 10 years later, and the contract was for 10 years, we sold them the rest of the third.

• 20:17Guy Raz?

  So in 98, you agreed to stay on for a fixed amount of time and to continue to run the company?

• 20:23Speaker 00

  Exactly. And their basic philosophy was to acquire businesses like ours and let the management continue running it. And our success was we tripled the size of the company, we quintupled the profits of the company, and we were able to grow. But more important, they, after we were with them a year or two, they said, "You've got to really look into this internet." This was, what was it, 99, 2000? We said, "What's the internet?" And then they started telling us. And early on, then, we started developing our internet business, which today represents about 38% of all the sales at Crate and Barrel. And customers buy an enormous amount of furniture on the internet, which is hard for me to, you know, believe.

• 21:09Guy Raz?

  So when you had to step down, was that hard for you? Like this thing that you built?

• 21:16Speaker 00

  Well, of course, it's hard. You know, I didn't realize I'd have that much energy left at 70, but I had enormous energy. But in the last two, three years, I've been doing things in our family office of finding new young entrepreneurs we could support. And when I advise young people today, I said, "Look at the job and see, are you going to love it? And is it going to be something you can devote your life to? And work 10, 12 hours a day and work six, seven days a week. I mean, then you'll be a success, but don't go to do something because of a salary or a title." And I think that's the thing we picked up from the European friends of ours who, you know, have a different pace of life and a different focus. And, you know, that's how it should be. It shouldn't be, "I want to make a lot of money. How do I do it?" It's, "What do I love to do?

• 22:01Speaker 00

  And if I do it really good, then we will make money."

• 22:06Guy Raz?

  How much of your success do you attribute to just your talent and your smarts and your hard work? And how much do you attribute to luck?

• 22:16Speaker 00

  Well, the lucky part was our timing. It was just that the appropriate time to be going to Europe to find new contemporary design and tabletop and furniture and things. I think it was a talent of attracting people and making them feel like we were all in it together that I didn't realize I had, nor did I realize I was good at for many, many years, but I was. And I think that had a lot to do with it. I was lucky to be married to Carol Siegel, who had this enormous talent. And, you know, we started out to create something that was going to be different and beautiful and wonderful. This is still in the culture at a company in great depth, and they're still doing very well.

• 22:58Guy Raz?

  You know, could you ever have imagined, like, when you opened up this thing in Chicago in a disused elevator factory with boards that you hammered into the walls, that this company would be doing sales of, like, what are Crate and Barrel's numbers today?

• 23:11Speaker 00

  It's about 1.2 billion a year. And we went from one employee and now to 7,000.

• 23:16Guy Raz?

  Could you ever have imagined that?

• 23:18Speaker 00

  Never, never, ever. We didn't have a plan. We had no ambition to do that. We just had ambition to love what we were doing.

• 23:27Guy Raz?

  I still have, from when I graduated college and moved to my first apartment, my mom bought me a set of flat, white Crate and Barrel dinner plates. They were made in Japan at the time. I still have them. Still serve dinner on them.

• 23:40Speaker 00

  Well, that's our problem. You replace cars every two, three years. You have dinner where for 20 years, you know, people tell me they have product they bought in the 60s and 70s. And I win.

• 24:01Guy Raz?

  Gordon Segal officially stepped down as CEO of Crate and Barrel in 2008. But two years ago, the company actually brought him back to help out during kind of a rough patch. Gordon stayed for a year. Things became more stable. Now he's doing mainly philanthropic work in and around Chicago. Oh, and in a few months, Gordon and Carol will celebrate 56 years of marriage.

• 24:29Guy Raz?

  And please don't turn us off just yet. In a moment, we're going to hear from you about the things you guys are building.

• 24:39Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks for sticking around because now it's time for How You Built That. And here's a story we got from Alec Avedisian, who kind of stumbled on his idea a few years ago when he was just out of college. He was working and surfing in a fishing village in El Salvador.

• 24:55Speaker 02

  And one of my friends that was living in the community actually showed me the roofing on one of the homes. It was colorful and bright. And so it made us just look at it again and be like, wait, I think that's a billboard.

• 25:06Guy Raz?

  And it was. The roof was made from part of a billboard that you'd see on the side of any road. And Alec remembers thinking, how could that work? I mean, billboards are just paper, right? That roof is going to fall apart in a day. But then he started to do a little research.

• 25:22Speaker 02

  And I was like, wow, I didn't know that billboards were made of PVC. So it's a heavy-duty vinyl material. So they're actually UV-protected, waterproof.

• 25:31Speaker 02

  So then I started realizing, well, hey, if they're using these as roofing and they're durable enough to last and to keep the water out, then they could definitely be turned into some sort of product.

• 25:39Guy Raz?

  Alec figured all of that bright, heavy vinyl could be made into really strong duffel bags and backpacks and things like that. So after he left El Salvador and moved to Southern California, he started to make a few calls.

• 25:52Speaker 02

  I didn't know anything about billboard companies, but I just started calling. And once I told them, hey, I think I can save you guys some money. Can I have a few of them? They said, yeah, sure.

• 26:02Guy Raz?

  It turns out the ad companies were happy because they didn't have to pay to dump the vinyl in a landfill. And Alec was happy because it didn't cost a lot to get the stuff, pretty much the cost of shipping. And when he had his very first sheet of vinyl to cut up, he designed something he actually knows something about, a carry bag for his surfboard.

• 26:22Speaker 02

  I figured a surf bag is like a pancake. There's only two sides to it, so it'd be the easiest thing to make. Let's start with that.

• 26:27Guy Raz?

  But it took him a while to figure out how to actually get it made.

• 26:30Speaker 02

  So my first bag I took to a car upholstery manufacturer because I didn't know anybody that did sewing.

• 26:35Guy Raz?

  And that first bag actually looked good enough for Alec to want to make more. So fast forward a couple of months and Alec starts selling these surf bags in sports shops around LA. And then he starts to branch out into other products like backpacks and phone covers.

• 26:51Speaker 02

  From one billboard, we can get upwards of 150 backpacks and probably around 1,000 phone covers, at least.

• 26:58Guy Raz?

  And almost every one of their products is unique, different shapes, different splashes of color, because each item is cut from a different part of a giant highway advertisement.

• 27:07Speaker 02

  You name it, Virgin Airlines, Alaskan Airlines, Gucci, Pepsi.

• 27:12Guy Raz?

  The vinyl from the billboards is washed and cut at a warehouse in LA County. And Alec eventually found a factory in Mexico that does all the sewing.

• 27:20Speaker 02

  Any billboard that you've ever seen, we've turned it into product.

• 27:23Guy Raz?

  The bags and phone covers are now in about 300 small retailers across the US. And the company just started to turn a profit.

• 27:30Speaker 02

  But we're not there yet where I'm like, oh, this thing was a sure success. This thing is definitely still a hustle and a grind. But that's also the fun piece about it. We love coming up with new marketing and finding ways to really tell the story.

• 27:43Guy Raz?

  That's Alec Avadiscian. He and his younger brother Eric own the company Rare Forum. That's rareforum.com in LA County, California.

• 27:54Guy Raz?

  And please keep sending us your stories. We love reading about them and sharing them. You can tell us all about what you're building by visiting build.npr.org. That's build with a D, dot NPR dot org. And thanks for listening to the show this week. You can write us directly at [email protected]. You can also follow us on Twitter. It's at How I Built This. Please also subscribe to our podcast through iTunes or however you get podcasts. And if you get a chance, give us a review. We love to hear what you think. Our show is produced this week by Casey Herman, with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei.

• 28:36Guy Raz?

  Thanks also to Neva Grant, Sanaz Meshkhanpour, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is Claire Breen. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This from NPR. Here's another NPR podcast you will definitely enjoy. It's called All Songs Considered. It's NPR's music discussion and discovery podcast. Each week, Bob Boilen and Robin Hilton share the best of the best new and upcoming music. You can download artist interviews, live concerts, and lots and lots of songs you'll fall in love with.

• 29:21Guy Raz?

  Find new All Songs episodes every Tuesday at npr.org/podcasts and on the NPR ONE app.

• 29:30Speaker 03

  This message is brought to you by the NPR Coffee Club. A subscription brings fresh roasted coffee directly to your door. And you can also give a gift subscription to the NPR superfan in your life. Learn more about our new NPR blends by visiting us at nprcoffeeclub.org.