Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell

At age 40, Bobby Trussell's promising career in horse racing hit a dead end. With bills to pay and a family to support, he stumbled across a curious product that turned into a lifeline: squishy-squashy memory foam. He jumped at the chance to distribute Swedish memory foam pillows and mattresses to Americans. Tempur-Pedic USA began by selling to chiropractors and specialty stores, providing one of the first alternatives to spring mattresses. Today, the company is one of the largest bedding providers in the world. PLUS in our postscript "How You Built That," how Christopher Rannefors created BatBnB: a sleek wooden box that hangs on your house and provides a home for mosquito-eating bats. 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.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

  Hey, it's Guy here, and I just want to let you know that we have a few tickets left for our upcoming live show on December 5th in Los Angeles. My guest will be Michael Dubin. He's the co-founder of Dollar Shave Club, and he has an amazing story. He grew this company from nothing to a billion-dollar brand in just five years. Now, if you haven't been to a live show, they are so much fun. It's a chance to meet me and the team behind How I Built This and other HIBT listeners. So if you're in the LA area on December 5th, you will not want to miss this live show. Our show is supported by American Express, and to get your tickets, go to nprpresents.org. And I hope to see you there.

• 0:43Guy Raz?

  How did you raise the money to start this venture at all?

• 0:47Speaker 01

  Well, that's a really good question, because I had to go back to all my basic same people who had invested with me in my other horse ventures.

• 0:59Guy Raz?

  That failed, right?

• 1:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, that had failed and gone broke. So I had to convince them that even though we lost money in something that I knew a lot about, that we were going to make money in something that I knew nothing about.

• 1:19Guy Raz?

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

• 1:30Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and on today's show, how Bobby Trussell made one of the most spectacular pivots ever from horse racing to memory foam, and how he turned that gamble into one of the biggest mattress companies in the world.

• 1:46Guy Raz?

  So even if you don't sleep on a Tempur-Pedic mattress, you may have tested one out at the store or seen one of those commercials where the people are jumping up and down on the bed next to a glass of red wine that does not spill. Well, either way, you probably know that Tempur-Pedic is one of these squishy mattresses that feels strangely firm and soft at the same time, with this memory foam that molds itself to your body. And today, of course, plenty of other mattresses and pillows have memory foam. But back when Bobby Trussell first launched Tempur-Pedic in the US, it was a completely new idea, a new sensation. Now, to be clear, Bobby did not invent memory foam. In fact, when he discovered it on a trip to Sweden, he knew absolutely nothing about

• 2:31Guy Raz?

  foam, nothing about mattresses. He'd been making a living in an industry that couldn't be more different. Horse racing and horse breeding. Yes, you heard that correctly. The guy who brought Tempur-Pedic to America, a $2.5 billion company today, was a horse breeder. But as we'll hear, at the time he discovered memory foam, he was also, shall we say, desperately in need of a new gig. And so what Bobby did was to see the incredible potential in a new kind of mattress. And then he basically gambled everything to launch it in the US. Bobby Trussell grew up in Milwaukee in the 1960s and was the oldest of seven kids.

• 3:14Guy Raz?

  His dad worked in sales and his mom was a homemaker. And Bobby worked odd jobs from the time he was a kid, paper routes and things like that. But when he was about 11 years old, something happened that changed the course of his entire life.

• 3:30Speaker 01

  When my dad was, I think, early 40s, he went on a vacation with my uncle and they rode some horses. And he came back and he said, I'm thinking I'm going to buy a riding horse. I was 11, and any kid who hears that is totally music to his ears. And so I rode with my dad between the ages of 11 until I went to college and was 18, pretty much every week. And horse racing became my favorite sport. We would get the issues of the Chicago Tribune, and I would cut out the race results and keep them in a scrapbook and try and follow when the same horse ran back. So I was totally enthralled in that.

• 4:15Guy Raz?

  Bobby eventually went to Marquette University, but horse racing was always in the back of his mind.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  Pretty much, yeah. I majored in finance, but I would often be sitting in the back row of a lecture, reading the racing form. And I would get my Marquette buddies and we would get in the car and we would drive 90 minutes south to Chicago and go to the races at Arlington or Hawthorne Racetrack. And we would have a ball, but I know several times, we were so broke on the way back, we had to run the tolls. They didn't have the gates. You'd just breeze right through them and hope they didn't catch you.

• 4:57Guy Raz?

  And so after college, I'm assuming you went to start working with racehorses full-time, right?

• 5:03Speaker 01

  Yes. The thoroughbreds who actually raced at the racetracks. And that's where my interest was. So I wrote letters to the top 10 horse trainers in the country. And nine of them didn't answer. And one of them was John Nairud, N-E-R-U-D, who offered me two jobs. One at his farm in Ocala and the other one at the racetrack at Belmont Park.

• 5:31Guy Raz?

  Which is in New York, right?

• 5:33Speaker 01

  In New York. And I had never been on a plane before. So I went there with my bag, showed up at the front gate and told them I had a job with John Nairud, showed them the letter. And they said, "Well, Mr. Nairud's still in Florida. He's not going to be here for two weeks." And I said, "Oh, no." And then he said, "Well, but his assistant is here. He's got 10 horses here. You can go see him." So they put me in, inside the track on the back stretch, they call it, where the barns are. And I went to meet the assistant trainer, who was a Yugoslavian guy who spoke very broken English.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  And I told him the story and he said, "You have a college degree, boy?" And I said, "Yeah." He said, "What you doing here, boy?"

• 6:25Speaker 01

  And I said, I want to work on the racetrack. And he said, you can stay over the barn. Only one problem is, we have the mattress frames came up from our Florida division, but we don't have the actual mattresses yet. So I said, okay, that's fine. So anyway, I slept on the springs for two weeks until the other horses and the mattresses came up from Florida.

• 6:52Guy Raz?

  Wow. And who would have thought 20 years later, you would have been sleeping on a beautiful Tempur-Pedic mattress?

• 6:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. Isn't that amazing?

• 7:00Guy Raz?

  We'll get there, though. We'll get there. We'll get there. Let's hold our horses. So this is the mid 70s. You start working at Belmont, and what was your job there?

• 7:08Speaker 01

  Well, I started out as a hot walker, making $75 a week.

• 7:12Guy Raz?

  What's a hot walker?

• 7:13Speaker 01

  A hot walker is a guy who walks hots. And hots are horses that come from their morning workout, and they're sweaty and hot, and you need to walk them in a circle for about 30 minutes and make sure, and you water them off slowly, so you make sure that they don't drink too much water, because that can make them sick. And then, because what I wanted to do was be a groom. A groom made $125 a week, and they assigned you three horses that were totally yours to take care of.

• 7:46Guy Raz?

  To brush and to clean.

• 7:48Speaker 01

  Brush and to clean their feet, and to put bandages on them, and feed them, and take care of them.

• 7:54Guy Raz?

  So you were doing all that for a little while, but what was the thing you really wanted to do?

• 7:59Speaker 01

  Trainer.

• 8:00Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 8:01Speaker 01

  Trainer's what I wanted to do.

• 8:02Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 8:03Speaker 01

  But I did leave New York after two years and went to Chicago, and my dad bought me a really, really, really slow racehorse for like 1,500 bucks. And so it got me my trainer's license, and I got in the game and ended up training. My first winter was at Keeneland.

• 8:25Guy Raz?

  Where's Keeneland?

• 8:27Speaker 01

  Keeneland is the racetrack in Lexington.

• 8:30Guy Raz?

  In Kentucky?

• 8:31Speaker 01

  In Kentucky.

• 8:32Guy Raz?

  Lexington, Kentucky presumably is where like the great horses are trained.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  It's the horse breeding capital of the world.

• 8:37Guy Raz?

  Right, right. So this is like, I guess you're sort of hitting up against the early 80s. You're probably close to 30 years old at that time. By the way, were you married at that point?

• 8:46Speaker 01

  No.

• 8:47Guy Raz?

  You're a single guy?

• 8:48Speaker 01

  Single guy.

• 8:49Guy Raz?

  Focused on horses?

• 8:50Speaker 01

  Single-minded, single guy.

• 8:53Guy Raz?

  Okay, so you're in Lexington, Kentucky, and I guess your career in horse racing really begins to take off at that point, right?

• 8:59Speaker 01

  Right, yeah. I got a job at Gainesway Farm, and I had studied pedigrees while I was on my racetrack adventure and became something of an expert, and they needed that. And that was the best move I ever made in my young life because I was soon involved in racing at a very high level. Instead of with a horse that my dad bought me for $1,500, we were buying Kentucky Derby favorites for $10 million a month before the race.

• 9:28Guy Raz?

  Wait, one horse for $10 million?

• 9:30Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. And that horse, his name was Proud Appeal, and he eventually ran last in the Derby, but it was quite an experience. And we also had significant interests in European racing. We were just as interested in who was going to win the English Derby, or the French Derby, or the Irish Derby, as we wore the Kentucky Derby, because we were looking for stallion prospects. And so I spent a lot of time, I went over following horses that we had made major investments in.

• 10:01Guy Raz?

  At what point? Because I guess at some point you sort of branched out and went on your own and started your own, like, horse lending or insurance startup?

• 10:09Speaker 01

  Right. That was in, so I always had Gainesway from '79 through '86, and then I decided to go out on my own with Jim Filpat. He was the general counsel, the in-house counsel for Gainesway.

• 10:23Guy Raz?

  And basically, you would be advising trainers on which horses to buy and sell and things like that?

• 10:29Speaker 01

  Absolutely. So we started stallion management services to do the same thing we did at Gainesway, but do it remotely for farms that couldn't afford to have that infrastructure. And then we also had a company called Thirbred Advisory Group, which advised people on other horse-related transactions. And that was a very good idea, but very bad timing, because the horse business started to go into recession.

• 10:58Guy Raz?

  This is in the late 80s?

• 11:00Speaker 01

  This is in the late 80s, yeah. Prices started going down. And essentially, everybody went broke.

• 11:09Guy Raz?

  Including you?

• 11:10Speaker 01

  Including me.

• 11:11Guy Raz?

  Like, how broke did you go?

• 11:12Speaker 01

  Well, I was, I felt like I was the brokest man in America because, you know, I did get married when I was 34 in 1986. And so by this time, fast-forwarding to 1991, I had two little kids. And we moved to a better location for kids than my downtown townhouse. But I couldn't sell the first house. And so I had two houses, two kids, two mortgages, and no job.

• 11:47Guy Raz?

  Did you have to declare bankruptcy?

• 11:49Speaker 01

  No, I never did. I owed everybody in town. But everybody else owed everybody too. So everybody knew that suing isn't going to really help. And the big joke was if one guy could come up with $10,000, he could pay $1 million in debt because Person A would pay B, and B would pay C, and it would come all the way back around to Person A.

• 12:12Guy Raz?

  So how badly in debt were you?

• 12:16Speaker 01

  I was probably $1 million in debt.

• 12:19Guy Raz?

  So how did you pay your bills? I mean, your business goes bust, you owe the bank, two kids, a house that you have a mortgage to pay on, and another house that you are living in. How do you, what do you do?

• 12:33Speaker 01

  Well, it wasn't easy because I would go to my office, and my secretary would say, "Bobby, we haven't paid the rent in a couple of months, and the landlord was just down here, and they're going to turn off the electricity." And then I would go home, and my wife would tell me the same thing, you know, "The gas company called." And so I really didn't know what to do. I would get in the mail, I would get pre-approved credit cards going, "You're pre-approved for a $25,000 line of credit." You know, and I would say, "You're really stupid." But I would, I would take them up on it because, and we would charge groceries onto the credit card, always figuring that, you know, things were going to turn around.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  But this was the period of my life where I fell back onto my roots, my Catholic education. And I had started going to Sunday Mass with my wife when we got married. She really moved me up quite a bit, but I was still going through the motions. So I rolled up my sleeves and went to church and started going to weekday Masses and literally just prayed that God would show me what to do. And I said, "It doesn't have to be in the horse business." I just decided, "Okay, if people come to me with ideas, I'm just going to say yes."

• 13:59Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  And my French horse trainer, Alain Falourd, he called me and he said one day, "I know a Swedish horse chiropractor who knew a company in Sweden that makes an air cleaner that can clean the horse's stalls."

• 14:16Guy Raz?

  Oh, like an air purifier?

• 14:17Speaker 01

  Right. It was actually a negative ionizer. It was zap, it would zap the air. And so my friend Alan said, "This Swedish horse chiropractor wants me to sell it in France." And he said, "I'll go you one better. I know someone who'll sell it for you in the States." So I started a company called Nion.

• 14:37Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  And it turned out to be the worst company because the product over there, it's 220 volts.

• 14:47Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 14:48Speaker 01

  And over here, it's 1/10. So the product worked half as good here.

• 14:50Guy Raz?

  Wait, you didn't figure this out before you got them shipped over?

• 14:53Speaker 01

  No.

• 14:54Guy Raz?

  Oh, sorry.

• 14:55Speaker 01

  Unfortunately.

• 14:56Guy Raz?

  Sorry.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  My market research was lacking. And then the retail price was $500 for these. And there were products on the market that were similar that were $49.95 who could make the exact same claims.

• 15:13Guy Raz?

  Right. You purified the air.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  Right. Plus, the company was owned by a guy in Sweden who's probably the only guy in Sweden who doesn't speak one word of English.

• 15:22Guy Raz?

  Wow. So you could not communicate with them?

• 15:25Speaker 01

  No. So he would send me faxes in Swedish. And I would have to take them to University of Kentucky and get them translated. And when I talked to him on the phone, I had to use an AT&T language line operator, and each call cost me $300.

• 15:43Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  So this was like the worst company with the worst product, over 10 times the price it should be. And so, this was going nowhere fast, but I had to go to Paris in October of 91 because I had horses over there, you know, still kind of in the business. And the Swedish horse chiropractor said, called me, he says, "Bobby, you have to come to Sweden while you're in Europe." I said, "Why?" He said, "There's another company. It's a mattress, Bobby. You have to come see this mattress." And his name was CG. And I said, "CG, I don't want to hear about any more of your Swedish, crazy Swedish connections."

• 16:29Speaker 01

  But I still said, "Okay, I'm in yes mode." I went to Paris and I got on a plane and I went to Stockholm. And I met him, and he introduced me to a guy by the name of Michael Magnusson, and that changed my life.

• 16:42Guy Raz?

  Who's Michael Magnusson?

• 16:44Speaker 01

  Michael Magnusson is the guy, he and his stepbrother, Gaglanvik, owned the manufacturing company which developed the first Tempur-Pedic products. And he told me that they had just launched it in Sweden the previous month, and that they wanted to go worldwide with it.

• 17:08Guy Raz?

  Launched what? What was it?

• 17:09Speaker 01

  Well, it was a 3-inch overlay.

• 17:12Guy Raz?

  Like a 3-inch mattress pad?

• 17:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. It's temperature sensitive, so it distributes the pressure over a wider area. So it was breakaway, you could put your hand on it, it would make a handprint. You take your hand off, and it would slowly come back to where it was.

• 17:29Guy Raz?

  Did you ask him about it? Like, where did it come from? How did they invent it? What was this thing?

• 17:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was originally invented by NASA for the space program to cushion the astronauts from G-forces. And since it was a public thing.

• 17:48Guy Raz?

  US government invention.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  US government. There wasn't a patent on it. It was freely alienable. And my Swedish friends bought a company in Denmark called Dan Foam. And they made it better and reproducible and more durable.

• 18:04Guy Raz?

  And the idea was, let's turn this into a mattress to sleep on? Was that their idea from the beginning?

• 18:10Speaker 01

  No. That was the weird thing is they really didn't know what they had. They had this squishy, squishy foam with slow comeback. And they had originally been interested in it for football helmets. But they made some three-inch overlays and they put them in a nursing home in Copenhagen. And they were thinking, maybe it would be good for bedsores. And the reports they got back is that, yes, indeed, it helped people who had bedsores. And the other thing they heard, though anecdotally, was, hey, the people who had back pains said it helped their back. And so that's when they said, hey, looks like we got something here.

• 18:53Guy Raz?

  Like a mattress, like for sleeping?

• 18:54Speaker 01

  Like a mattress. That's when they launched it in Sweden, and that's when I met them.

• 18:59Guy Raz?

  Okay, so you're in Sweden. You're meeting with this guy, Michael Magnusson. And as you say, he's looking to take this mattress foam worldwide. So what did you do? How did you decide that you wanted in?

• 19:13Speaker 01

  So I stayed at his house and slept on the mattress. And I woke up and he said, what do you think? I said, this is the most amazing product I've ever encountered. I'm interested. And when I came home after my first Swedish trip, I told Martha, I said, sweetie, we're in the mattress business.

• 19:32Guy Raz?

  And what did she say?

• 19:34Speaker 01

  She said, okay, but can you change the baby?

• 19:39Guy Raz?

  I mean, it is remarkable, right? You do this overnight. You're overnight at Michael's house and you sleep on this thing and you wake up and you're just thinking, "Man, that was amazing. I want to sleep like this every single night."

• 19:52Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 19:53Guy Raz?

  And so, right then and there, you said, "I want to work with you," or you just said, "Hey, this is kind of cool. Can we keep talking?"

• 19:58Speaker 01

  Well, given my position in life, I was more forceful than that. I said, "I'm interested. I want to get involved if there's any possible way." And he said, "Well, we want to go worldwide with it. We have nobody in the States. So, why don't you go back and write me a marketing plan and we'll see." And I said, "Okay." So, I did so. I went home and wrote a marketing plan. I had some help with some old high school friends who eventually came on to work for us. And we wrote, which is perhaps the worst marketing plan ever written.

• 20:41Guy Raz?

  And what was your plan? Like, you said, "We're going to sell it here. We're going to distribute it there." Like, what did you-- what was your pitch to them?

• 20:47Speaker 01

  We said, "We're going to sell this in truck stops." Because it's only three inches thick. We thought it would fit great into the back of the cabs of the semis.

• 21:00Guy Raz?

  Oh, right. Because they sleep in like that sort of elevated part of the cab, right? Truck drivers do.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. We thought it would go perfect in there. And we were also going to put an ad in the chiropractor directory. So, anyway, that was it. And he came over, Michael came over, in late '91. And we met him in Milwaukee. And he and I negotiated that he would give me exclusive North American distribution rights for his products.

• 21:30Guy Raz?

  In exchange for?

• 21:31Speaker 01

  In exchange for two things. Number one, I had to finance it because he said, "We don't have money to finance you. You have to raise your own money."

• 21:39Guy Raz?

  How much did you have to raise?

• 21:41Speaker 01

  Well, it was undefined, but I was supposed to raise what is needed. So, I raised about $500,000.

• 21:47Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  The other condition was, we had to sell 10,000 mattresses the first year in order to maintain exclusivity.

• 21:53Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  And so, I said, "Sure. You know, I can do both of those two things."

• 21:57Guy Raz?

  Let me just interrupt this for a sec, Bobby. And forgive me for this, but-- I'm just trying to get into the head of Michael Magnuson. He is a Swedish guy who is starting a mattress company in Sweden and he's seeing some success. And he agrees to give you a horse trainer, a guy whose entire life is in the horse business. The exclusive distribution rights to sell memory foam in the US. Why would he ever have taken a risk like that? Like, what? It just seems so implausible.

• 22:32Speaker 01

  That's really a good question. But I had spent three days with him and the horse chiropractor, and we had hit it off on a horse level. Because he was in the horse business in Sweden. And so he was like my Swedish alter ego.

• 22:49Guy Raz?

  He's like your Swedish spirit animal.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  Right, yeah. And so he got comfortable with me as a person, I guess. And number two, he wanted to control it. He didn't want to have some company in the US that is going to have their own ideas. He had a certain idea in his head of how he wanted this to play out. And he knew, he figured anyway, that he could control me, which he could. And so we had a collaboration. We worked together, talked to him every day for 12 years, basically.

• 23:24Guy Raz?

  And he didn't even do any due diligence. Like, you could have been a, you know, you could have been an ax murderer. Like, he didn't really know much about you. Like, you could have been, you know, a horrible person. Like, he just took this chance.

• 23:38Speaker 01

  He took a chance, but his ace in the hole was that I had to sell 10,000 mattresses the first year to maintain exclusivity.

• 23:45Guy Raz?

  How did you raise the money to start this venture at all?

• 23:49Speaker 01

  Well, that's another really good question. Because now I had to go back to all my basic same people who had invested with me in these yearling partnerships where you raced in Europe, and my other horse ventures.

• 24:03Guy Raz?

  That failed, right?

• 24:04Speaker 01

  That had failed and gone broke. So I had to convince them that even though we lost money in something that I knew a lot about, that we were going to make money in something that I knew nothing about.

• 24:15Guy Raz?

  Oh my, what was your pitch to them? You said, "Hey, guys, I know this horse thing didn't work out, but I'm getting into mattresses or memory foam and I need your money." And did any of them say, "Are you out of your mind?"

• 24:26Speaker 01

  Well, my dad, you know, he gave me 50 grand or something and my mom did too. And they just did it because I'm their son.

• 24:35Guy Raz?

  They love you, you're their son, sure.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  Right. But the rest of them, I think they did it because A, they were comfortable with me, but B, when they encountered the product, they had the same emotional reaction that I did when I first encountered it. And this would include the first guy who invested, Dave Fogg, who I had met only a few months earlier. Told him the whole story. He said, "Well, bring me over with the product." So I brought an overlay over to his house. It was January and it was freezing. And one of the unique properties of the material is that it freezes as solid as a board at 50 degrees Fahrenheit. That's the temperature sensitivity.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  So the mattress froze on the way over to Dave's house. And so I come in, I'm carrying this overlay, and I noticed luckily that he had a fire going in the fireplace. So I said, "Let's just, I'll just set this over here for a while and we can chat." And he said, "Okay." And so we talked about it and I'm kind of eyeing the mattress to see if it looks like it's uncurling. So anyway, it did thaw out and he really liked it and he wrote me out a check. So I think that's the answer to the question. The product kept bailing us out. Michael Magnussen came over. I told him, "I'm going to raise the money, but can you help me?" He said, "Sure." So he came over.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  We met him in Chicago and we went over to my Uncle Bill's house and we showed him the mattress, told him the story. He could see that, you know, Michael was real. He wasn't some, you know, fictitious guy because Uncle Bill had lost a lot of money in my yearling partnerships.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  So Uncle Bill, he goes into the back room. He comes out 10 minutes later. He hands me a check for $50,000. So I am just absolutely overjoyed. I said, thank you so much. Michael and I left. I dropped Michael off at O'Hare. He went back to Stockholm. I got in my car and drove back to Lexington. And on the way home, I stopped at a fast food restaurant. So the next morning was Saturday morning and I get a call. I'm dead asleep. It's 9:30 and it's Uncle Bill. And he said, he calls me Rob and he says, Rob,

• 27:01Speaker 01

  I got a phone call from Connie at a Burger King in Lebanon, Indiana, who said she found a check for $50,000 on the floor. And I said, there's no possible way. So I'm going through my pants pockets and my coat. And I said, oh, my gosh. And I thought Uncle Bill was going to say, you know, maybe my money's not so safe with you after all. And then he said, can I overnight you another check?

• 27:30Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 27:31Speaker 01

  And I said, I said, OK, OK, yeah, thanks.

• 27:35Guy Raz?

  Wow, Uncle Bill, God bless him. All right, so you are now, you got some money. You got, you got to sell 10,000 of these overlay mattresses. How did you do?

• 27:48Speaker 01

  We were supposed to sell 10,000 mattresses the first year and we sold 70. So we missed the goal by 9,930.

• 28:01Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, how Bobby Trussell managed to keep his company alive after selling just 70 mattresses. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR.

• 28:24Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. So it's the early 1990s and Bobby Trussell has gone all in on a business he knows next to nothing about, memory foam mattress pads. And he's shipping them over to the US in containers from Europe. And he's come up with a marketing plan that mostly targets chiropractors. But things are not going well. And the $500,000 he raised from friends and family, he burns through it in just a few months.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  We were spending the money on, well, product. The containers were 75 grand apiece. We bought two or three and we had salary. I wasn't taking any salary, but I had two or three people working for me. And we just had a burn rate.

• 29:10Guy Raz?

  And so when you were out of cash, how did you continue operating?

• 29:16Speaker 01

  Well, we had a container coming over and it was $75,000. And I called Michael and I said, we have a problem. And he said, what's that? I said, the container coming next Tuesday, I can't pay for. And he said, oh, okay. Let me call you back tomorrow. I'll talk to Doug, his partner and brother. So next day he calls back and says, okay, here's what we'll do. We will swap that container for 10% interest in your company, Tempur-Pedic. And I said, okay. Because I was in no position, we weren't going to make the $10,000 minimum. And I was out of money and he could easily have just pulled the plug on us and said, okay, sorry it didn't work.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  We're going a different way. But he said, I'll swap that for 10% interest in your company. And I said, great.

• 30:07Guy Raz?

  I mean, you got into that position because the mattress pads weren't selling. So So why weren't they?

• 30:14Speaker 01

  Well, the chiropractors who we were trying to market these overlays through couldn't sell the overlays. They would say, "Bob, it's a pad." I said, "No, it's a mattress." And they would say, "What do you do with it?" I said, "You put it on top of your old mattress." They said, "It's a pad."

• 30:31Guy Raz?

  And how much were they cost?

• 30:33Speaker 01

  It were like $800 for a queen.

• 30:36Guy Raz?

  So they weren't cheap?

• 30:37Speaker 01

  They weren't, still weren't cheap, but the chiropractors kept saying, "You ought to make a pillow out of this stuff."

• 30:43Guy Raz?

  Huh.

• 30:43Speaker 01

  Because that was more in their comfort zone, selling pillows. They sold those anyway. And so they helped me design a pillow, along with Dan Foam, and they came out with a pillow probably right around then, right around July of 1992. So then I said, "Okay, now we got another product." And I asked the chiropractors we were working with, "How would you go about selling it if it were you?" And they said, "Well, it's really a unique product. You need to get it in people's hands."

• 31:14Guy Raz?

  Hmm.

• 31:14Speaker 01

  And I said, "Well, gee, there's 40,000 chiropractors in the US. We don't have any rep force or distribution. How am I going to get it in the hands of all these chiropractors?"

• 31:25Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 31:26Speaker 01

  And I asked one of them and I said, "What if I just mailed them one?" And the guy says, "Well, I guess it could work." So we mailed 500 pillows to 500 unsuspecting chiropractors.

• 31:40Guy Raz?

  You just found their names in like a chiropractor directory?

• 31:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:43Guy Raz?

  And the pillow, you just sent them a package with a Tempur-Pedic pillow? And what did it say? It said, "Here you go. Here's a pillow for free."

• 31:49Speaker 01

  Yep. It had a letter on top of the pillow in this big box, and it said, "This is a Tempur-Pedic Swedish Neck Pillow. It's, you know, the best thing since sliced bread, yada, yada, yada. It's yours free if you order four. And if you don't like it, all we ask is you let us pick it up at our expense." So... We got 25% of them to buy four pills and that was the major breakthrough that turned us out of the nosedive. And so, all of a sudden, from that 500 chiropractors, we had 125 of them who were buying four pills a month. And we were selling it to the chiropractors for $49. So, we did about $300,000 in sales that first year, all in the last four months of the

• 32:34Speaker 01

  year, pretty much.

• 32:35Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  And I always will have a fond place in my heart for chiropractors because they really got us going and we eventually sold or have 10,000 chiropractors, which I believe we still do now, selling the products in their practice.

• 32:51Guy Raz?

  But, but of course, you know, turning this business into a, into a business that just distributed through chiropractors was not, that was not going to be enough. That was not how you were going to blow this thing open.

• 33:00Speaker 01

  Right. And we always wanted, of course, to get it into stores. And in November of 92, of course, now, we're still broke. I got no salary. And we were, went up to Cincinnati to the mall up there and I, you know, would do some Christmas shopping, which is really more like Christmas browsing. You know, I'm bored to tears. And my wife Martha said, "Bring your pillow and you can find a store that'll sell it."

• 33:33Guy Raz?

  You mean like go walk, like walk to the mall and find a store that would sell your pillow?

• 33:38Speaker 01

  Right. So, we're walking through the mall and she said, "Oh, there's Brookstone. They sell pillows. Go show them your pillow." I said, "Okay." So, I went there and I showed the, some, you know, 18-year-old kid the pillow and he's, he didn't know anything and he said, "Well, I can give you the number of headquarters in New Hampshire." I said, "Oh, great." So, he gave me the number of headquarters and I called him the next week and I got into, to the purchasing department. And he said, "Oh, you need to talk to Steve Rich." So, I left a message for Steve Rich and I sent him a pillow, too. And so, I would call Steve every day for weeks and weeks and weeks and leave him a message.

• 34:20Speaker 01

  And finally, I don't know, two months later, my secretary comes in and says, "Bobby, there's a Steve Rich from Brookstone on line two." And I said, I think I'll take that.

• 34:32Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 34:32Speaker 01

  And he was calling me to tell him to stop calling him because he had a note on his desk every day, Bob Trussell, Bob Trussell, Bob Trussell, Temper Pedic. And I said, okay, but all I ask is one thing. Make sure you took that pillow out of the box because you can't tell by looking at it. He said, oh, yeah, it's very nice, but we sell seven pillows and we don't need any more. And yours would have to sell for a lot more than our other seven pillows. I said, okay. So we hang up. 10 minutes later, the secretary comes in, it's that Steve Rich in Brookstone again. And he said, you know, maybe we'll take this down to research after all.

• 35:16Speaker 01

  And he had not taken it out of the box. And when he did at my, I made him promise, he had the same reaction, the emotional reaction with the slow comeback foam. So taking it down to research meant showing his wife. And his wife slept on it and she said, this is the best thing I've seen. So then he calls me back the next week and he says, okay, you got me on your side. Now I have to pitch it to the purchasing board. And then he calls me back, okay, we're going to buy 500 pillows.

• 35:50Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 35:50Speaker 01

  We've got 100 stores, we're going to buy four for each store and you've got to give me 100 demos. And I said, okay. And I hung up the phone and we'll talk about high fiving. I mean, that was the, that was the seminal moment. We had never sold anywhere near 500 pillows. And within two weeks, we were the hottest selling new product in Brookstone.

• 36:14Guy Raz?

  And if Brookstone was already selling a bunch of pillows, this was probably far and away more expensive than the other ones, right?

• 36:22Speaker 01

  Right. He said, we're going to have to sell this, Bobby, we're going to have to sell this at $90. And I said, really? Because the chiropractors are selling it for more like 70. And he said, yeah, because just to make the numbers work. I said, okay, whatever you want to do. So they sold it for 90 bucks and it would absolutely, we started selling like hotcakes.

• 36:44Guy Raz?

  Do you think the fact that it was so expensive was there was like added cachet? That like some people would go into a Brookstone and say, a $90 pillow, man, that must be amazing. I'm going to buy that.

• 36:55Speaker 01

  The answer is yes.

• 36:56Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 36:58Speaker 01

  I think if you sold it for 30, you'd sell less.

• 37:02Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  And that is what Michael Magnuson wanted. That's why he chose me is because his vision was this was not a product that would be discounted. And he was afraid any other company would discount it and it would become just like everybody else. We have something no one else has, so why should you discount? It's high end and it actually performs. I would get letters from strangers saying, Bobby, I've had a sore neck for 30 years and now it's gone. That's when I knew we were really onto something, when I got these letters. And that's what Michael, that was his vision is how to position the product as high end.

• 37:44Guy Raz?

  I just want to sort of pause and reflect on this for a moment. You were, I mean, you and Michael had only known each other for a couple of days when he agreed to give you this contract. But over the, you know, over the course of time, as your business really started to grow and you had to run this together, was there tension or did you actually continue to get along great?

• 38:03Speaker 01

  There was a lot of tension and stress and we got along great. I mean, he was very exacting and he had his own ideas of how to market. And sometimes I didn't agree and we would kind of have it out. So there were some stormy days, but we trusted each other. And one thing I learned about him is if you do what you say you're going to do, no matter how it turns out, you're going to be all right. And the same with me and him, he would always do what he said he was going to do. So we had a very close working relationship. And yeah, it was difficult. We had a lot of ups and downs.

• 38:47Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So they owned a significant chunk of the company. Your investors owned a significant chunk of the company. How much were you able to retain?

• 38:55Speaker 01

  Well, that 10% interest that they swapped for that container of pillows, we had to do that four more times. So they ended up owning 45% of my company. So me and my US investors, we owned 55.

• 39:11Guy Raz?

  And what was your, but what was your revenue in like 97, 98? What were you doing? Twenty, thirty million a year, something like that?

• 39:18Speaker 01

  My goal was always to get to a hundred million. It seemed like it took us forever, but we did three hundred thousand in ninety-two, then two point six million, then six and a half, then thirteen, then twenty-eighth, and forty-five.

• 39:32Guy Raz?

  Wow. And mainly, mainly from pillows initially, right?

• 39:36Speaker 01

  Initially, but the mattresses came in about nineteen ninety-four. Because what we were able to do is customize the products for the US market. In other words, we took that three-inch overlay and we laminated it to a five-inch base of normal high-density foam. So now we had an eight-inch foam mattress, which almost doubled the price. So now we're selling a queen for like twelve ninety-nine or thirteen ninety-nine. But now we had something that could appeal to the US market.

• 40:10Guy Raz?

  So essentially, it was a mattress, like what we think of as a thick mattress. You were able to create that and then start to sell it in the US?

• 40:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 40:19Guy Raz?

  How did people find out about them? How did they know about them? Again, through chiropractors?

• 40:23Speaker 01

  No, the chiropractors never did really get going with the mattresses. They were kind of pillow, pillow people. But we started selling in a store chain called Relax the Back, who had about thirty or forty stores, started in Texas. And when we first started marketing it, we marketed the mattress as, hey, if you have back pain, you got to have this mattress.

• 40:47Guy Raz?

  Ah.

• 40:48Speaker 01

  Similarly to the analogy I use as Volvo, when they started, if you're, number one, concerned with safety, you got to have this car.

• 40:57Guy Raz?

  Right, exactly.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  And we had this medical endorsement. We had ten thousand chiropractors selling it. Of course, they had another fifteen thousand chiropractors selling it all over Europe. And so that was our core, and we used that as a springboard. And so, okay, we're in Brookstone, we're going great guns. And I told Mike Anthony, the CEO of Brookstone, that I wanted to sell, wanted them to sell the mattresses also, now that we had the American style mattress thickness. And he said, Bob, our stores are tiny, we can't fit mattresses in there. We're a men's gift shop. And I said, oh, okay. So I started selling to Sharper Image, they're our rival. Brookstone had an absolute cow about that.

• 41:43Speaker 01

  And they called me, Mike Anthony called me, and he said, Bob, we want you to not to sell to Sharper Image, it's gonna hurt our business. And I said, okay, I'll pull out of Sharper Image if you sell the mattress, too. And he said, oh, man, okay.

• 42:00Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 42:01Speaker 01

  So, so we put a twin sized mattress, and by this time, they've got 200 stores. And they were selling one mattress per store every six weeks. And I was waiting for the call from him to say, Bobby, we tried.

• 42:18Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 42:19Speaker 01

  But he never, I never got that call, because then it was one every five weeks. And then, six months later, it was one every four or three weeks. And it ended up being like, two a week, as the product got more and more momentum. And the reason it got more momentum is because, parallel to this, we had opened up another channel called the Direct Response Channel. And that's the other huge moment, when we were able to figure out how to sell direct to the public.

• 42:53Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 42:54Speaker 01

  So I started advertising in The New Yorker magazine at first. And my main goal was to get our name out there. And so, we started selling in The Wall Street Journal and USA Today. And then, one day, I got a phone call from The New Yorker, our first magazine, and he said, you know, you guys have an 800 number. That means you're eligible for a direct response rates. I said, oh, okay. How much is that? He said, $6,000. I said, I've been paying 25,000 and I could be paying 6,000. And he said, yep. That changed my world because now I could advertise almost indiscriminately. I could be everywhere.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  And it was at this time that Brookstone was selling, trying to sell mattresses and people became gradually more and more aware and they would walk into the store and say, that's the one I read about in the USA Today. And so that's what got us going with mattresses.

• 43:57Guy Raz?

  Okay, so let's get a sense of the landscape of mattresses in the US. Like, at that time, like, who dominated the mattress market in the US? And presumably Tempur-Pedic wasn't even like a drop in that ocean.

• 44:10Speaker 01

  Right. It was dominated by the four S's. Sealy, Simmons, Serta, and Spring Air at the time. And they all were inner springs. And they didn't even try to differentiate as a product. It was a commodity and they sold on price and terms. You know, it's 50% off and you never have to pay. That's how they, they sold it. So, we came along with our message in our magazine ads saying, hey, we have something that's a better wheel. We have something that can help you in the one-third of your life that you're sleeping. And so it's a product that can have a big impact.

• 44:54Guy Raz?

  So, okay, so you have this, this growing business. And, you know, you went from 2 million to 6 million to 14 million. First of all, at what point were you making real money as the CEO of the company?

• 45:06Speaker 01

  As far as my making money personally, I never was able to pay much of a salary because we weren't making any money until we merged in 2000.

• 45:20Guy Raz?

  The merger in 2000 was basically, like, all of the subsidiaries that were selling Tempur-Pedic. Around the world, they basically became one big company, right?

• 45:30Speaker 01

  Right, because from our standpoint, we just had a distributor agreement with the Swedish guys.

• 45:38Guy Raz?

  Ah, right.

• 45:39Speaker 01

  And the day that they canceled that agreement would be a very sad day, because we'd be out of business.

• 45:44Guy Raz?

  Essentially, they could have, they could have at any point just gone directly to Brookstone and said, "You're our exclusive distributor."

• 45:51Speaker 01

  Well, we did have a contract, but, well, that first year, they sure could have, and probably the second and third years, too, but then we probably were hitting it, but it's still a contract with a Swedish company. What if they challenged it? I mean, it was very flimsy, but what I didn't realize is, from their standpoint, they had the same problem. We were 60 to 65% of their world sales. So their company was only valuable pretty much because of that contract. So we both were very highly motivated to merge. The problem was, how do you value us?

• 46:28Guy Raz?

  Sure, yeah.

• 46:29Speaker 01

  Because they had the manufacturing plant, and they had the IP. And during the 90s, I couldn't draw much of a salary, but I, what I did do is sell little bits and pieces of equity to friends and family and stuff. So I was able to keep going based upon selling it down. So very many people I talked to who have startups will say, "Oh, I'm never going to sell controlling interests. I got to control it." Well, my philosophy is the opposite, is I'd rather have 5% of something really big than 51% of something small.

• 47:05Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 47:06Speaker 01

  And so my advice is, okay, you'd always like to control it, but you don't have to.

• 47:13Guy Raz?

  So, okay, so you merge, you end up with, you know, a certain percentage, probably, you know, 5 or about 5%, something like that?

• 47:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:23Guy Raz?

  And you are the CEO of this merged company?

• 47:26Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 47:27Guy Raz?

  And I guess, like, in early, the early 2000s, you guys took outside investment. You took a big chunk of money from a private equity firm, right?

• 47:37Speaker 01

  Right. Two private equity companies came in and bought it. And we retained our 20% for our US group.

• 47:47Guy Raz?

  I think they put in, like, $350 million or something in 2002, is that right?

• 47:51Speaker 01

  Well, there was a, in the early 2000s, after we emerged, my Swedish friends decided that they wanted to sell a partial interest because they needed it for their other companies. This is only one of their 10 or 15 foam companies.

• 48:07Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 48:07Speaker 01

  But the investors were slightly worried about having a minority interest with a private Swedish company that they don't really know that much about. And so the Swedes came back and they said, "Well, we don't want to be minority, so we'll sell the whole thing." So, anyway, that's what the 350 million was. The purpose of the transaction was to take the Swedes out.

• 48:32Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 48:33Speaker 01

  Not a ton of it went into the company, actually.

• 48:36Guy Raz?

  So, in 2003, this is no longer a Swedish company?

• 48:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, 2002, actually.

• 48:43Guy Raz?

  2002. And so you're not calling, you're not calling Michael every day anymore?

• 48:47Speaker 01

  Well, they stayed on as a consultant for, Michael did, for a couple of years, but not as much, no, certainly not. And my bosses now was the board, which was two private equity companies.

• 49:00Guy Raz?

  How did you deal with that? Did you like that?

• 49:02Speaker 01

  Well, it was a lot different because their thing was they wanted to buy into companies that they were already growing, already profitable, and they were comfortable with management. They didn't want to run it. So, they pretty much let me do my thing. There was an equity kicker involved that if we hit certain numbers, we would get another 50 million, which they didn't really think we'd hit, but we blew the doors off and we hit it quite easily the next year.

• 49:32Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 49:33Speaker 01

  It turned out to be one of the all-time great private equity deals for them. And then they took us public three months later. So, it was like, they didn't even have their money up for a year, and they made, like, 10x.

• 49:47Guy Raz?

  So, did you sell all of your ownership as well in that deal?

• 49:52Speaker 01

  Uh, no, uh, we sold a little. I did get a little bit of a payday, but I got more options. And so now I'm, now, you know, this horse guy, I'm CEO of a public company on the New York Stock Exchange.

• 50:07Guy Raz?

  My God.

• 50:08Speaker 01

  We're on Ringing the Bell there when we went public. And so this is just, to me, the total answer to a prayer.

• 50:16Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 50:17Speaker 01

  Uh, times 100.

• 50:19Guy Raz?

  So you are, uh, so now you're, you're the CEO of this public company. You are, uh, but, but still, like, what percentage of the, of the market did Tempur-Pedic control when you took the company public?

• 50:32Speaker 01

  We were probably then about, uh, you know, 5%, 6% of the US mattress market. But we were a much larger percentage of the $2,000 and up price point.

• 50:49Guy Raz?

  Because I should, we should point out here, Tempur-Pedic mattresses are very expensive compared to ordinary mattresses.

• 50:56Speaker 01

  Right, right. We are definitely in the high end, you know, luxury, whatever you want to call it. Uh, we are able to operate exclusively there because the product is just so good. It really is a breakthrough in sleep science. It adapts to your weight and your shape and your temperature. And so your mattress is adapting to you instead of forcing you to adapt to it. What we always would say is, you know, an inner spring pushes up against you, whereas this breaks away from you. So you can see that we have a better product, and that's why we're able to charge more.

• 51:33Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So, okay, so, so Bobby, I remember, uh, there was a certain point in my younger days when I bought a memory foam mattress. I didn't buy Tempur-Pedic. I couldn't afford it. I just bought one at IKEA. And it seemed like there was a point in, you know, sort of the, around 2006, 2007, when everyone got into this game. Because clearly, you, they, the, the other mattress companies just let you guys dominate the sector until they realized they could step in and take away some of your market share.

• 52:03Speaker 01

  Right. All those years back in the early, I mean, late 90s and early 2000s, I was expecting to get a call from an, from an industry player like Sealy.

• 52:15Guy Raz?

  To say, hey, we want to buy you out or something.

• 52:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. And we would have said, okay.

• 52:21Speaker 01

  But I never got the call because I believe that they thought that we would go the way of the waterbed, that this was a fad.

• 52:30Guy Raz?

  Ah.

• 52:31Speaker 01

  And that was one of the main concerns of the investors. Is this real or is it a fad? And we were able to convince them that it's real and convince the public markets that it is real because it is.

• 52:44Guy Raz?

  You stepped down, I guess, in 2006 as the CEO of the company. Did you just feel like, you know what, been there, done that, I want to kind of enjoy life a little bit and not work so hard?

• 52:58Speaker 01

  That was part of it. And the other thing was, I never really saw myself as a CEO of a public company, talking to investors and there's guys who can do this better than me, is what I knew from the start. And I, yeah, I felt like I had been in it long enough, I kind of wanted to cash in my chips and do something different.

• 53:19Guy Raz?

  Yeah. I mean, the thing that's quite amazing about your story is that your entire identity, Bobby, was about horses from the time you were a kid. Like, you loved horses, you rode them, you read the horse trades, you read the horse racing, you know, newspaper section. You went to college intending to be a trainer. You went and did this until you were 40. This was your entire life, your whole identity was around horses. And then you completely switched. I mean, you went to something that you had no natural interest in. You just liked the product.

• 53:53Speaker 01

  Right. I changed horses in the middle of the stream, you might say.

• 53:57Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 53:58Speaker 01

  And I was in a situation where all that I knew had kind of dried up and gone away, horses. And when you're 40 years old and your resume says horse, it's not like you can go and get a job at a bank.

• 54:11Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 54:12Speaker 01

  Or an insurance company. You really have to consider doing something entrepreneurial, which you were probably well-equipped for, because I think you're more equipped for that when you're 40 than when you're 20.

• 54:25Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 54:26Speaker 01

  You have to have the ability, though, and the mindset to take risks. But when you don't have anything, it's not so risky, if you think about it. And the other thing is, I think it's important to have the propensity to think big. And so, I always kind of had that. You know, my... Feeling is you've just got to keep trying. You've got to keep saying yes, and you've got to keep praying, and things will break.

• 54:54Guy Raz?

  I ask this question of everyone who comes on to the show, and it is a simple question, Bobby, which is how much of your success is because of your intelligence and your skill, and how much because of just luck?

• 55:10Speaker 01

  Well, I think a lot of it's luck. I think it's a combination of perseverance. You know, if I'm going to pat myself on the back, it's for I kept trying different things. You know, I had the ionizer business and the horses and, you know, I'm definitely not smarter than other people. I think I'm a risk taker, and I got very fortuitously matched up with a product that was significantly better than what was out there, and it was something that no one else had.

• 55:46Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 55:47Speaker 01

  So I think perseverance combined with luck is what got us where we wanted to be.

• 55:54Guy Raz?

  Bobby Trussell, co-founder of Tempur-Pedic USA. By the way, in 2012, Tempur-Pedic acquired its longtime rival, Sealy, making it one of the biggest bedding providers in the world, a company with a market cap of $2.5 billion. I'm just going to be frank with you for a moment. If you are a child, like between, you know, three and seven, Tempur-Pedic mattresses suck because you can't bounce on them. It's just, if you're a kid, you're like, oh, you got the Tempur-Pedic? You know, the wine glass doesn't even spill over. I can't jump on this thing.

• 56:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're better for sleeping.

• 56:45Guy Raz?

  And please do stick around because in just a moment, we're going to hear from you about the things you're building.

• 56:54Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks for sticking around because it's time now for how you built that. And today's story does not start in the typical way.

• 57:02Speaker 02

  A lot of people think of starting a company, they think, oh, I gotta wait for that lightning bolt moment to just hit me, like that amazing insight that I'm just like, oh, my gosh, I gotta build a company around this.

• 57:12Guy Raz?

  But that is not what happened to Chris Ranifors. He did not have that lightning bolt moment. What he did have was more of a restless itch. He and his friend Harrison were feeling bored at their nine to five jobs in Louisville, Kentucky, and they knew they wanted to launch a business. They just had no idea what to sell.

• 57:32Speaker 02

  So we would actually walk up and down the halls of Walmart and say, okay, what if we took that toy and smashed it with that home object? What would we get? And what if we took that thing and tweaked that thing? And what if we smashed this with that and now with this?

• 57:45Guy Raz?

  And on one of those brainstorming trips to Walmart, they wound up in the garden section.

• 57:50Speaker 02

  And they had a pretty big selection of birdhouses.

• 57:53Guy Raz?

  And Chris looked at those birdhouses, but he didn't think about birds. Instead, he thought back to how he and his dad used to build little houses for bats, literally a place for bats to hang out and sleep in the backyard, which I know, sounds kind of creepy.

• 58:10Speaker 02

  50% of people out there will think, oh, bats, horrible, scary. The other 50% will think, huh, bats.

• 58:17Guy Raz?

  But whichever camp you're in, Chris wants you to know that bats, they get kind of a bum rap. The vast majority of them do not want to bite you and do not carry rabies. In fact, in many places, bats are in trouble. They're actually running out of habitat. So a nice little wooden house in the suburbs could be the perfect refuge. And as a bonus, they will also eat your mosquitoes.

• 58:41Speaker 02

  A common bat will eat up to 1,000 mosquito-sized insects in an hour, and that makes them one of nature's greatest forms of natural pest control.

• 58:49Guy Raz?

  So that was it. Chris and Harrison. And had their idea. They were going to sell wooden bat houses.

• 58:55Speaker 02

  So now that we found this concept, we started digging further into the bat house market, this very niche and particular space.

• 59:03Guy Raz?

  Who knew that the bat house market was even a space at all? But clearly it was.

• 59:09Speaker 02

  And we started noticing that most bat houses on the market, they lack proper ventilation. They're too small. They don't have proper gripping for the animal to hang on. Or they just don't look good.

• 59:19Guy Raz?

  So Chris and Harrison designed a prototype of a wooden bat house with grooves inside that the bats could grip onto. And then they launched an Indiegogo campaign and were kind of amazed when about 500 people signed up to buy bat houses.

• 59:34Speaker 02

  We asked them, why did you buy this thing? And I think about two thirds of them said, like, I hate mosquitoes, but I don't want to buy pesticides. I hate pesticides even more than I hate mosquitoes.

• 59:44Guy Raz?

  So the two partners found a manufacturer in Missouri and they shipped out their first bat houses in January. And you should check out a picture of these things. They're made of red cedar. They attach right under the roof of your house. They hold up to 100 bats and they look, well, sort of like Scandinavian furniture.

• 1:00:01Speaker 02

  If you get a bat house that's beautiful, you're going to want to put it up on the side of your house, right in the middle of your yard. And then when you have your friends over for a barbecue and they come over and they say, hey, what the heck is that thing? You got to say, oh, yeah, it's my bat house. And they're like, bat house? What? And you say, no, no, no, like, let me tell you about bats.

• 1:00:18Guy Raz?

  Chris and Harrison's company is called Bat B and B. And since the beginning of the year, their company has provided potential homes to over 100,000 bats. If you want to hear more about Bat B and B or hear previous episodes, head to our podcast page, howibuiltthis.npr.org. And of course, if you want to tell us your story, go to build.npr.org. And thanks so much for listening to the show this week. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And while you're there, please do give us a review. You can also write to us at [email protected]. And if you want to send a tweet, it's at howibuiltus.

• 1:00:58Guy Raz?

  Our show was produced this week by Rund Abdelfatah with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. Thanks also to J.C. Howard, Norcutti, Neva Grant, Sanaz Meshkhanpour, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is Mia Venkat. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This from NPR.

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