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I find that white sofas only exist in staged homes.
I mean, yes, some people have them, but...
Like people have white sofas, A have no small children, or their children are so well behaved or they always wear latex gloves, or they have no pets or they don't care about red wine.
Have you ever heard of slipcovers?
Welcome to How I Built This a show about innovators entrepreneurs, idealists and the stories behind the movements they built.
I'm Guy Raz and on the show today how a frustrated screenwriter brought her storytelling to real estate and built Meredith Bear Home one of the biggest staging companies in the industry.
In the late 1990s, something subtle but seismic started to shift in American real estate.
For decades, buying a home meant spending your weekends driving from open house to open house, picking up paper flyers and trying to remember which layout belonged to which address.
But suddenly, homes were being listed on the Internet.
And that changed everything.
Because, for the first time, Buyers could tour dozens of homes in a single sitting, scrolling through bedrooms and backyards long before they ever stepped inside.
And with that shift came a new challenge.
An empty room in an empty house simply didn't sell the dream, and it didn't photograph well.
So a new idea, fairly a concept at the time, began to emerge.
It was called staging, the art of giving a home space Just enough life to spark imagination.
Trendy or artful furniture that could show what it would be like to live in that house.
And that staged furniture also helped in another way.
It tended to increase the sale price, sometimes by hundreds of thousands of dollars over asking.
And one of the people who helped transform staging from a clever trick into an entire industry was Meredith Baird.
Meredith discovered the idea almost by accident in 1998.
She was 50 years old, frustrated with her career as a screenwriter in Hollywood and pouring her energy into a house she was renting.
She furnished it with tasteful pieces.
She added art and plants to make the space come alive.
So alive that when the owner showed the home to a potential buyer, it sold immediately.
And almost as quickly...
Meredith realized she might be onto something.
Today, her company, Meredith Bear Home, is one of the best known staging firms in real estate.
But in this episode we're also gonna learn about Meredith's pre-staging years, because her life story is a story in itself, almost like a movie.
She was a teenage mom who was forced to give up her child.
She acted in Pepsi commercials, appeared in cigarette ads.
She wrote for Penthouse.
She dated Patrick Stewart.
The staging work just happened by chance.
It wasn't supposed to be a business.
But Meredith eventually turned her brand, Meredith Bear Home, into a major force in real estate.
Now.
Long before she built the business, Meredith lived the early part of her life in one of the most unusual places in America, a notorious maximum security prison.
From about six and a half till I was almost 13, I lived on the prison grounds at San Quentin.
Beautiful piece of real estate.
It's incredible, right?
Anybody who knows it knows it's right on the water in Marin County.
It's beautiful around the bay, but of course, it's a Very scary place.
Tell me how, why were you living and why did you grow up on the grounds of San Quentin?
My father was an associate warden there.
We lived on the grounds because we could get very close to free rent.
And there was a one-room schoolhouse there where I went from first through eighth grade.
Wow.
And we had to walk sort of from my end of the prison down across this long path that looked down at inmates exercising in the yard.
And then we arrived at the other end of the prison where the schoolhouse was.
And we were just a bunch of kids hanging out, playing tetherball, baseball.
And I was usually the only person in my grade.
So I was clearly the smartest person in my grade.
So do you remember, I don't know just, the security measures that had to be taken just to secure your I mean Your home, for example?
Right,
Because in case there was like a prison break or somebody escaped, was it, do you remember?
It was the safest place to live.
Who was going to steal my bicycle?
You know, it was pretty much go out and play and come home when it's dark, that kind of a childhood.
And I felt very safe.
There were guards all over the place.
I mean, the one thing I do remember is that when we came home, if we went into the city or went into San Rafael when we came home, they would check our car to make sure we weren't taking any stowaways.
Yeah.
And there was one instance where my next door neighbors he was also an associate warden were tied up and an inmate got oh I don't know a few blocks before he was caught.
Wow.
And I guess you were there until, as you say, until about eighth grade, and then you moved to Iowa because your dad got a bigger job in that state's prison system.
Is that right?
Yes.
He became head of the prison system in Iowa.
He was director of corrections for Iowa.
And we lived in Des Moines.
Yeah.
So your dad, he was running the prison and your mom was kind of, her project was flipping homes?
Well, she did.
My mother was an interesting woman.
When we were living at San Quentin, she was bored out of her mind.
So she got a law degree in And then she used to drive around looking for something to buy.
My father had inherited some money and he was quickly losing it all in his investments.
So my mother took what was left and bought a thousand acre ranch up in gold country.
And we would go up every weekend and kind of stay in this little cabin up there.
This is in California.
Yes.
Three miles from Coloma where gold was discovered in the 1800s.
In the Sierra Nevadas.
Yep.
That's right.
Sierra foothills.
And so then when we moved to Des Moines, my mom took the worst acreage.
We had like 50 bad acres and traded it for this mansion with 13 bedrooms.
So that was she liked real estate.
All right.
You go to college in the mid 60s because you're going to be like a young woman right at this kind of moment in time when there's all these huge cultural changes in America.
And you went to the University of Colorado.
Yes.
And what was that like in the mid 60s?
Was it?
I mean, I think I'm thinking 65 is the beginning of like, the free speech movement at Berkeley and then late 60s.
It's crazy, right?
Yeah.
Was the University of Colorado more conservative or was it did it feel like things were changing?
Oh, things were definitely changing.
I mean, certainly by 67 or so.
Everybody was going to sit-ins.
We were all just – and it really changed dramatically.
I mean, I pledged a sorority my freshman year, but by my junior year, I was a hippie.
And while you're in college, I guess you did a little bit of sort of versions of what your mom was doing, which was not necessarily flipping houses, but I guess you kind of got involved in like helping sort of people decorate their homes.
Tell me a little bit about what you would do for extra money.
Oh, so first of all, I had always had jobs, you know, dress store, travel agency.
And then whatever money I could save, I started flipping houses.
And at that time in Boulder you could buy a little house for 2000 and I'd flip it and sell it for 8000.
And all I would do really is to make it look cuter.
I might add shutters.
I might paint the door a nice interesting color and take my furniture out from wherever I was and put it in there.
So I was sort of doing that without giving it much thought when I was in college.
Right.
Actually I've skipped a few things, because actually what happened is I got pregnant my freshman year in college.
And my parents made me give up my son.
They were pretty brutal to me.
And it was a pretty awful emotionally experience, just the way my parents reacted to the whole thing.
Sorry, i'm just to say you gave up your son for adoption, or yes they okay, they did.
Well, they did.
Yeah, i was not really given a choice.
I can't imagine how traumatic that experience was.
When you were a young woman, you're pregnant and your parents demand that you give the child up for adoption um, Did you ever reconnect with that person?
Well, as a matter of fact, I adopted him last year because both of his parents have long passed.
And he's now a grown man.
He's in his 50s.
He's a grown man.
He's in his 50s.
Yeah.
So at one point, I hired a detective and I found him.
And I corresponded with his mom and she asked me to stay away.
And I did until he turned 18.
And then just send him a note if he ever had any questions. here's how to reach me.
What an incredible story.
And so now you have obviously a relationship with him.
I do.
I do.
We're very close now.
We had our ups and downs over the years because I think he never really forgave me for quite some time for giving him up.
I think he thought things would be great with me, but I don't think it would have been necessarily because I was so young.
Yeah.
You were like 20 years old, 21, maybe 19.
I was 18 when I got pregnant and 19 when I gave birth.
Wow.
Right.
Okay.
So I just want to go back to your time in college for a moment because, as I understand it, I think right before you graduated, you met a guy named Jerry Bruckheimer who would go on to become obviously like a legendary movie producer, American Gigolo, Top Gun and Pirates of the Caribbean and tons of other movies.
But when you met him, I think he was just starting out.
I think he was making TV ads, right?
Yes.
He's an ad guy and came up to me and asked me to be in a Pepsi commercial.
And I went, yeah, right.
Was Jerry Bruckheimer, what was he doing in Boulder, Colorado?
They were scouting for talent.
All right.
He was an ad guy and he was a young guy.
And he finds you and he says, hey, you look pretty good.
I mean, were you like a He thought you were cute.
I was cute.
Yeah.
And I had really long hair, you know, down to my waist, practically like a cute hippie, you know, with mascara, a mascara kind of hippie.
And so I did, I think, three or four different commercials for them over a couple of weeks.
Wow.
OK, so you are, so you do these Pepsi commercials, and they were filmed in Boulder, like on campus or in town.
Oh, yeah.
All over in the mountains.
I mean they had me riding a horse, you know, drinking water out of a stream being twirled around by a guy with children in front of a campfire.
It was all kinds of very Colorado situations.
Right.
OK, so you do those ads and I guess you decide to relocate to New York City, not to pursue acting necessarily.
You just go to live there, right?
Yeah.
I ended up packing up a U-Haul and driving to New York and living there.
But I needed a job.
So I looked in the Village Voice and it said, British Periodical needs editorial assistant.
So I went for an interview and it was Penthouse Magazine.
Okay.
And there was this six foot four man with a booming voice.
He said, I'll let you know.
And I got the job.
Okay.
So this is the early 70s, 70s, 71s.
You get to New York and you get a job as an editorial assistant with Penthouse Magazine.
First of all, I mean, it wasn't even Playboy.
It was Penthouse, which was way more explicit.
I mean, first of all, what did your parents think?
You're like, hey, I got a job.
It's called Penthouse Magazine.
Like I can't imagine calling my parents when I'm 22 and saying hey, I'm working at this place called Penthouse Magazine.
I mean, because it's a Pornographic magazine.
How did people respond?
Okay.
Well, first I should tell you that Jim Good used to be with Playboy.
And Jim Good was the editor who hired you?
Yes.
And he created the Playboy interview.
So he was an intellectual.
So, I mean, my dad thought it was fabulous.
Your dad was happy that you were working at Penthouse?
Yes.
He thought it was cool.
And my baby – my younger brother, who was 12 years.
My junior was in boarding school and I would send him a subscription and he loved it.
But your job was not to like vet photographs.
You focused on the writing.
But was the writing racy?
Was it sexual or was it just like regular?
Not really, no.
What kind of articles were in there?
Articles that guys who wanted to look at the pictures –
This was the old saying back in the day where people say oh, I subscribe to Playboy for the articles.
That's right.
And Penthouse was sort of, I would say, probably a poor man's version of that.
Right.
And I was really working on trying to...
Fine writers and articles that were interesting on all kinds of subjects, whether it was cars or whatever, would be interesting to the men who'd want to read that magazine.
And that would justify their being able to have it at home and look at the pictures.
And then, Guccione wanted to put me in the magazine.
He wanted me to be naked in the magazine.
This is Bob Guccione Jr. who founded the magazine, right?
Yeah.
And...
I said, are you kidding me?
I would never do that.
Nobody I know would speak to me again.
I mean, I was a feminist.
Yeah, probably a good move on your part.
My father would have had a heart attack.
All right, but you decide, of course, this is not the right place for me.
You're not going to pose in the magazine.
I think when I said no, I experienced a little bit of being just treated.
I could see I was headed down a road I didn't want to go down.
Right.
Today, it probably would not pass muster.
There'd probably be a lot of lawsuits, sexual harassment lawsuits.
But back then, I guess, it was just a different time.
Okay.
So you decide to leave.
And Jim Good, who's your mentor editor there, he helps you get an appointment with Eileen Ford.
This is the Ford Modeling Agency.
Right.
Right.
So you wanted to be a model, but not a nude model, but you thought I should...
Maybe I'll do some modeling to make money.
More for commercials.
I mean, Jim was saying, gee, you did these commercials.
You should be doing more of them.
And with commercials, the key was to learn to smile while you're talking about the item that you're selling.
So I kind of got that down.
And so in the course of time, I did about 100 television commercials.
And also I read ads like for Winston and Kent's and Benson and Hedges.
Oh, yes.
Cigarette ads.
Yeah.
So they started to also send me out on print.
So I was like the Winston girl, the Kent girl.
I went down a rabbit hole looking at cigarette ads from the 70s last night, looking to see if I could find you.
And you must have some of them.
Oh, I do.
But it's kind of amazing.
The ads are totally nuts.
You can't even imagine a magazine printing them today.
They're literally – beautiful glamorous, healthy looking people with a cigarette hanging out of their mouths and the caption would read like if it weren't for winston, i wouldn't smoke, or you know like.
It's just ridiculous.
You know just the most ridiculous things.
Just these healthy vibrant, flourishing people smoking cigarettes in these ads.
That's what they wanted.
They in fact, with my winston ads, the i government made them tape my ads down because I always looked young for my age.
They thought I looked 16.
And that it was just wrong for my image to encourage children to smoke.
So loud.
Alright, so you're you're in New York, and I guess in the mid 70s, you decide to move out to LA.
And I have to imagine you go out there thinking hey, I'm getting some work in commercials, maybe I can break into TV.
Yes.
In fact, well, actually, the agents sort of push you there.
I mean, once they see you doing something, they start sending you on auditions.
And so I then would get parts in movie.
I got some parts in movies.
You did Chips, I think.
You did Happy Days.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I was on the very last episode of Happy Days.
With a speaking part?
Oh, yeah.
I can't remember the girl on it.
Joanie.
Joanie.
Joanie.
Yeah.
So they made me look just like Joanie.
And then they break up.
Chachi and Joni and they walk into a restaurant and they're both with someone who looks like the other one.
Yes.
And so, all right, you were having a little bit of success, but it doesn't sound like you were really breaking through as an actor.
You know, I never liked it.
I never was particularly talented.
But when I started reading the scripts for television and for movies, I started thinking you know, I could write this stuff.
This isn't like brain surgery or anything.
Right.
So I decided I wanted to write my first script.
And this was based on this idea that what you were saying was just not that great.
And you had experience as a writer.
And you thought, hey, I could do this.
I could be a screenwriter.
I didn't take a class or anything.
But everybody found it so interesting that I grew up at San Quentin Prison.
It is, yeah.
So I thought, hmm, OK.
And I wrote a movie called Prisoners about this girl who grew up.
Her father was the warden.
And about her friendship that she formed with this inmate that worked at their house as a gardener.
And what happened to the script?
Well, I sold it for a quarter of a million dollars in 1980.
That's about a million dollars in today's money.
That's a lot of money.
That's correct.
It was a lot of money.
And initially, Adrienne Lyne was going to direct it.
And we had people like Richard Gere who wanted to play the inmate.
And Diane Lane was going to play the... the girl.
And then you know what happens in Hollywood is then that executive leaves and then the project gets dumped.
And it ended up being purchased and made in New Zealand.
But they completely rewrote my script and it wasn't what I wrote.
And when they finally let me see it, I went to the bathroom and threw up.
Wow.
That being said, just as an aside, I mean, you're like 33, 34 years old.
You've made a million bucks on a script.
That's pretty awesome.
I mean, equivalent to today's money.
No, no.
It was unbelievable.
Yes.
I bought a house.
I bet.
And you probably thought, OK, I'm well on my way.
And you did.
I mean, this begins a long period of time where you become a screenwriter and you had some success.
You were able to sell screenplays.
Yeah, I pretty much was paid for everything I ever wrote.
Right.
And I think, I mean, you even made a film that starred George Clooney, Unbecoming Age.
It's a very obscure George Clooney movie, but early George Clooney.
When I met him, I called every friend I had and I said, you've got to go sign up this guy.
He was just the most charming, funny guy you'd ever meet.
You could just see that he was going to be a movie star.
All right.
So you are, again, you've got this... burgeoning career as a writer and this is your this is what you're doing in life i mean this you're in your 30s and you probably i would imagine you're thinking great this is you know maybe one day i'll win an academy award and i'll get recognized for my work right that's the aspiration of course of course i think that's everybody's aspiration where in truth you know there are a few people that make it in hollywood and most people are just working writers like i was all right This is just another interesting, crazy part of your life because you are writing screenplays.
You're interacting with all these celebrities, right?
I mean, George Clooney or Tatum O'Neill, Sally Field.
I think you even dated Michael Crichton, the author, for some time.
In the early 90s, you are set up on a blind date with Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Patrick Stewart.
That's right.
You know, I open the door and here's this bald guy.
And by the way, I had never watched Star Trek.
And then, you know, I sat down and started talking to him and I went.
He's actually very handsome and very charming.
And we fell in love.
I mean, this is, I looked it up and there's paparazzi pictures of the two of you together and, you know, red carpet photos.
And this was at the height of his fame.
I mean, well, he continued to be famous.
But I mean, Star Trek Next Generation was a massive show.
He was a... highly recognized person.
I found it often annoying because like we'd be out to dinner and everyone felt like they could come and just interrupt and say could I have your autograph?
Or I loved you and this and that and that and that.
The other thing for me.
It was the only time in my entire life I gave up myself for those few years to be with him because he was making movies all over the world.
I traveled with him and so I really put my career on the back burner, and then We started living together.
And then a few weeks after this, he told me to get out, leave.
Did it come as a surprise?
Were you stunned?
I was stunned.
You know, Patrick wasn't really successful until his late 40s.
And all of a sudden, bam, he was a star.
Huge.
And so he, I think he had a lot of women who wanted to sleep with him because he was a movie star.
And I think he wanted to kind of have it all.
And then I think once he had done a bunch of that, he wanted me back.
And I said, not going to happen.
So you were part of that ride.
You were on that kind of roller coaster with him.
I was.
And it was, you know, he was wonderful when he was wonderful.
Let's just put it that way.
But that was when I rented a little house in Brentwood.
And I
I had to figure out how to get back into the writing world.
And my heart wasn't in it.
Was it hard to break back into it?
I mean... It was very hard.
You know, Hollywood changes so rapidly, the people, the positions.
And, you know, I think that screenwriting was ultimately not gratifying at all for me.
I just stopped liking being in a room by myself sitting there in front of the computer all day in my head.
And I was in my later 40s at this point.
Being a woman and also being that age.
Just what I wanted to write wasn't what the young guys that were execs at the studios wanted to make.
Yeah, makes sense.
I mean, I don't think that story's changed much.
So you are, I mean, now at this point, you're on your own. own again, right?
Renting this house in Brentwood.
And I guess not sure if you're going to continue trying to do screenwriting.
And this is actually the time that you wind up starting your staging business, which I guess at first was just sort of an accident, right?
Like it just kind of happened.
Yeah.
I found myself fixing up this little house I was renting and Rearranging the furniture.
And then I went out and bought about 150 huge pots and grew trees and plants and flowers.
And I just wanted to be in the garden and make things pretty.
And the owner of the house I was leasing came to town.
This is about three years I'd been there.
And he said, oh, my God, I love what you've done.
I want to show it to my friend.
And then he called me the next day and said, you're going to need to get out.
I just sold the house.
Wow.
Because you had made it so nice.
This is, I think, around 97, 98.
So you were just turning 50.
I had turned 50.
Yeah.
How was your, I'm just curious, how was your financial situation at that point?
Were you okay?
I mean, because you had done years of screenwriting.
Yes, I was just okay.
You know, I was making a living.
I wasn't rich by any means.
So I rented a room in a friend's house.
And it was a shock.
I was devastated.
Devastated by just everything going on in your life?
Yeah, I kind of felt nowhere.
You know, I'm 50.
I'm not going to raise children.
I'm sick of relationships.
I'm sick of my career.
It was just kind of a really low point for me.
And I had a friend who was a neighbor of mine back in the 70s.
And he was an actor.
We were all actors living close to each other back in the day.
And he now was an interior designer and he'd built building houses.
And I had all these potted plants.
And I said how about I put all my plants in the courtyard and someone who's looking at the house can see how beautiful it could be?
And then I said, also, I have all this furniture.
And he went.
You know, I was going to ask you if I could borrow some of your furniture for the house.
So the house sold in a matter of days for half a million over asking to the head of one of the studios.
Using your furniture and your potted plants.
Yes.
So let's just pause for a second.
I want to ask you about your sort of taste.
I mean, like, how did you pick furniture?
Did you just...
Have an eye for really beautiful pieces?
Did you buy used pieces, new pieces?
Do you know something?
Way back when I was in Iowa, when I was 12 or 13... A kid, yeah.
Yeah, and my mom would buy these big houses.
I would be with her and I'd say, oh, I just saw a picture of a table.
That's what we should put in our breakfast room.
I don't know how I knew that.
And in New York, I had... I don't know, I'd go into a thrift store and buy something...
Every place I ever had, everyone loved what I did.
Everyone always had said, would you do this for me?
Would you help me?
I always said yes.
And I never took a course, anything like that.
And so it's just something that I enjoyed.
I never took it very seriously.
All right.
But this was, I mean, because I'm trying to imagine this is the late 90s.
You're still your whole identity, the way you think of yourself. is I am a screenwriter.
Correct.
I was a writer.
But because there has to be a transition point, how did you go to doing another house?
Did somebody ask you?
Yeah.
A broker who had come through the house that sold in a few days said would you do this for me?
And I said, sure.
And then I started to say okay now, if I can live in this house, I'll give you a better deal, because I was now homeless.
OK, but still at this point, you're not thinking, hey, this could be an interesting career.
No, not at all.
No, not at all.
You're still thinking I'm just doing this as kind of a side thing.
Yeah.
But still working on screenplays.
And it gives me a place to live.
All right.
You know, the first house, you know, this broker said to me, listen, no one's going to buy it.
So you can live there and you'll probably be there for ages.
Even though it was on the market, this house?
Well, no, it was about to go on the market.
It was about to go on the market, but you could move your stuff in and make it your own and you could have free rent there.
Not only free rent, they'll pay me to bring my furniture there.
All right, so it's a pretty good deal.
You're going to have about a year of free rent.
What happens?
It sells the first month.
Wow.
Now, so another broker says, listen, I have a house you can move right into under the same terms.
It's a weird house, and they're going to have a lot of trouble finding a buyer.
So you'll be able to be there for a long time.
Just come and put your furniture there.
Right, and they'll pay me to do that, and I can live there.
And did they call it staging or no?
Okay, what happened was the broker started to call it staging.
Had you heard that word before?
Never, never.
All right, my understanding is that at this time, you were asked—
To possibly work on writing an adaptation of a novel.
This is Barbra Streisand's production company.
Right.
A script for this potential movie.
What happened?
I had to say no.
I had to decide that I was going to go in this other direction.
How did you do that?
I mean, because...
In Hollywood and it's in any industry, and I come from the world of journalism, right where I remember.
When I left journalism, you know people were like what?
You know, now I do podcasts around business.
But the people who are in certain worlds, they can't see beyond it.
You're leaving screenwriting to do what?
To stage houses?
Like, did a part of you feel like, God, I'm a failure?
Or was part of you worried about that?
Well, no.
I mean, I...
I had a lot of times in my life where I felt like a failure, certainly after having had a child.
And definitely in the film industry.
I often felt like a failure, even when I was fired off the script that I wrote and sold for so much money.
But you know, now it was just kind of like I take this cup and I move it from here to here and they think it's brilliant.
This feels good.
I think I'm going to do this.
When we come back in just a moment, how Meredith gets a van, opens a warehouse and begins to build an unexpected side hustle into a business.
Stay with us.
I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This.
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Hey, welcome back to How I Built This.
I'm Guy Raz.
So it's 1998 and Meredith has left the film industry behind to start a home staging business.
And as word spreads, she starts doing more than just one house at a time.
And, you know, I needed to now buy a van.
I started driving the van myself.
And by the way, I would go to Home Depot and pick up some workers and I had to buy all kinds of supplies and things i never thought i'd be a girl who'd own those things you know i just yeah and if you were standing there i'd ask you if you liked if you'd like to work with me because i mean i needed help yeah let's dive into the to this business for a moment because you did not invent staging i mean you you really popularized it and you turned it into helped turn into a huge industry but it had existed it just wasn't as common like they're mostly when you go buy a house before staging became a common thing, you go and look at an empty house, it was just an empty house, empty walls, empty rooms, and the person would have to imagine what it could look like.
Now it was hey, maybe if we make it look like how it could look like as a home, that could make it more appealing, which in fact it does.
How did you like when you started out, right?
And you'd walk into an empty house with nothing on the walls, nothing on the floors, just a house.
How did you, in your mind's eye, start to see what to get, where to go?
Like, oh, a rug here, a large sofa here, leather, no, a leather sofa.
Let's put a print on this wall.
Let's put a console here.
Like, how did you start to picture that in your brain?
Well, in the beginning, I just had what I had.
And I had to make that work.
I learned quickly to ask to get paid up front.
And to this day, I'll only do the job if I'm paid up front, because then I had to run around and buy things and I would shop the way I always shopped, you know, whether it was estate sales or thrift stores or whatever.
I even at times borrowed.
I met a rug dealer and I said listen, I need beautiful rugs and, if you will, let me put your rugs in my house.
And I said no one's living there, this is for display and And people are wanting to buy my furniture.
I will put them in touch with you and you can make the sale.
So basically, my homes will be showrooms for you.
And this one gentleman gave me I mean probably at one point, a million dollars of rugs to use on consignment.
And so you would basically get paid up front.
And how much would it cost?
Let's say, I guess, range, but roughly.
I named some big numbers right off the bat.
I was doing big houses.
So maybe $30,000 to install and then a monthly rent if I wasn't living there.
Meredith, how did you know what to charge people?
Because essentially you were a consultant, right?
You were consulting people on how to stage their homes and you were offering to rent them furniture during that time.
But it's hard for people to figure out, like, what do I charge?
First of all, I thought what I'm doing is going to sell their house, and it's going to sell it fast.
And so I figure their monthly mortgage has to be X, And every month that it's on the market they're paying that.
So do they want to sell it in one month or do they want to sell it in one year?
So I kind of took that number and played with it.
You know it's a bargain if you pay me 30000 to do this because it's Otherwise it isn't going to sell right away and you're just going to be paying the monthly net.
Right.
And you're going to sell this house at a premium, so you're actually going to make the money back and more.
Yes.
So in the early days would you rent a U-Haul truck and just load up the truck and then unload it into a house and then return the U-Haul truck?
Yes.
In the very early days, that's what I did.
And then I bought my first van.
And then I bought my first truck.
I mean, I now have 36 trucks, but I never thought I'd be a girl who had 36 trucks.
Yeah.
And where did you store the furniture in the early days?
Did you get a warehouse right away?
In the beginning, I would store the furniture in the garages of the homes I had staged.
My clients did not appreciate that.
And then at one point I actually rented a little store on fourth street in Santa Monica that I used as my office.
And then everything that I didn't have in a house at the time was for sale.
If anyone wanted to come in and buy it.
And so that was my storage.
And then I finally got my first.
I went to a warehouse and I rented a thousand square feet of space, which quickly turned to 5000 square feet.
Wow.
Tell me a little bit about your aesthetic.
I mean, you know, there's all kinds of looks, especially in Southern California.
You know, there's that sort of that canyon kind of rustic California modern look.
There's mid-century modern.
There's the farmhouse look.
There's, you know, more of an Ikea style.
I mean...
She was a collector of everything.
She used to drag us to antique stores and to yard sales, and we hated it.
But when she passed, my brothers and I divided everything up and then all this stuff in her garage.
I just said could I take it?
Because I've just started doing some of this stuff, staging.
So I had my mother's mid-century furniture, and I had a bunch of her antiques.
So I had a little of everything here, And then I started manufacturing pieces.
I had an upholsterer move into my warehouse and he started making furniture.
I just started to buy antiques, this that, whatever the look was, whatever the house needed, I just started to buy it.
So I can do almost any style because I have a little of everything.
So it wasn't necessarily a specific style.
Style.
It depends.
The one thing that was specific is the white sofas.
I always found that if I had white sofas, they were neutral and I could bring in all kinds of different art and different looks and it would all work.
So that was one of the things that I started out doing.
And I can see that all the people who have since become stagers do the same thing.
I find that white sofas only exist in stage tombs.
I mean yes, some people have them, but people have white sofas.
A have no small children, or their children are so well-behaved, or they always wear latex gloves, or they have no pets, or they don't care about red wine.
Have you ever heard of slipcovers?
Yeah, but that's weird.
You throw them in the washer with a little bleach.
Yeah, but when you have people over, you want them to see the sofa, and it's a white sofa sofa.
You know, we have a white rug.
I don't know why.
We have two dogs, two cats and two teenagers.
I mean, it's nuts.
But I get it.
Like when you go into a staged home, you look at it like, wow, this is awesome.
I want to live here because there's no crap.
There's no like stuff on the refrigerator and just like accumulated junk in the kids' rooms from all the you know camps they went to and the water bottles.
It's an idealized lifestyle.
Oh, man.
Yeah.
So for kids' rooms, even from the day one, we would do that idealized kids' room.
Instead of 50,000 toys all over the place, we would have two or three really cute toys.
Yeah.
The only kids who live like that are like the royal family kids.
Right, right.
Yeah.
When I first started, I would do all kinds of props.
I wanted to make people laugh or just feel good when they walked into a house.
So I would like, With the bedroom, I'd throw negligee on the bed and I'd throw high heels across the floor and do little scenarios like that.
I think, having been a screenwriter, I sort of like making it up just to give people, give them a chuckle.
Yeah, in fact, I had almost my whole wardrobe in different closets in my staged houses initially.
I remember getting a phone call from this woman on the freeway saying I just loved that scene black dress in the such and such a house and I've got to have it.
One of the things that I'm curious about is how you make a house.
Look, you know, you get a house.
It's okay inside.
How do you make it so that a person coming in to look at the house is like, wow, this is amazing.
You make the house what it wants to be.
I think we always imagined who was going to buy it most likely.
But we also wanted to open the aperture to make this house appeal to as many people as possible.
So we always encourage a paint to the homeowner.
Invest in that, but don't build a new kitchen.
The first thing I did when I came into my house is rip out the kitchen they had just put in to help sell it.
So it's really what does this house wants to be and how do I give it the love it deserves to show it at its best?
Part of what you do also like manipulates not the right word but you you're touching or you're kind of trying to connect with somebody's psychology.
For sure.
It's sort of like a sales rep when they're selling you something.
They understand human psychology so well and they already have a script and they know what you're going to say.
And then the script points them into the next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing, until you're finally like OK, all right, fine.
I'll take that 85 percent off deal that you've offered me.
But in fact, they knew you were going to get to that point.
In your case, you are thinking about who's going to buy this house and what's going to appeal to them.
And so there are like, I don't like the word tricks, but there are like kind of tricks.
Like you will have dried pasta next to the stove.
You'll have like an open cookbook in the kitchen on a beautiful cutting board, right?
Exactly.
All the things that make a house feel like a home.
Obviously, what we want when they open the door, whatever they see, is the most important thing.
That moment is when you fall in love.
Starting with the entry, they want to see, oh, that's exactly where I put my keys.
You know, you have the bowl there for their keys.
They can say, oh, that is where we would sit.
That's where I would sit with friends.
When did you first, I mean, you kind of launched this in 1998 as a business.
And You probably have a steady stream of jobs.
But at what point do you remember it being like I can't do this alone?
I've got to hire some full-time people to join me.
I can't just go to Home Depot and get some day laborers every week.
Well, I would say probably within a year, I had to have regular people that were working for me.
And in the beginning, I had kind of put together a crew, but so it took me a while to figure out.
Honestly, managing people and figuring out and hiring people, I think is the hardest.
That's hard.
And now also toward the end of 99, I was thinking I can't keep moving every single month.
I just can't do it.
So I started to try to look for a house to buy.
And I figured that I could take my pension that I had as a writer and take an early retirement.
So I had some money to put down on a house.
So I started making offers and it was just, the houses were just flying off the market at that time.
Bids, bids, bids, bids coming from everywhere.
And I finally, in the spring of 2000, I bought a house.
And so with my crew, when I wasn't installing, I had them doing work at my house.
Yeah.
One of the things that I read about was that, and this is very common, right?
You're starting a business and it kind of happens and in your case, really happened unexpectedly.
There's a lot of especially in high regulation states like California, there's a lot of compliance that you have to deal with as a business owner.
And I guess like three, four years into running this company, you get contacted by the State Board of Equalization because they're saying you have not been charging tax to on the work you're doing, even though you probably were paying tax on your wages.
Tell me what happened.
Oh, it was devastating.
I was supposed to be charging tax on rent.
On renting of the furniture that you were staging.
Okay.
Yep.
You know, I had no business background.
I mean, I didn't know any of this.
So it was really a scary moment.
Actually, the very same day I got this news, I found out I had colon cancer.
Oh, wow.
So it was a big double blow.
This is in about 2001.
Yes, around there.
So it was like coming in every direction.
But you know, I ended up getting this wonderful guy who came in literally to my house where I was living and went through boxes with me of paperwork to help me find everything I needed, negotiated with the state for me to pay over time.
And then I went and had a foot of my colon taken out and went back to work a few days later.
When we come back in just a moment, Meredith takes her business to reality TV but then decides to pull the plug.
Stay with us.
I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This.
Hey, welcome back to How I Built This.
I'm Guy Raz.
So it's the early 2000s, and Meredith Baer has recovered from a bout with colon cancer.
And through much of the next decade, her home staging business keeps growing.
Oh, it at least doubled every year for the first 10 years.
Okay, so that's pretty great.
Yeah, I mean, no, it grew and grew and grew and grew.
What happened is the LA Times Sunday did a story on me.
And then the New York Times, all of a sudden we're getting phone calls from Connecticut, Manhattan.
So we open up shop there.
And then, you know, people want us to come to Florida.
So we opened up there.
And when you opened up a new location, how would you do that?
Because you're in L.A.
It's your name on the companies.
And I'm sure a lot of these designers want you specifically there.
How would you open an office?
How would you identify the people who could run it and manage it?
I think like, for example, with New York, because that was our first secondary location.
You know, I went there, I interviewed some people, I found someone I liked, I walked and I found a little warehouse.
I started to fly out there myself and do the installs initially.
And then I found some designers.
How did you find people who had a good aesthetic?
I found people that I thought had, I liked the way they put their own homes together.
And it wouldn't be, I wasn't hiring interior designers.
No one's going to walk around in high heels and a cute dress and do staging.
It's hard work.
So I just started to ask people and give them a shot.
And if they were good, I kept them.
And then I'd ask them, do you know other people like you?
You know a lot of companies we talked to, their sort of defining moments are like the early 2000s.
If it's a dot-com company, right.
There's a bust.
And then the financial crisis of 2008.
And for many companies, it just, it was really tough.
In your case, it actually forced you to expand your business, to actually focus on because you were doing high-end homes, but I guess during the financial crisis, there was an opportunity to charge less and And to do you know, sort of more modest homes, because people needed to sell their homes.
Yes.
Although we did find that the more modest homes weren't as profitable.
And sometimes the clients would be even more demanding.
So we came up with a minimum for a job that we would do.
I think it's $10,000, right?
Yes.
Now, speaking of that financial crisis, up till 2007...
We would double almost every year.
And then that was the first year that we were flat in 2008.
But boy, 2007, we could see it coming.
We had a lot of really big developers who weren't making their rental payments and were owing us more and more money.
And a lot of them went bankrupt.
So you could see it happening already a year before.
Yeah.
But okay, you get through the recession, right?
And then, on the other side of it, This whole industry, this whole like home staging industry, really starts to take off.
I mean, you guys, again, I mean, you aren't the first, right?
But you're in L.A.
A lot of celebrities are using you to stage their homes.
And now this becomes de rigueur.
Like if you're going to sell a house, like staging becomes part of the cost of doing business.
Definitely.
And it also makes the brokers happy. job a lot easier.
They make more money and they make it faster.
And they're the ones encouraging their clients to stage.
Yeah.
And by 2012, from what I read, you had about 100 employees.
You got 130000 square foot warehouse in LA, you've got one in Connecticut and Florida and you're expanding into Manhattan.
And that year you get approached by buy HGTV to do a reality series which I know it just ran for one season, but it must have really transformed your business because all of a sudden you're on TV doing this stuff.
I don't know if it did or not.
It actually was a lot of work and took us away from running business as usual.
And, to tell you the truth, we're a high-end company and we didn't want to present drama, And so it really was a show.
I don't think that could go more than one season because it really was about what we do.
And I think you kind of get it after a season.
Because we have been approached other times and I've just made a decision not to do that.
Yeah.
Just to be clear, you never raised any money, right?
Outside money.
You know what?
I never did.
I have two warehouses in LA now but I borrowed money from my house, you know, for the down payment on those.
I didn't know how to ask for money.
I didn't.
Yeah.
I mean, in some ways it's the perfect business to do that, because it reminds me a little bit of 1-800-GOT-JUNK, which we profiled about seven or eight years ago, which is, it's a junk removal service.
He bought a truck, you know, for 800 bucks.
Within a couple of weeks the truck was paid off from removing people's stuff, dumping it.
He buys another truck and that's how the business grows.
In your case, you actually didn't need that much upfront cash because you had your furniture.
You were using your own furniture.
And then you get paid and then you buy some more furniture.
And then you get paid more and you buy some more furniture.
And eventually, you've got warehouse costs, you've got, you know, personnel costs.
But it's not like you're manufacturing.
You know, you've got a factory in China that's manufacturing products and you need just tons of cash up front.
So it is actually a business that doesn't necessarily require outside funding.
Right.
I was always able to take our profits and grow and build from there.
Now we do.
One of my warehouses along the road.
The first warehouse I bought is now solely manufacturing.
And we did at a point manufacture in China.
Yeah.
As you found, I mean, you you start to find different revenue streams.
For example, you eventually started to make your own furniture for the houses, right?
Correct.
And not all of it.
What percentage of the furniture in the houses that you stage do you make?
I would say 60% to 70% of our upholstered furnishings we make.
Oh, wow.
And when I go into a home that is staged by you, by your company, everything is for sale?
I can buy anything?
Yes.
Well, everything except we do not sell our mattresses.
We call them props.
And we generally don't sell like sheets and towels and things like that.
Although we will if someone wants us to do a household package and do the buying of that for them.
Is that a significant part of your business, or is the overwhelming majority of your revenue still coming from just staging homes?
I would say the majority of our revenue comes from staging, but we... do very, very well in sales.
Boy, especially when COVID hit and things were just hard to get.
And now with the tariffs and all of that, we sell a lot of furniture.
So you had started this, I think it's called InstaHome service.
You had started that earlier?
Yes, we started InstaHome because what we realized is a lot of people were asking us for interior design And someone can take two months to figure out what fabric they want on a sofa.
And a lot of our clients are just super busy and they don't really want to go through that process, but they want a house full of furniture.
So we have them go through our website and then we charge them an install fee to install a house full of furniture, and then we give them a price list.
And they buy what they want, and anything they don't want, we pick up.
And you also lease furniture, right?
You can rent furniture from you guys.
Right.
We have a product called Luxury Lease, and that is we provide furniture to people to live with.
Well, it makes sense, because furniture is one of those things where the depreciation is just dramatic.
Right.
And then when you want to resell it, it's not easy.
The options are limited.
It's like Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist, but then people are coming to your house or you just sell it to a consignment shop and they're going to give you pennies on the dollar.
Exactly.
So leasing actually might make sense for a lot of people.
For a lot of people, I think it does.
Also a lot of clients are it's a second home or a third home and it does make sense for a number of people.
So...
Today, I think you're the biggest home stager in the country.
Yes.
One of them, maybe the biggest.
And how many people do you have working for you total?
About 320.
Right.
At any given time, how many homes are you working on concurrently?
Like 200, 150, more than that?
Oh, no, more like we usually have about 700 to 900 homes installed at any given time.
And people are paying anywhere from the absolute lowest 10000 but all the way up to what?
100000 plus.
We're just finishing a home right now, as we speak, that was a $185,000 job.
Just to stage it?
Yeah.
And you're concentrated also in high-value areas San Francisco Bay Area LA, New York, Hamptons and Miami right.
Yes.
So at what point did it become very difficult for you, meredith bear, to be doing the staging and for you to step out of that?
I mean, i continued to install up until maybe maybe 10 years ago.
I just couldn't do it all.
I, you know, i couldn't be sort of running the business and doing the buying and and as i got older, it's physically, it's just physically hard, it's hard physical work.
Yeah, I mean, when you – because you were in LA
You're in L.A.
And so many celebrities have used your services, Bob Dylan, Harrison Ford, Reese Witherspoon.
Apparently, Scarlett Johansson used you and liked what you did so much she decided to take her house off the market.
I know.
I loved that.
What happened – what would happen when Harrison Ford or a celebrity or Brad Pitt is like I need Meredith to do my house?
You mean me personally?
Yeah.
Yeah.
They don't get me.
They don't get you.
Nobody gets you anymore.
No.
I mean, at this point, I pretty much work from home, and I am on email usually 10 hours a day.
Yeah.
You are still the CEO of Meredith Bear Home, right?
Yes.
And are you actively looking for somebody to run it, or do you like being the operational leader and CEO, and do you like doing that?
I would say...
At this point, I'm 78.
I'm working longer hours than I'd like to.
It's 10 hours a day.
And there are some other things I would like to do.
I'd like to spend, I'd like to have more time for friends and see my grandson more.
So what now?
I mean, obviously this gives you a sense of purpose and your name is on the brand, but it sounds like you also want some time to do other things.
Are you looking to sell the brand?
I've thought about it.
I haven't really quite gotten there yet.
You know what?
If the right situation arrived, I'd probably do it.
Again, you know, I didn't have any training as a businesswoman or as an interior designer.
And again, I certainly don't have any experiences about selling the company.
Yeah, I mean, it is amazing because you had a completely different life before age 50.
Right.
And really before age sort of 32, you're kind of more into acting and bit parts, and then you got into writing.
So who, at age 50, wakes up and says you know, the next 30 years of my life are going to be completely different than what I was doing the previous 50 or 30 years of my professional life?
So it is kind of remarkable, right?
I mean, if you think about like, you could not have imagined, I guess, when you were 50, that this would become this thing.
No, I never could have imagined it.
And I do think we all are capable of reinventing ourselves.
We're not stuck doing the same thing we've always done.
You know, we might love something for a while, but after a while, we don't.
Doesn't mean we have to stay on the same path.
I think we're all taught that we have to choose a career, and then that's who we are, that's what we are.
But I think the truth is, I think we're a lot of things, all of us.
Meredith, when you think about all that you went through and what you've achieved now, how much of it do you think was because of the work and the grind that you put in and how much do you think has to do with just luck and fortune?
Well, you know, I think there is luck involved in most success.
I mean the fact that I was walking along and Jerry Bruckheimer asked me to be in a Pepsi commercial changed my life big time.
And the fact that I had gotten kicked out of a house and I needed a place to put my plants and my furniture, you know, was luck.
But I also think one has to seize the opportunity.
I think that we probably all trip over luck at times in life.
I just learned to say yes.
Yes, I can.
And then I'd figure out if I really wanted to or if I could.
But I'd say yes.
And then do it.
That's Meredith Baer, founder and CEO of Meredith Baer Home.
I need you to come to my studio and stage it because it is really a mess.
I've got like protein bars here and I've got like wires everywhere and just crap and old computer on the ground.
Can you come stage my stage?
I don't want to sell.
I just want to want to live in a staged world.
OK, yeah, we'll we'll do that.
Just remember, 10,000 is our minimum.
Oh, my God.
Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week.
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This episode was produced by Alex Chung with music composed by Ramtina Rablui.
It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Noor Gill.
Our engineers were Patrick Murray and Kwesi Lee.
Our production staff also includes J.C.
Howard Casey Herman, Chris Messini, Sam Paulson, Carrie Thompson, Katherine Seifer, Ramel Wood, Andrea Bruce and Elaine Coates.
I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.
And don't stop the podcast just yet, because right now you're about to hear an amazing small business story that you'd don't want to miss.
This segment is presented by American Express.
With a business platinum membership, the best just got even better.
Back in the early days of COVID, Jess Berger, like many of us, started spending a lot more quality time with her dog.
Our great Dane Winston was really the center of our home during the pandemic.
And with all that extra time with Winston, Jess started noticing something.
He kept having a lot of skin and digestive issues.
Jess had spent years working in the pet industry as a buyer and a marketing executive.
And she knew some dogs could develop allergies and sensitivities to certain ingredients in their food.
I personally have my own gut and allergy issues.
And so it's only fitting, right, that my dog would have the same issues.
I just started an elimination diet, just like I would do for myself, and chicken was one of the things that we had cut out.
And almost instantly, she saw a difference.
Winston's skin started looking healthier, he scratched less, and his digestive issues disappeared.
But Jess had a problem.
The problem is that I couldn't find a lot of products out there without chicken.
Which, if you think about it, is kind of wild.
Chicken is one of the most common ingredients in pet foods.
So with Winston as her guide...
Jess decided to launch her own brand called Bundle and Joy.
I thought what if I built a pet brand that was all about gut health and sensitivities and allergies, but also gave back and was so much more than just pet food?
Jess had a vision for a brand with a strong sense of community built around dog moms like herself.
So she spent about 18 months on R&D and made plans to launch a big trade show in California.
Expo West.
But there was a problem.
To say that the pandemic caused disruption would be quite a statement for all of us, right?
We had all these best laid plans to launch in March of 2022.
And then we quickly realized that there were some delays and we had no real product.
No real product.
But what could she do?
Just not show up to the trade show?
We had already made the commitment to show up.
And I said, all right, guys, we are going to fake it till we make it.
No product, no problem.
Jess's team rolled up to the trade show with a hand-built display, mock products and a little something extra to stand out.
We found some roller skates that look like our brand and our colors and decided to wear roller skates for the entire trade show.
And here's the amazing thing.
That bold approach, it paid off.
Immediately.
Grocers like Sprouts and Whole Foods loved the idea of gut-conscious dog food and offered just deals on the spot.
Eventually, the product delays worked themselves out.
And today, Bundle & Joy has expanded to retailers like Walmart, Costco, and soon... We are about to launch into PetSmart, which is where I started my pet career in 2007.
By the way, Jess's dog, Winston, who inspired the company, has since passed.
But a new generation of pets has come along to inspire her.
Now with our new Great Danes brother and sister, Sol and Luna.
I want them to live the longest they can possibly live.
That's Jess Berger, the founder of Bundle and Joy.
Her small business story was presented by American Express.
To build a business like no other, you need a card like no other.
There's nothing...
If you like how I built this, you can listen early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.
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