Why the Gaineses walked away from their hit TV show
Magnolia magic: What to conquer next?
Chip Gaines talks with the bluster of a guy at a party who has a story, or a colorful analogy, for everything — which he does. Joanna, his wife and co-founder of the couple’s rapidly expanding media and retail brand, Magnolia, sits beside him with an occasionally bemused expression as she looks for opportunities to steer the conversation.
Two full years before they shocked their fans by announcing the end of their hit HGTV show, “Fixer Upper,” they already knew they were going to have to leave it. The move would be risky. It was late 2015, and the Gaineses were in only the third season of the show that had transformed their lives almost overnight, taking them from local house flippers in Waco, Texas, to regulars on the covers of celebrity gossip magazines.
“Fixer Upper,” which chronicled home renovations that they did around Waco, was an instant sensation when it launched in 2013. By 2015, the show was setting ratings records at HGTV and helping make the network one of the top 10 on cable.
Such high visibility allowed the couple to build other businesses around their growing celebrity. In the fall of 2015, the Gaineses supersized the small Magnolia Market store that they had opened in 2003 in Waco. They relocated it to a long-dormant cottonseed mill complex that covers two city blocks. They launched a Magnolia-branded furniture line with the company Standard Furniture and fielded many offers to do other licensing deals.
So why ditch the show so quickly? The answer, as with most things Chip and Joanna, involves a combination of country humbleness — the official reason for the 2017 announcement was their desire to focus on family — and world-conquering ambition.
What Chip and Joanna are great at, it turns out, goes well beyond homebuilding and decorating. Self-made entrepreneurs, the Gaineses are naturals at forging powerful connections with their audience, in ways that others don’t. And then building upon that foundation.
HGTV had intended “Fixer Upper,” like so many other shows of its ilk, to present homes as physical assets — that is, houses. In this case, monochromatic “modern farmhouses” with shiplap walls and farm sinks. But what really attracted people to “Fixer
Upper,” the couple surmised, was the idea of home, the place where you live with your loved ones. Chip and Joanna’s family life and values were the real story, not their work.
The Gaineses had discovered the core of their brand’s appeal. They were authentic folks juggling family and work and succeeding. They were happily married, but they bickered. People could relate. Joanna, whose mother is Korean, was a refreshing foil to the stereotype of the blondhaired Texas woman, while Chip seemed like a good-old-boy prankster. They were glamorous but real. And it wasn’t a put-on.
By the third season of the show, the network people were coming around to a similar understanding, and they started asking Chip and Joanna to play up their relationship. Chip Gaines says the directions became more like “We need you to always be together. Chip, if you’re hanging drywall, we need Joanna to be standing there making cupcakes.” But to the Gaineses, that still missed the point. They won’t admit to squabbling with the TV bosses, and they’re even more resistant to claiming a grand strategic insight. But, in the two years that followed, Chip and Joanna aggressively reshaped their business around their vision. And the more they did that, the less the show felt like the core of their operation.
“The show was limiting our involvement in what was taking place here in this office,” Joanna Gaines says. “We were pouring so much time into doing this thing that had to fit in this format, and it was a conflict with our growing business.” They have their own lines at Target and Anthropologie, among others, and Joanna Gaines also edits a magazine.
“As things started getting complicated,” Chip Gaines says, “we made a bet on what Jo and I have always bet on. We bet on ourselves. We knew there was a real chance that everything else would go away without the show. But would it be a complete kick in the pants to end up operating a great construction company in Waco? No. I’d be honored. And, as soon as we accepted that, much greater opportunities started presenting themselves.”
The center of the Gaines universe lies at Magnolia Market at the Silos, the shopping and dining destination Chip and Joanna built in downtown Waco around that old cottonseed mill. On a recent Saturday, families picnicked on the lawn, and the line to get into the Silos Baking Co. stretched around the corner.
As soon as the Silos opened in October 2015, Chip Gaines says, it dwarfed anything that he and Joanna ever made in construction. When “Fixer Upper” started, the company’s business was 100% construction. By 2016, it was 80% retail.
The Silos complex today includes a dozen food trucks, a vegetable garden, the bakery, a coffee shop and 12,000 square feet of retail space selling scented candles, baskets, signs quoting Scripture, and all manner of fan paraphernalia. This year, the Gaineses are expanding the Silos, adding what they call a retail village, as well as a furniture showroom, a ball field, more gardens and a relocated historic church.
Magnolia Market at the Silos is essentially a Chip and Joanna theme park. And people travel by the busload from Georgia, Iowa and beyond to experience it.
“Tourism to Waco doubled overnight when the Silos opened,” says Carla Pendergraft of the Waco Convention and Visitors Bureau. Several hotels have opened in Waco, and more are on the way, including one from the Gaineses.
According to Ray Perryman, who leads the economic analysis firm the Perryman Group, the Gaineses have transformed a city of 138,000 people into something of a boomtown.
Next up: their own network, a joint venture with Discovery.
When the Magnolia network launches this October, the venture will reach more than 52 million households, and it will eventually include an app and a streaming service. Like Joanna’s magazine, Magnolia will carry fewer ads than its competitors. Programming will run the gamut from cooking shows to episodes of “Fixer Upper” to revivals of wholesome old series in the hopes that whole families will once again gather ’round the tube.
Once again, the Gaineses have traded up. Back when they were flipping houses in Waco, they would identify a cheap home, add their design vision to it and sell it for a profit, which they’d invest in the next project.
They did the same with their own fame.