Lovesac’s founder & CEO details his vision for a sustain-able company

It’s not often that you hear CEOs talk about influencing people to buy fewer things. Shawn D. Nelson, who founded Lovesac just over a quarter-century ago, knows he doesn’t talk like most CEOs, and he’s OK with that. The company he started at 18 by cutting strips of vinyl and assembling a bean bag is now approaching $1 billion in annual sales and is the fasting-growing furniture company in the U.S. It’s not small by any means, but as Nelson tells investors, “We can’t ever become the size of Apple, because I refuse to sell you the same thing even twice.”

The company’s modular Sactional couches are renowned for their longevity and mix-and-match customization that customers keep with them through different stages of life.

“People joke around: Get a divorce, split your Sactionals in half; get married, add on; have kids, add on,” he told BOSS. “My Sactionals are older than my children.”

It’s all part of a philosophy that Nelson thinks will bring sustained success not just to his company, but to the notion of conscious capitalism.

“We hope to be a player in driving the movement, very intentionally, for people to think about buying better stuff so they can buy less stuff.”

Designed for Life

If Nelson can convince people to think differently about the things they buy, consumer behavior will change. When that happens, other businesses will follow suit.

“CEOs chase consumers, and if consumers want it, CEOs will build it,” he said.

The way to start is by getting his products – made with fabric derived from recycled plastic bottles – into people’s homes and having them see how useful and durable they are years or even decades later. Whenever someone thinks, “That may be the best thing I ever bought,” it’s a sign of the Designed for Life ethos coming to fruition.

“One of the fundamental pillars of Designed for Life is the leveraging of self-interest,” Nelson said. “It’s not enough for Sactionals to be super-green. They have to win in the landscape. They have to be a better solution.”

People have to keep choosing the product because it offers them the most value over time, even if it’s more expensive up front. Scaling that “best thing I ever bought” realization in consumers can take time, a challenge given the need as a public company to deliver quarterly and yearly for investors.

“You have to be able to act pragmatically day-to-day, quarter-by-quarter, year-by-year. You have to be willing to act and be in constant pursuit of the grandest goals. So, what’s the grandest goal look like for a Designed for Life platform? It’s simple. Massive scale, through wide adoption caused by better design.”

The way Nelson sees it, the Designed for Life philosophy is the playbook for a sustainable business model, and Lovesac is the first real-world case study.

“We have a hypothesis, but we’re trying to prove it in the harsh light of the real world, with real profitability and everything else that comes with it on the line.”

Putting it to the Test

From a pragmatic approach, carrying out the living experiment sometimes means actions like moving some operations out of China and into Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia, as Lovesac has done in the past to avoid tariffs. In the long term, to build what Lovesac likes to call a sustain-able company, it will involve more local sourcing and manufacturing closer to the consumer, with a high degree of automation.

“I think it’s so twisted that we have to buy wood in Canada to put it on a boat and diesel-fuel it to Vietnam to probably use diesel-powered energy to turn it into furniture, to put it on a boat and diesel-fuel it back to Long Beach to rail it to Chicago to FedEx it to you,” Nelson said. “That’s in some ways, one of the most sustainably minded companies in the landscape doing that. But I just described to you, honestly, the supply chain for most of the stuff in our lives.”

Breaking free from that requires real scale to be able to build shorter supply chains in more places across the globe. It also requires “infinite patience” as Nelson puts it, something CEOs and investors don’t always have. He acknowledges a different leader with different goals could probably make the company more profitable in the short term, but “over the long term, I think Lovesac will be a monster.”

“Maybe we’ll fail. But I don’t think we will. I think, given enough time, enough runway, we’re going to do exactly what I just told you we’re going to do.”

Shawn-isms

In 2024, Nelson released “Let Me Save You 25 Years: Mistakes, Miracles, and Lessons from the Lovesac Story.” Each chapter of the book relates a “Shawn-ism,” a lesson learned that has turned into a mantra. His advice to budding entrepreneurs, and the Shawn-ism from the first chapter is, “Just Do Something.”

Having an idea is nothing without execution. So do something, anything, to bring it to life. “Lovesac wouldn’t have the opportunity that I described if I hadn’t gotten off my couch at 18 years old because I had this idea. I immediately got off the couch, drove down to Joann Fabrics, bought some black and tan vinyl, brought it home, cut it out, and made a big beanbag. Turns out people liked it.”

After that initial rush of excitement, the road gets hard as you experience growing pains and refine a vision for the company. The last Shawn-ism, then, is “Maintain Top Ambition with Infinite Patience.” Ambition is no short supply among leaders, but keeping it through the years and having the patience to follow through on a vision through different trends and market climates is a different animal.

“It requires extreme scale and extreme timeline to achieve,” he said. “There will always be gold in those hills because there are so few people willing to go the distance. There are so few people willing to pay the price willing to commit. It may not be as lucrative as fast. It may not even be as lucrative from a personal standpoint, but from a make a difference in the world standpoint, I believe that that last Shawn-ism is everything.”

The vision, and the Shawn-isms, weren’t in place when Nelson made that decision to get up and make that first bean bag.

“I’m really proud of what we’re doing. We didn’t start with any of this. This evolved. There’s been a lot of people involved in coming up with this.”

It’s the type of result a kid lounging on a bean bag in a dorm room might dream of.