industry : lessons in leadership
Lessons in Leadership with Jay Steinfeld, Founder of Blinds.com BY SOPHIA BENNETT
J
ay Steinfeld’s first business venture— selling custom T-shirts as a high school student—put him on the path to an even more impressive entrepreneurial success: founding Blinds.com, which was acquired by The Home Depot in 2014. “With their enormous buying power, skilled operational excellence, over 2,000 stores and significant cash support, we’ve become a formidable powerhouse,” he says. Steinfeld left the company in May 2020 “not to retire, but rewire.” He’s joined four boards, started mentoring students at Rice University’s graduate school of business and written a book. “Lead From the Core: The 4 Principles for Profit and Prosperity” (BenBella Books) is scheduled to be published in October. Drawing on more than 35 years of experience selling window coverings, Steinfeld talks about how he got started, the rise of ecommerce and
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MARCH + APRIL 2021 | wf-vision.com
what he sees for the future of the industry. He also offers his take on how to be a great leader in an article at wf-vision.com.
Draperies, Bedspreads & More. We were both shop-at-home decorators working six to seven days a week, with one to four appointments a day.
How did you get into the window covering industry?
How did you move from those small stores to what would eventually become Blinds. com?
When I worked as the vice president of finance at the national franchiser Meineke Mufflers, we started looking into franchising businesses other than muffler shops. One such business was window coverings. Eventually, Meineke was sold, and the new owner, a car parts manufacturer, wanted no part of franchising anything other than muffler shops. In fact, they wanted no part of me either. I was fired immediately after the sale. The idea of owning a window covering store remained, and in 1987, my wife, Naomi, began running her own. After a year, I joined her to own and run one of my own. Neither of us had any clue as to how to sell window coverings, but the two stores were part of a franchise begun by the former owner of Meineke, who partnered with a long-time chain of stores called Laura’s
In 1993, I read in a trade magazine— probably yours—an article written by Rory McNeil about the “information superhighway.” I didn’t have a vision as to what the internet would become, but I thought it was worth experimenting with my own website for Laura’s—especially because it cost only $1,500 for that website. The next year, Amazon started selling books online, so I got the harebrained idea that I would sell blinds online too. Everyone told me it was lunacy. Customers had to measure and install themselves, and we did not send color samples. We mitigated the color problem by selling, at first, only white and off-white, and only metal, wood and vertical vinyl blinds. My goal was to make buying blinds and shades a no-brainer, so I called it NoBrainerBlinds.com. And because we were first, I touted us as “The World’s Most Popular and Trusted
