CSC Generation's Retail Modernization

A story about Justin Yoshimura, a 32-year-old entrepreneur who's building a billion-dollar company by acquiring and modernizing furniture retailers.

"This guy's 32 years old and he's built basically like a billion-ish dollar company rolling up furniture companies. What he's doing is making them more ecommerce and digitally savvy. He'll close down half of the retail locations that aren't performing, he'll get the ecommerce side to build up.

He takes all the customer data they have - they have years of customer purchasing data but it's in a machine that's 20 years old that they can't even extract and put into an email database or Facebook ads. He's built a system to buy these companies, trying to build what Constellation Software did for small SaaS companies, but for large furniture companies.

He owns Z Gallerie, which he bought for 20 million, Surla Table for 89 million, One Kings Lane, and others. He started making these wild public offers at old school furniture companies. He went to them privately first saying 'I'd like to buy your company' but they're in Nebraska, they're 65 years old, they're like 'my father's father built this furniture store.'

So he just started releasing press releases saying 'I'd like to buy this company for 20 or 30% over the public share price. Please respond board, you have not been productive, you have not responded to my offer in private, you have not told me a counter offer. Your shareholders deserve this publicly.' That's how he got on people's radar because he was pretty much doing this under the radar before."