Missouri Star's Quilting Empire

A story about how Al Doan and his mom turned their quilting hobby into a massive business by transforming their small town into a quilting destination.

"His mom takes up quilting as a hobby, and she wants to do a more advanced quilt where you need to send it to a machine quilting company. There was a 6-month wait to get machine-built quilts made, and Al was like 'Oh, there's a business here.'

They bought the machine and created a website where people could send their stuff for machine quilting. People started asking them for fabrics, so they started selling fabrics. People asked for patterns, they started selling patterns. Fast forward, they've built Missouri Star Quilting Company, doing nine figures a year in revenue, profitable, bootstrapped family business.

The thing that made it take off was getting his mom to start making YouTube content. YouTube was still pretty early at that time. He said 'Mom, record videos teaching people how to be better at quilting.' They now have the number one quilting channel with almost a million subscribers, and Jenny, his mom, is beloved.

Then he stole the idea from Woot.com about having one crazy daily deal - something 50-100% off, limited quantity, limited time. They call it the Quilter Daily Deal. That trained people to keep coming back to the website.

It started with buying one building for warehouse and production, then a second building. Then they realized - why do this with nameless, faceless warehouses? They bought all the buildings in the area and turned it into a tourist destination. It's like the Disneyland for quilters. Main street is all quilt shops. They even have a place called Man's Land with comfy recliners, TVs, and food for the husbands who got dragged along. Now they have 100,000 tourists coming every year."