Missouri Star's Quilting Empire

A story about how Al Doan and his family built Missouri Star Quilt Company after noticing a market opportunity in quilting services.

"My mom had taken a quilt to get stitched together by a lady with a $40,000 machine. This lady was backed up a year and said 'Oh I made your sister a quilt, I took it in, I'll get it back in 2008.' I thought 'nothing takes a year to do - you can build a house in less time than it takes to get this quilt done.'

That was literally my market research. I asked if there were others and she said 'yeah, everybody's backed up.' We started growing online and couldn't fit all the inventory in our store. Instead of opening a warehouse, we noticed when people came to our town, there were normally no customers, giving a bad impression. But we had 12 people cutting and fulfilling fabrics, creating this energy and buzz in the shop.

We split out and bought the next building for fabric. Then I asked 'who has the most quilt shops of any town in the world?' It was some town in Germany. I decided we were going to take that title. We ended up buying 27 buildings downtown, started restaurants because people only had Subway and a gas station for food. We even opened a sleep-in for ladies to come stay.

The buildings were cheap - average price in a small Missouri town was about $20,000, though our last building was about $80,000. Now we're at over 400 employees, over $100 million in revenue. We're 90% online revenue, 10% in-store, but 98% of our marketing is about the town. It became this destination that tells our brand's story."