34. Stephen Kuhl | Burrow (modern modular furniture)

Stephen Kuhl is the Co-Founder & CEO of Burrow.
Stephen grew up in upstate NY and spent the majority of his time in high school freestyle skiing - getting comfortable doing backflips at an early age. After graduating from Cornell for his undergrad, he bounced around at a few different jobs before landing in private equity and venture investing at Commonfund. He spent 2 years at Commonfund before leaving for business school at Wharton in 2015. When he got to school, he had a terrible experience buying furniture and met his now Co-Founder, Kabeer, who shared similar struggles. They took an entrepreneurship class together and thought it was the perfect place to create something new. That’s how Burrow was born.
Today at Burrow, Stephen and his team have created a next generation brand to improve the entire customer experience of owning furniture. After getting their start redesigning the sofa from the ground up in 2017, they’ve seen explosive growth and now go to market with an entire line of home furniture from seating and storage to tables, rugs and accessories. What they figured out that the rest of the industry got wrong was that consumers hated the complex, non-customized buying experience, multi-week delivery times and stress moving their furniture from one home to another. Burrow solves all of these pain points and then some. Customers can easily design their custom furniture online, have them delivered in compact boxes within a week and then assemble them in minutes without tools. Burrow has also redesigned their products to be more comfortable and durable so they can withstand the punishment that everyday life brings.
Use code “Kallaway” to get 10% off all Burrow products.
Tune in to hear Stephen's story!
EPISODE TOPICS: 

• (2:49) Burrow snapshot today 
• (4:40) Background and founding story
• (6:33) Business school / entrepreneurship
• (9:16) Analyzing the opportunity & first steps
• (13:50) Furniture design process
• (18:35) Y Combinator
• (21:32) Early struggles
• (29:47) Building customer loyalty
• (31:50) Customer acquisition
• (34:55) Out of the box marketing tactics
• (38:12) Furniture industry outlook
• (42:28) Manifesting the future vision
• (45:40) Scarcity and limited drops
• (47:46) Fundraising lessons learned
• (50:35) What drives you?
• (53:35) Stephen's wellness stack
• (55:29) Having an executive coach
• (58:06) Exciting trends
• (1:00:50) Stephen's startup manifesto

Burrow - burrow.com

• Follow Stephen (@sgkuhl25) on Instagram // Twitter
• Follow Burrow (@burrow // @hiburrow) on Instagram // Twitter
• Stephen's content and learning recommendations 

The Founder - www.thefounderpod.com 

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Don't have time to listen to the full episode? Read the 5-minute version here