The Growth Strategy That Took Blinds.com from Startup to Billion-Dollar Exit With Jay Steinfeld

Jay Steinfeld is the Founder and former CEO of Blinds.com, the world’s largest online retailer of window coverings, which was acquired by The Home Depot in 2014. Under his leadership, Blinds.com grew from a bootstrapped startup in his home to a billion-dollar enterprise, earning a reputation for innovation in ecommerce and technology-driven growth. Jay is also a Wall Street Journal best-selling author of Lead from the Core: The 4 Principles for Profit and Prosperity and the Entrepreneur in Residence at Rice University’s Graduate School of Business, where he shares business insights.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [2:32] Jay Steinfeld highlights the Big Brother Little Brother growth strategy
• [4:13] How a failed designer channel led to a 90-day Sears integration opportunity
• [6:24] Expanding partnerships to Wayfair, Lowe’s, and The Home Depot’s acquisition offer
• [8:25] How Blinds.com built product-agnostic custom ecommerce software with over 125 engineers
• [14:41] Risks of empowering competitors and creating private-label “stickiness”
• [18:01] Advice for brands: identifying unique value and making integration irresistible

In this episode…

Scaling your ecommerce business doesn’t always require more ad spend or tighter funnels — it can come from forming the right strategic partnerships. Rather than battling industry giants for market share, there’s an opportunity to grow by leveraging their reach and infrastructure. How can you turn major players into powerful growth engines for your brand?

Jay Steinfeld’s answer is the Big Brother Little Brother strategy, a partnership model where a smaller company integrates with a larger one to accelerate growth. As a seasoned ecommerce founder and technology-driven operator, he explains how building product-agnostic software creates leverage far beyond a single category. By making integration seamless and delivering unique value that larger companies lacked, he reduced customer acquisition costs and unlocked rapid distribution. He also emphasizes creating “stickiness” through private-label strategies and focusing on asymmetric risk — low downside, massive upside. The key takeaway: identify what only you can offer and make it irresistible for larger partners to say yes.

In this episode of Minds of Ecommerce, Raphael Paulin-Daigle chats with Jay Steinfeld, Founder and former CEO of Blinds.com, about the Big Brother Little Brother growth strategy. They delve into the brand’s 90-day Sears integration, expanding partnerships to Wayfair and The Home Depot, and the risks of empowering competitors while creating long-term “stickiness.”

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Raphael Paulin-Daigle: LinkedIn | X
• SplitBase
• Jay Steinfeld: LinkedIn | Website
• Lead from the Core: The 4 Principles for Profit and Prosperity by Jay Steinfeld
• Blueprint to a Billion: 7 Essentials to Achieve Exponential Growth by David G. Thomson
• PreFix
• Sears
• Wayfair
• Lowe’s
• The Home Depot

Quotable Moments:

• “When a small company can ride the coattails of a larger company, well, we're the little brother.”
• “We wanted it to be product agnostic, so we could also then move into other product categories.”
• “If you limit yourself in some limited way, then you don't think of Big Brother Little Brother applications.”
• “And anytime you do anything, you're always looking for the asymmetric risk where the downside is low.”
• “What do you have that no one else has, and what do other people need?”

Action Steps:

1. Identify your unique competitive advantage: Knowing exactly what you offer that others don’t makes partnerships far more compelling.
2. Target larger partners with strategic gaps: Aligning with companies that lack your capability increases your odds of integration and scale.
3. Make integration simple and fast: Reducing friction for enterprise partners accelerates deal flow and long-term collaboration.
4. Build product-agnostic systems: Designing flexible technology lowers risk and opens expansion into new categories.
5. Create partnership “stickiness” through exclusivity: Offering private-label or embedded solutions makes it harder for partners to replace you.

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by SplitBase.

At SplitBase, we design, test, and manage high-converting landing pages and on-site experiences for fashion, luxury, and lifestyle ecommerce brands. Our optimization program pinpoints exactly where your store is losing money most, and then we help you fix that.

The result? Increased conversions and profits for our clients.

With our team of conversion optimization specialists, performance marketers, and conversion-focused designers, we've got your back when it comes to testing and optimization.

Request a proposal on SplitBase.com today, and learn how we can help you get the most out of your marketing spend.

You can find us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Don’t miss out on our exclusive podcasts at Minds of Ecommerce.

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Episode Transcript

Intro: 00:06  

Welcome to the Minds of Ecommerce podcast, where you'll learn one key strategy that made leading ecommerce companies grow exponentially. We cut the bullshit and keep the meat in a 15-minute episode. Founders and executives take us through a deep dive of a strategy, so you get to learn and grow your online sales today. Get ready. I'm chatting with Jay Steinfeld, founder and CEO of Blinds.com.

In 1993, he bootstrapped his company into becoming the number one online window coverings retailer in the world. And then in 2014, sold it to Home Depot. Now, today, he continues to lead the brand and is also part of Home Depot's online leadership team. So I'm super excited to have him here because we're also going to be talking about his big brother, little brother strategy, something that isn't talked about much, but it's a strategy that got Blinds.com sold to Home Depot. And today you're gonna learn exactly how he did it.

I'm your host, Raphael Paulin-Daigle, and I'm the founder of SplitBase. This is Minds of Ecommerce. Now, this episode is brought to you by SplitBase. At SplitBase, we help leading eight and nine-figure brands such as Dr. Squatch, Hyperice, and Meka grow through customer-focused conversion optimization programs. We pinpoint exactly where your website is losing most money, and then, well, we help you fix it.

The result? You get increased conversions, higher AOV, and of course, more money, which in return allows you to scale advertising profitably. We've been at it for over a decade and can help you manage from A to Z. So request a proposal today on splitbase.com to learn how we can help you get the most out of your marketing spend.

All right Jay, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 02:00

Raphael. Thanks for having me.

Jay Steinfeld: 02:02

Now, as you know. Right. This podcast is all about going deep, dissecting one key growth strategy so our listeners can get the most value right away. And you definitely have one that you, I'm sure could talk about for hours. And that's your big brother, little brother strategy.

So before we actually dive into it, I want to know all the details, but can you give a bit of an overview to our listeners? What is the big brother little brother strategy?

Jay Steinfeld: 02:32  

The big brother little brother strategy is something that I read in a book, Blueprint to a Billion by David Thompson, and it was strategy number four. I thought, that makes sense. I think I'm going to try that. We actually did it by accident, because what that strategy is, is where a small company like what we used to be because it started in my house. It was just me taking phone calls out of my car.

Even so, we were very small. And when a small company can ride the coattails of a larger company, well, we're the little brother. The big company is the big brother. An example of that is when Microsoft partnered with Dell. That's like the textbook approach to Big Brother, Little Brother.

So they got into all the computers, and Microsoft became Microsoft. Another example is something, it's a company that I'm involved with now called Prefix, which does service around the home, and they're partnering with insurance companies, such as USAA, and USAA loves to have them get into the house to help with their underwriting. So it's a partnership that's a growth strategy that is helping that company and other companies grow. And it's something that we decided to do as well. Again, by accident.

Jay Steinfeld: 03:49  

I mean.

Jay Steinfeld: 03:50

We started by building a technology for designers. We thought we could use designers as a way to come up with a new channel. That strategy actually did not work. I'm not going to go into why it didn't work, but it turned out to be a bad strategy, but good because we built the technology to create websites for all these individual designers.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 04:12

Interesting.

Jay Steinfeld: 04:13

So when it didn't work, we still had the technology. One day, Sears of all companies contacted us and said, we want to get into the blinds business. We don't have the capability to do it. Will you run that for us and use technology? Well, we had the technology and we said, sure, we would love to do it. Now we were battling with a lot of big established companies and by a miracle, we did get it, which was amazing.

And then we were the little brother to the big brother of Sears. And that was a very successful Partnership alliance, really, because we already have the technology and we just had to integrate with this massive organization, which we did in 90 days, which is unheard of if you try to integrate with a large public enterprise company. But we did that so well that we said, you know, this could be a growth strategy that we can do some more of. So we contacted Wayfair. Wayfair said, yeah, we would like to get into the blind business.

How long is this going to take? Well, we did the whole thing in 90 days and we can get you in the blinds business in 90 days. They said okay. And now we were with Wayfair alone. Behold, we did some other smaller companies.

And then Lowe's came by and Home Depot and they said, what's this? What are they doing? They're helping all these other companies. How do they get into these Sears and Home and Wayfair businesses? We found out it was us and we were.

We were kind of beating their butts anyway online at this point. And so Lowe's contacted us to see if they could do it as well. And we were just one deal point away from doing it. There was a legal issue about liability and it was taking forever. Well, we put them on the back burner.

In the meantime, Home Depot shows up and says, well, we'd like to consider something like that too. Well, they didn't, they didn't pussyfoot around. They actually made us an offer and said, we not only want to do this alliance, we want to buy you. I mean, and that was great. We did that.

And now we're using the same technology in all, all their stores online, and we've used it to move into other product categories like custom decks, custom doors, custom vanities, many, many other categories. And we're in the billions now where it started off as just me and my car.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 06:49

Jay,This is fascinating. I'm curious though, like, was that the idea from the start to be that little brother? Was that why you built that technology in the first place, or did it kind of happen by accident over time that those big retailers were interested? And then it started something else?

Jay Steinfeld: 07:08  

It was definitely not in our vision. Well, frankly, I had no vision when I started. All I wanted to do was sell blinds online. That was my vision, right? And eventually I realized that I could actually expand this a lot more.

And I would try anything I would buy. One of my big core values is to experiment without fear and to evolve continuously. So this was just another one of those experiments. This one happened to work particularly well, but there was definitely no forethought, forethought in it. And it only came luckily, because Sears contacted us and we by default moved into the big brother little brother.

But if we had it to do it again, this is now that we know we could have done it. I wish I would have thought of it sooner and actually pursued it, although that's very easy to say it could be. The timing just worked out well.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 08:03  

So I want to make this very concrete for our audience. When we're talking about a technology, it sounds like you're talking about customization. I know back then it must have been very different and it's evolved over the years. But what are you referring to when you're saying, hey, we built this technology and we sold it. Is it a hardware technology?

Is it a software technology? What are we talking about here?

Jay Steinfeld: 08:25  

It's software. We ended up with like 125 engineers. People think they asked me, you sold blinds online. Did you have any employees or did you just, like, do this out of your garage? It was, you know, we had a lot of people, 500 when I left and the software was built to allow us to sell custom blinds, but also to not be dependent on selling only blinds.

We wanted it to be product agnostic, so we could also then move into other product categories. We decided not to do that because we wanted to just focus and felt like there was still low hanging fruit. Once we moved to Home Depot, well voila! We now have all these experts and all these different product categories. Their website already had customers looking for these products, and that made it much, much easier to do it and less risky.

Do you? At that time I had my money and there was no risk, right. For me? For them. They risk it.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 09:31  

Do you think there's an opportunity to do something like that with every kind of ecommerce company? What type of brand? You know, do you see today having these types of opportunities ? And obviously I'm not talking about customization technology specifically, but you know, when we look at just the overall big brother little brother strategy, how can that be replicated with, you know, ecommerce businesses that are listening to this? What are some other examples, maybe that you've seen that are practical to think about?

Jay Steinfeld: 10:06  

There's a lot of companies that do some niche products, like maybe subscription sign-ups and you're really good at doing subscriptions. So you contact Shopify and you get them to use you in all of their software as a component. You could be a learning platform where you somehow aggregate data and get that into certain types of files or accessible reports, and you build that into learning modules like some knowledge base that some company already has. So you partner with them, or you partner with an HR company to get them to use your system. It's another form of a channel partner.

But it's not just a channel partner, it's someone who you seriously integrated with and decided this is something that is going to power the growth in a meaningful way. It's not just let's just see if we can get them as a customer, right? This is the kind of customer that we've identified as a sweet spot. And like anything, it just takes creative thought and putting yourself in a room and saying, who can use our product? Who is missing?

Where is there some hole, a vacuum in their product assortment that we can fill, and which one of those will we be able to make money with and be able to scale So that's that's that's how you do it. Just think about where you can fit in in other companies and ride their coattail because you lose. You don't have to spend money on customer acquisition. Yeah, you have to spend money on the integration. But once you've done it once, it's much easier to replicate it.

And you can scale that pretty easily.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 11:59

At that point. Did you see yourself as an ecommerce company first, or did you see yourself as a software company first?

Jay Steinfeld: 12:08  

We never saw each other, saw ourselves as an ecommerce or a software company. I think we were. We saw ourselves as a direct marketing company powered by technology. So we use technology just like we use the internet. But I didn't want to say anything.

I didn't want to ever say we were an ecommerce company, because that meant the only way we would grow was through ecommerce. Well, how about people who just knew us and called us? Is that an ecommerce company or somebody who got a direct mail flyer and then just gave us a call? Right. Does ecommerce have anything to do with that?

I mean, if you limit yourself to what you call yourself in some limited way, then you don't think of big brother little brother applications that could apply because you've defined yourself too narrowly.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 12:59

That is such an important shift in thinking.

Jay Steinfeld: 13:06

And we never thought about doing all these customizable products either. At the beginning it was just let's sell blind.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 13:12

Yeah.

Jay Steinfeld: 13:12  

But as we started building the technology, we said, you know, if we just spend another 20 or 30% on what would have been, let's say it was a million, but we can spend a million and a half and have it product agnostic, then that would really help us be able to diversify. And that's what I always wanted to do. I mentioned that before, but the idea of being more diversified decreased the risk for me and gave us an opportunity to grow. So the downside was pretty low. The upside was enormous.

And anytime you do anything, you're always looking for the asymmetric risk where the downside is low, the upside is very high potential. And that's exactly what this was.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 13:53  

Yeah. And I think it also provided you.

Jay Steinfeld: 13:55  

Don't do that. I'm sorry.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 13:57  

Totally. I'm also thinking it also provided you with a very unique competitive advantage. Right. Like the others, you know, people that sell online or define them as ecommerce can't. Like they can compete on some aspects of your business, but not all of it, right?

The technology companies can compete with some aspects, but not all of it either. So you have that unique angle that really makes you advantageous in this space. I'm curious here, like obviously we're talking about this. There's many upsides. You know, you guys have grown a ton.

But what were some of the biggest challenges that, you know, brands typically see when facing that approach.

Jay Steinfeld: 14:41  

Well, the biggest downside that we saw in doing the big brother, little brother, and it was to position our competitors to be pretty damn good because we were the people answering the questions. We were the people doing the merchandising, and we were the best. And now we were making Sears and Wayfair right. The best along with us. So we had to decide, do we really even want to do this and prop up competitors?

But because of that, we developed a private label that was only for that channel. So Sears and Wayfair had private labels. That was our private label. And therefore as we had our private label, they wouldn't and they didn't even look at it that closely. But they were not able to say, we're going to use a Wayfair brand or we're going to do a Sears brand.

It was our brand which made it much stickier and made it more likely that they would not stop the other. Which brings up the second point, and that is a lot of people don't want to go to Amazon because they feel Amazon or they don't want to deal with Chinese companies because they're going to steal the technology and learn everything there is, and then they don't use you anymore. But we wanted to provide stickiness where these big companies just couldn't be without us. Now, when we sold to Home Depot, part of the deal was that within two weeks we had to completely stop selling through Sears and Wayfair, which made sense.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 16:23  

Yeah, yeah.

Jay Steinfeld: 16:24  

And funny enough about it, we didn't have a huge amount of revenue from it, but it did make us very appealing to Home Depot and Lowe's because they saw one. They are the revenue that we already had from just being good and profitable. We were always profitable, expanding margins. I mean, that that's a good thing. But they also saw that our technology was good enough to be able to integrate with these big companies, with Sears and Wayfair, and that gave us a halo effect on us, that our engineers were good, that our technology was good, and it made it more made them more comfortable that when we integrated with them, it would work.

So it also gave us something that we were building that was pretty damn fun. So we were building and working with these big companies and we were these tiny little companies. That was it. It just gave us this, you know, made us puff out and feel pretty good.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 17:34  

I love that.

Jay Steinfeld: 17:35  

I'm. I still think about it and smile because it was. I can't believe we did it now.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 17:41  

I mean, you've built something incredible. If, you know, some people are thinking about this strategy and they're thinking, I want to find a way to do this with our brand. If you were an advisor to a brand or a company, right. That's thinking of, you know, this type of strategy. What would your biggest piece of advice be?

Jay Steinfeld: 18:01  

What do you have that no one else has, and what do other people need, and how do you integrate and show the value to them? That makes it as easy as possible for this big brother to integrate with you.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 18:15  

Amazing.

Jay Steinfeld: 18:15

What is the value prop that you have to them? That, and you can make it so easy for them that they have to say yes. Now, if you're a big brother, you can pretty much deal with whoever you want. But, I mean, even even the AI companies right now, they're buying up all these smaller companies to get some capabilities, whether it's, well, anything, you know what they're doing. Yep.

So that's the same thing that you can do. AI doesn't have to be high tech. Blinds is not a high-tech business. But we were using technology to its greatest advantage.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 18:53

I love that. Jay, we're pretty much out of time already. I can't believe it went by so fast, but I'm sure you've got so much more to say on this and so many more lessons of business. Now you've got a book, so you've got lead from the core, the four Principles for profit and Prosperity, that's, I'm sure, available everywhere and that people can buy and read to learn more about you and your successes. But if people want to find you on other channels or want to know more about you, where should they go?

Jay Steinfeld: 19:25

Well, I do have Jay Steinfeld. com as a website, but I'm very active on LinkedIn, so feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. You can ask questions there, and I do some interesting posts every now and then, and I'm happy to connect with people and learn from them as well.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 19:43  

Amazing Jay, it was an honor having you on the podcast. Thank you so much for all this advice and we'll talk soon.

Jay Steinfeld: 19:53  

Thanks so much. Good to be here.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 19:58  

All right. Perfect. That was great. It went by so fast. I looked at the time and I was like, wow, we're already above 15 minutes.

I could have kept going for hours. Jay, I really appreciate you. Thank you so much. This will be sent to my editor and I believe in the next couple weeks or so it'll get posted once it's posted. Usually, it's audio first on all podcasting platforms.

It does get posted on YouTube a little later. But we'll send you an email with the links to everything.

Jay Steinfeld: 20:31

Great. I'll market it for you.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 20:33

Fantastic. All right, Jay, thanks so much. Have a good day.

Jay Steinfeld: 20:36  

Yeah, I think the topic is an interesting one. It's not one that I talk about very often, but when you were looking for some growth strategy, I thought of it and I thought this could be good. It could be helpful.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 20:49

It's great. And I love you know, it's like we talk. This is episode number, what, 72 or something. We've talked about almost everything, but this is not something I've talked about before. So I always love when guests are able to bring that unique expertise or a strategy that maybe brand owners didn't really think about.

Jay Steinfeld: 21:07  

Great. Well, I'm glad you thought it was good. Hopefully your viewers and listeners will as well. Thanks for having me. I appreciate the opportunity.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 21:14  

Thank you so much.

Jay Steinfeld: 21:16  

And happy New Year.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 21:17  

Yes. You too.

Jay Steinfeld: 21:17  

Bye bye.

Outro: 21:24  

All right. Well, that's it for today's episode. And thank you so much for tuning in. Now, if you like what you've heard, and you don't want to miss any of the new episodes that are about to come out, make sure you subscribe to the podcast and well, bonus points if you also leave a review in the iTunes store or wherever you're listening to this. Now, if you're working on an ecommerce store that does over $1 million in revenue and you need help with conversion optimization or landing pages, well, I've got some good news because there's a pretty good chance we can help with that.

Go to splitbase.com to learn more or even to request a proposal. If you have any guest requests, questions, or comments, tweet me @rpaulindaigle, and I'll be super happy to hear from you. And again, thanks again for listening. This is Minds of Ecommerce.

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