With an “Employee-First” Mentality, Everyone Wins

The Container Store, Culture Impact Brief

Read the excerpt below followed by the link to download the full Culture Impact Brief

How The Container Store Serves Customers, Vendors and Shareholders by Putting Employees First.

The Container Store, the nation’s leading retailer of storage and organization products, has enjoyed overwhelmingly strong growth since its inception in 1978. Instead of competing solely on convenience and price, as do most retailers, The Container Store’s dominance in the market is also the result of an intense focus on human relationships. At its core is an “employee-first” mentality that emphasizes bringing great people on board, paying well above the industry average, providing outstanding training and development opportunities, and providing a solid values framework that enables employees to unleash their “creative genius.” This has resulted in an environment where employees, customers, vendors and, ultimately, the shareholders, win.

The Container Store has approximately 5,000 employees and sixty-one 25,000+ square-foot retail stores across the country and a thriving online and call center business. Since its inception in 1978, the retailer has enjoyed high double digit, year-over-year growth rate. In 2012, revenues reached $706M. The company is in a period of rapid growth, and in the next year, six new stores are planned to open, each boasting more than 10,000 multi-functional storage solutions stocked annually.

According to Chairman and CEO Kip Tindell, the key to the company’s success has been its “employee-first” culture, with an intense focus on building strong relationships with employees and, ultimately, with customers. In his keynote address at the 2013 Great Place to Work® Conference he noted, “If you take care of the employees better than anyone else, they will take care of the customer better than anyone else. If the employees and the customers are ecstatic, the shareholders will be ecstatic too.”

Jessica Rohman