About a decade ago, Susan Tynan was at a local shop trying to frame four national park posters when she was hit with a $400 price tag for each frame. It was at that moment that she struck upon the idea that there should be a company that made the process easier and cheaper for the average consumer. “They cost more than my couch did at the time, so I just felt like: That is weird,” she tells host Dennis Scully on the latest episode of The Business of Home Podcast. “I gained more and more conviction that this thing should exist, and it should exist in a way that delights people.”

Tynan, a Harvard Business School alum, had worked for numerous startups and even the Obama administration before she decided to dive headfirst into the new project, and in 2014, Framebridge was born. Millions of dollars in venture capital later, she was up and running. Today, the company employs hundreds on the manufacturing side and has opened dozens of retail locations as well.

“In the beginning, it was kind of a novel idea. It was a category that nobody was looking at,” she says. “I think that story was interesting to people in terms of raising venture money. But what allowed us to continue to raise venture money was proving, through customer data, that we got people to do it more often than they ever had. Raising venture capital is tough. [Investors] were like, ‘It’s a craft business.’ I had to really show [them], ‘No, we want to own the category.’ I had the ambition to build a big business. But it was, at the end of the day, the data you can’t fake: Customers come to us, they like us, and they come back. That allowed us to continue raising money.”

Now, the brand is looking to reach the trade. “We love the design community not only because they’re good customers, but because their influence on other customers is so important,” says Tynan. “We know that we have customers who first learned about Framebridge from their designer, and that stamp of approval is invaluable. So we’re trying to continuously figure out how we can make life easier for designers.” The company is set to debut a collaboration with Farrow & Ball that will be open to the trade before it’s released to consumers—a Framebridge first. “It’s a new chance to introduce ourselves to the trade. There’s just an assumption that any [brand that] started online did so with quality-shortcuts, so it’s very important for us to show people that we didn’t, and that we take design and craftsmanship very seriously.”

Crucial insight: Many direct-to-consumer companies excelled at marketing, but relied on outsourcing manufacturing to overseas factories. Framebridge, by contrast, did its own production from day one. “We needed to be vertically integrated. The whole reason for this thing was that we could offer high-quality custom framing at a more approachable, more affordable price if we did it ourselves and did it centrally. In doing so, we would have to be manufacturers.”

Key quote: “Two things that are challenging about our business are, one, having to be great at everything. We are retailers, we’re technologists, we’re designers and we’re manufacturers, and so for a small business, that’s a lot to take on. The other piece is [that] we have to match supply and demand. Every business has to. But for us, if we get it wrong, it’s not that we’re sitting on stock that we have to mark down. We have people, and we have to train people, and so getting our forecasting right has been a big part of our business.”

This episode is sponsored by Loloi and Crypton. Listen to the show below. If you like what you hear, subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

The Thursday Show

Host Dennis Scully and BOH executive editor Fred Nicolaus discuss the biggest news in the design world, including Google’s new AI tool, the state of domestic manufacturing, and whether clickbait is killing design. Later, Urban Electric CEO Dave Dawson joins the show to talk about his company’s latest moves.

This episode is sponsored by Serena & Lily and Hartmann&Forbes. Listen to the show below. If you like what you hear, subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.