Made by Gather Founder on Building a $5 Billion Kitchenware Empire After 2 Failed Startups

Small business takeaway:

• Made by Gather grew into a $5 billion kitchenware company by resisting the rush to sell mainly online and turning mass retailers like Walmart, Target, and Costco into a design platform. Its rise reflects three durable strategies: focus sharpened by early failures; elevated design that creates emotional pull in a function-first category; and outside-industry talent paired with data that tackles consumer pain points, like cluttered kitchen counters, with product innovation.

At face value, Shae Hong’s growth philosophy for his kitchenware business Made by Gather sounds, well, puzzling.

The maker of design-forward items from toasters to skillets presumes that folks who don’t care about how their housewares look, in fact, really do—even though the product category is known more for function than fashion.

And rather than hiring seasoned home executives to run the business, Hong is more drawn to folks with no industry experience at all. 

The strategies almost seem intent on thwarting, rather than advancing, success. 

Yet Made by Gather, with $5 billion in sales today, has managed to outperform the industry. U.S. kitchen electrics sales rose 4.44% to $13.8 billion in 2025, while housewares sales (cookware, bakeware, cutlery, food storage, gadgets, kettles, portable beverageware, and tabletop) slipped 15% to $25.1 billion, according to Circana. By Contrast, Made by Gather’s revenues surged more than 50% last year, Hong told CO—.

That success reflects a push to bring “elevated design” at affordable prices to more consumers at mass retailers like Walmart, where its Beautiful by Drew Barrymore kitchenware is exclusively sold, and newfound innovation to utilitarian items, such as space-saving toasters and air fryers that declutter kitchen counters and cabinets, said Shae Hong, Founder and CEO. 

The company’s collaborative, growth-minded, and data-obsessed culture means key decisions on everything from pricing to product expansion must reflect rigorous market insights. “You have to be open to the idea that we are going to grow every day,” Hong told CO—. 

Made by Gather: a success story 26 years—and two failed startups—in the making

Unlike the wave of direct-to-consumer kitchenware brands that tapped e-commerce for growth, Made by Gather took the opposite tack by building a business in brick-and-mortar stores first. 

That game plan paid off, but it was a long time coming.

Hong’s industry wisdom was honed over two decades as a housewares supplier to other companies’ brands, in the aisles of industry trade shows, and after two failed startups.

As a 19-year-old college student in 1999, Hong founded internet-connected appliance startup ePods. Salton, the now-defunct housewares company that scored a huge hit with the George Foreman grill, marked its biggest investor. When the market crashed in 2000, so went ePods, which could no longer raise funding. 

Hong’s second venture, a line of countertop kitchen appliances under the Amana license, folded in 2002 when Maytag acquired Amana and terminated the licensing agreement. 

But these failures yielded their lessons.

The then-president of Zenith offered Hong feedback on the ePods business model, which was an internet service provider/hardware business/content company/e-commerce provider all at once. “He said, ‘You’re trying to do four things. Just one of those things is hard,’” Hong said. The comment underscored “the importance of being focused.” 

Around that time, Hong recalls his first visit to The International Housewares Association (IHA) show, where he surveyed the products in the aisles at Chicago’s McCormick Place, North America’s biggest convention center. “Everything looked pretty much the same,” Hong said. “It was all white plastic, black plastic, and very simple design. I thought, ‘I think I can design something better.’”

[Read more: Three Company Founders Disclose How They Discovered Their Niche]

Betting on physical stores and high-design kitchenware on mass-market shelves 

Hong spent the following years running Made by Gather predecessor Sensio, building a sizable business designing white-label and licensed housewares for major retailers and personalities like chef Gordon Ramsay and reality star Bethenny Frankel. 

Then, in 2018, Hong bought out his partner and the company that would become Made by Gather started to take shape.

This was amid the rise of buzzy direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands like household cleaning startup Brandless and online marketplace Jet.com. 

Despite the era’s drumbeat narrative that e-commerce would usurp physical retail, Made by Gather invested in placement at brick-and-mortar stores, particularly mass merchants from Walmart to Costco. 

“There was a lot of temptation in 2018 and 2019 to pivot to all DTC. But that’s not what we knew,” he said.

The strategy proved prescient. As DTC startups like Brandless and Jet.com folded while others from Caraway cookware and Jinx pet food to UNTUCKit menswear discovered they needed physical stores to sustain growth and scale, Made by Gather bet on its “core belief that stores were not going to go away,” Hong said. 

The business also followed market shifts as more housewares sales moved from specialty retailers (think Bed Bath & Beyond) and department sales to mass chains: In 2005, specialty stores and department stores accounted for 13% and 9% of housewares sales respectively, according to data from IHA provided to CO—.

Fast forward two decades, and department stores and home specialty stores generate a mere 2% and 2%, respectively, of the housewares and kitchen electrics business in the United States. By contrast, mass merchants rank as the second largest distribution channel behind e-commerce, ringing up 28% of the categories’ U.S. sales in 2025, according to Circana data shared with CO—.

By concentrating 80% of its business with mass retailers, Made by Gather has earned 6% market share in the kitchen electrics and housewares categories, Hong said. 

[Read more: 3 Scaling Startups Unpack Customer Acquisition and Retention Strategies Driving Growth]

Beautiful by Drew Barrymore: a design-centric ‘human-at-the-helm brand’ bringing younger and higher-income shoppers to Walmart

Hong spotted a void in the market for high-quality, elegant housewares products designed by women for women.

He said he found the right partner in actress and businesswoman Drew Barrymore. Their shared vision for kitchen appliances with a premium aesthetic at accessible price points from $9.99 to $140.99 birthed Beautiful by Drew Barrymore in 2021. 

Beautiful caters to the “feel good optimistic Mom,” Hong said. A “human at the helm brand,” the collection was about forging an emotional bond with consumers. “Our category lacked emotional connectivity. It was controlled by brands that were bought based on function—stand mixers, blenders, as opposed to how the brand connected to your life,” the way many beauty brands did, he said.

Hong also set out to create a lifestyle brand that had reach and resonance beyond Barrymore fans, inking an exclusive distribution deal with Walmart. Hong said the line results from Barrymore’s innate style acumen and the company’s work with top designers and engineers to turn utilitarian household goods into kitchen-counter eye candy. That investment banks on the premise that “everybody cares about design, whether they know it or not,” he said. 

Today, Beautiful is a leading brand in ceramic cookware sets and stand mixers at Walmart, according to the retailer. It’s also drawing a younger, 25- to 35-year-old higher-income demographic that’s new to the discount chain, Jaeme Laczkowski, Walmart’s Director of Media Relations, told CO—. “Made by Gather has been a great partner in helping us reach current and new customers with stylish, high-quality products for the home,” she said. 

That success comes as the past dozen years has seen design and innovation gains in the kitchenware category. “The toaster back in 2014 looked like the one I had in 1970,” said Joe Derochowski, VP, Home and Home Improvement Industry Advisor at Circana. As a generation of more sophisticated home cooks draw inspiration and culinary confidence from social media and foodie culture alike, brands are upping their design game in the kitchenware category, he said. 

Success in the housewares business today calls for brands to bring an “er” to a new product—better, faster, cheaper—that improves on the consumer experience in some tangible way, Derochowski said. For example, “If I’m making eggs, does the product help me make them? Serve them? Store them?” A housewares item that enhances some part of the consumer’s process—from planning and prep to heating, storing, and serving—is table stakes today, he said.

The culture edge: leveraging data insights and talent plucked from other industries 

Hong regards Made by Gather’s culture, which prizes humility, “you can’t talk down to anybody; if you have an ego, you won’t make it here,” as its rocket fuel. That culture, elements of which he’s hush-hush about, prioritizes strategic planning led by data insights. It also leverages best practices from other business sectors via talent plucked from outside the housewares industry. 

“That’s super important because you don’t learn from other industries or categories if you all come from the same industry,” he said. 

For one, Made by Gather taps fashion’s playbook to differentiate the Beautiful and Bella brands with a design discipline uncommon in the category, Hong said. The strategy marks the imprint of Chief Product Officer Denielle Wolfe, who’s held roles at brands such as Coach, Kiplinger, and Tumi and “brought the idea of elevating design across organizational teams and processes, which is now ingrained in the DNA of how we operate,” he said. “You know something is Tumi. A Coach bag is a Coach bag.” That cohesive product design and branding have helped distinguish Made by Gather among kitchenware brands that often lack a singular vibe, he said. 

Design discipline goes hand in hand with strategic planning led by robust, AI-powered data insights that guide category expansion and product innovation, Hong said. Hong credits that rigor to Chief Marketing Officer Matthew Carrow, who in 2023 brought data expertise honed at vacuum cleaner disruptor iRobot to Made by Gather. “We were collecting data about the home and habits people have and did nothing with that data until Matt showed up,” he said.

Today, merchandise hits retail shelves only following “a massive product development timeline.” Before rolling out Beautiful’s limited-edition Buttercream appliances this year, for example, the company tested the precise shade that would resonate with consumers “to make sure that tone of yellow was the right tone,” he said. “It’s doing great.” 

And it was Made by Gather data that revealed an unmet need to optimize kitchen space. “The consumer has told us via insights and data that there’s a lack of space on the countertop and a lot of clutter is happening, and we were trying to solve that for the consumer,” Hong said. The findings led to the 2023 launch of the “fits-anywhere” feature of its solution-driven Bella brand, which includes griddles that fold in half and store upright to save cabinet space. 

“Everything we do is tested and vetted through data,” he said. “It’s always about looking around the corner, how to evolve and how to keep growing.”

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