Thirty and Fabulous

In 1978, Kip Tindell and Garrett Boone, a couple of entrepreneurial types, were just clueing in to the “saving time” concept. Sure, that’s hard to imagine now, when response time is little more than a nanosecond. But remember, FedEx was still fairly new, and fax machines were still a mere idea back in the late ’70s. Correspondence was sent strictly via “snail mail,” and international orders were placed with a telex machine.

Tindell and Boone opened the first Container Store, a 1,600-square-foot space, at the corner of Preston and Forest Avenue. Their mission was to get people excited about organization—no easy task. They carried a little-known brand from Sweden called Elfa. (Probably most of you reading this have used Elfa shelving at one time or another.) They also found organizational solutions in non-traditional places such as grocery stores, hardware stores, and auto parts stores. The duo’s genius was presentaton: they showcased these items with great lighting, modern shelving, and a color scheme that matched other products. Take the akrobin, a plastic bin used by the automotive industry to stock parts. It remains one of the store’s bestsellers. And the ubiquitous dairy crate used by college students for everything from book shelves to entertainment systems? They just tagged onto a production run from dairy companies who used different colors for their crates.

The look of the products has remained much the same in the last 30 years: simple, clean, and modern. One of the biggest developments came in 1983 with unbreakable resin, making clear plastic boxes a must-have for storing items while keeping the contents visible. Color choices have come and gone—anyone remember almond and harvest gold? But the true genius of Tindell and Boone’s vision remains. They forecasted a desire for sustainability with their use of durable, unbreakable, and, most important, reusable goods.