Room & Board
A Serendipity Story
Serendipity Stories bring the practice of serendipity to life in real-world examples.
In 1972, John Gabbert was in Europe touring retailers as part of his job at his family’s furniture store. He walked into a store almost no American had heard of, and his mind was blown.
It was IKEA, which at that time had just a couple of locations in Sweden. What caught his attention wasn’t only the clean, low-cost designs; it was the system behind them. IKEA designed its own furniture, worked with manufacturers to build it, and then sold it straight to customers.
Gabbert had grown up inside the opposite arrangement. His father owned Gabbert's, a successful Minneapolis, Minnesota store that sold the ornate, colonial-style furniture popular at the time. All of it was made by manufacturers in North Carolina and New England, who decided which products would exist and how long they’d be available. The system frustrated him: manufacturers dropped products that sold well locally, and salespeople on full commission worked for themselves rather than the customer.
Gabbert, then in his early twenties, was running the store day to day — but it was still his father's company. He could see what wasn't working, but the changes weren't his to make. So he tucked the IKEA idea away but never forgot about it. Eventually, he landed on a way to pursue it.
He found a New England maker open to a partnership and talked his family into opening a modest department inside the Gabbert’s stores — first called Put Together, then Home and Company — selling modern, inexpensive, assemble-at-home pieces. In an approximately 100,000-square-foot Gabbert’s store, it occupied around 4,000 square feet. (He and a few friends later settled on a plainer name for it: Room & Board.)
Then, bad news created an opportunity. The Gabbert’s business and the Gabbert’s family reached a crossroads — his father backed out of an agreement to sell him the company, as had been previously planned. Gabbert decided enough was enough and traded his roughly 30 percent stake in the Gabbert’s company for full ownership of the small Room & Board division.
For years, Room & Board stayed IKEA-like and temporary — inexpensive, flat-packed, made to get you started rather than to keep. It was successful enough, but nothing impressive. Gabbert still liked the IKEA idea but wanted to do it better: the same approach, higher-quality furniture. So he made his move — a much larger space, and alongside the existing low-cost line, a better, American-made line at higher prices. The result surprised him. His original customers, now out of college and more established, bought it eagerly. They no longer wanted affordable furniture for now; they wanted to invest in pieces to keep.
Gabbert built the new Room & Board piece by piece, choosing and designing what he liked and trusting that customers his age would like it too. A few key encounters shaped both the look of the furniture and the way he'd make it. At a furniture market, he happened upon a cluster of Vermont woodshops sharing a rented space, makers of simple, classic designs that let the solid wood speak; they became an early partner. At the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis’s modernist museum, he encountered a sculpture by Martin Puryear that stayed with him. The framing — raw steel, welded so the seams showed — struck him as right for furniture. He took the notion to a small shop that made security gates and asked them to build a table instead: two-inch steel in a clean Parsons frame, topped with wood, marble, or glass. It became one of Room & Board’s best sellers and is still made by the same manufacturer today.
Rather than sell whatever factories offered, Room & Board designed its own furniture and had specialists each make the part they did best — one shop the frame, another the wood top, another the upholstery — which lowered costs and gave customers more choice. Today Room & Board sells hundreds of millions of dollars of furniture a year. It has transformed from a small “shop-within-a-shop” within Gabbert’s stores to its own powerhouse company.
"Life's not about how fast you run or how high you jump, but how well you bounce," Gabbert says. His career was a long practice in bouncing — in meeting the unexpected and making something of it. He sought out new inputs, encountered ideas worth keeping, collected them, let them grow and evolve, and eventually connected them to an opportunity and pursued them until they became real. That is what it looks like to practice serendipity.