Business View - January 2015 79
junior year report card again, and I was really nervous
not knowing what this was going to be like. We were
very, very excited about it.”
It’s the latest validation for a business whose objec-
tives had taken some subtle turns since operations
initially got going in 2007. Back then, the parent entity
– Home Franchise Concepts – created Closet Tailors,
which was intended as a complement to the compa-
ny’s flagship Budget Blinds brand.
Shortly after its creation, however, franchisee feed-
back indicated that demand in the marketplace had
shifted to many items outside of the closet space.
Near the same time as well, a respected industry ana-
lyst compiled an article documenting how the home
organization industry was evolving from its original
roots in closet design.
The sequence of events, Tafoya said, prompted HFC’s
executives to reassess their direction.
“We didn’t want to be another me-too company,” he
said. “We absolutely wanted to be a leader in the
space.”
A subsequent meeting with the CEO of a similarly one-
tracked business – PremierGarage – yielded a part-
nership in which it and the Closet Tailors enterprise
set out to work strategically to expand the respective
product lines. After working together for more than a
year, HFC purchased the trademarks and intellectual
property of PremierGarage. The new “whole home” or-
ganization company, including garage floor coatings,
was branded Tailored Living-featuring PremierGarage.
These days, the new brand boasts 86 franchisees and
178 territories across North America. A territory typi-
cally consists of 100,000 “qualified households,” ac-
cording to Jonathan Thiessen, HFC’s vice president of
FRANCHISE
