Waco Then the World

How Chip and Joanna Gaines turned a modest Waco, Texas, house-flipping operation into one of the most powerful new brands in entertainment, publishing, and retail.

- By Tom Foster. Photograph by Andrew Hetherington

Mesh cap backward, face unshaven, Chip Gaines talks with the bluster of a guy at a party who has a story, or a colorful analogy, for everything—which he does. Joanna, his wife and co-founder of the couple’s rapidly expanding media and retail brand, Magnolia, sits beside him with an occasionally bemused expression, her black hair tumbling around the shoulders of a creamy sweater as she looks for opportunities to steer the conversation.

Two full years before they shocked their fans by announcing the end of their hit HGTV show, Fixer Upper, they already knew they were going to have to leave it. The move would be risky. It was late 2015, and the Gaineses were in only the third season of the show that had transformed their lives almost overnight, taking them from local house flippers in Waco, Texas, to regulars on the covers of celebrity-gossip magazines.

Fixer Upper, which chronicled home renovations that Chip and Joanna did around Waco, was an instant sensation when it launched in 2013. By 2015, the show was setting ratings records at HGTV and helping make the network one of the top 10 on cable. Such high visibility allowed the couple to build other businesses around their growing celebrity. In 2014, they launched a tiny homewares store, Magnolia, that became so popular shoppers lined up for hours in the summer sun to get in. Former first lady Laura Bush came by, with Secret Service agents in tow.

In the fall of 2015, the Gaineses supersized the store after relocating it to a long-dormant cottonseed mill complex that covers two city blocks. They launched a Magnolia-branded furniture line with the company Standard Furniture and fielded calls to do other licensing deals.​