Shea McGee’s Retail Empire Is Just Getting Started

It’s three days before Shea McGee’s McGee & Co. retail flagship soft launches in Salt Lake City, and things on the shop floor are remarkably calm. Everything is perfectly in its place: A dining table is set as if for a family dinner, with a wispy arrangement of white anemones; shelves are full but not overly so; pillows have been fluffed and plumped; throws have been draped with just a dab of insouciance. Glass cloches contain candles and small piles of matches, stacked with care.Yesterday was the store’s big photo shoot ahead of its official opening on September 25, which means all of the styling is still in pristine condition. And for Shea—chief creative officer and, with her husband Syd, cofounder of the firm Studio McGee and the lifestyle brand McGee & Co.—there isn’t a hair out of place, either. She’s just as she’s appeared on screens for more than a decade: Sparkling white smile, wheat-blonde locks tumbling over a crisp white wrap top.The Salt Lake City location, formerly a Hard Rock Cafe, took two years to renovate. Photography courtesy of McGee & Co.The store design is meant to feel like walking into a Studio McGee home—an entryway, multiple dining, living, and bed rooms, and a garden shop included. Photography courtesy of McGee & Co.She flutters around the shop floor, leading store associates around from one vignette to another, advising them on styling, product, and other details they’ll need to have polished come Saturday. “I have a tendency to be an advocate for the thing that I love that isn't our top seller,” she says. “I want to show people how good it is, and I know I can do that if I just get it in front of them.” A camera follows her every move. As Syd and I sit nearby discussing the business, I realize that Shea is now teaching the associates about the vignette we’re sitting in. I try to duck out of the frame and hide our empty cans of Diet Coke, but Syd remains unfazed: The camera at this point is a fixture of their professional life.The couple have been in the spotlight since the early days of Instagram, when Shea documented their home renovation. (That was McGee 1.0.) Splashy media coverage came in the years that followed; so did a Netflix show, three books, and an even bigger audience (McGee 2.0). Today the mother of three (ages 12, 10, and 5) has licensing deals with Target, Kohler, and Ann Sacks, a mammoth social media following (four million on the @studiomcgee account; @mcgeeandco is approaching two million), and an active YouTube channel, which racks up a few hundred-thousand views per video. The Salt Lake City-based couple is spinning enough plates to easily fill any of the near-dozen china cabinets the company sells through their furniture business, which until now operated primarily online. Their latest endeavor—bringing the McGee world to brick-and-mortar retail—is what Shea calls part of “McGee 3.0.” “We’ve been running a product business for years, and now it’s time to create the experience,” she says.Located in Salt Lake City's Trolley Square, the “shop," as Shea calls it, is 7,500 square-feet. Photography courtesy of McGee & Co.Shea and Syd McGee. Photography courtesy of McGee & Co.While a shop was always part of the McGee vision board, the journey to this moment wasn’t a straight line. In the late 2010s, the couple, who met during their college years, ran a small pop-up shop in Costa Mesa, California, but at a stamp-sized 600 square-feet, it lacked the footprint needed to support a robust furniture-selling operation. They explored securing a more suitable space, and were days away from signing a new lease when Covid hit. The plan for major McGee retail was shelved—for then.A few years later, the McGees caught wind of a commercial space opening in Salt Lake’s red-brick shopping district, Trolley Square. The neighborhood was also conveniently home to a Kohler showroom, one of the studio’s biggest licensing partners. The property itself was rough: Formerly a comedy club, and a Hard Rock Cafe before that, the building didn’t exactly conjure the gentle transitional style that defines the McGee look. But if you squinted—and Shea is good at squinting—the bones were great, with soaring ceilings and generous, light-flooding windows that the nightclub had covered with black film. The renovation took two years, but the McGee experience is nearly ready for primetime.Behind the scenes of the store photo shoot in the days leading up to the grand opening. Photography courtesy of McGee & Co.“I've been here every single day, thinking about it morning and night, because I want it to represent exactly what's been in my head,” says Shea. Photography courtesy of McGee & Co.Shea plans to have the studio's senior-level designers hosting regular check-ins with the shop's design associates. Photography courtesy of McGee & Co.While Studio McGee has been designing homes for clients across the US since 2014—including ones filmed across four seasons of the couple’s hit Netflix show, Dream Home Makeover—this brick-and-mortar retail debut will be the first time the larger public will be able to experience the McGee universe in three dimensions. Walking into the 7,500-square-foot flagship three days before launch, I realize I have never actually set foot inside an actual McGee home—but now, I feel like I have.That’s very much by design. Laid out into layered vignettes with furnishings and accessories from the in-house McGee & Co. line, as well as a bit of in-store-only vintage and hand-picked lines like Match pewter and Caroline Francis candles, the space is “more of a home atmosphere than straight retail,” says Shea. There are showroom pieces—like the grand Octavia sectional that greets guests upon arrival—as well as smaller, grab-and-go gifts like terra-cotta flower pots, books, and hand towels. Syd, who says he admires retailers like Buck Mason for their attainability, lively merchandising, and attentive staff, explains that they had aimed for an experience somewhere between big-box and boutique. Despite its immense scale—and the McGees’ already-in-motion plans to open between three and six other locations over the next two years—Shea refers to the flagship simply as a “shop.”In addition to the in-house McGee & Co. line, the store features a curation of vintage and hand-picked lines. Photography courtesy of McGee & Co.“I'm getting to see our products through new eyes—and I was the one that concepted them!” says Shea. “When you see them in a store setting, pieces can have a lot more detail than you can see online.” Photography courtesy of McGee & Co.That kind of intimacy is important to the couple, who recognize that they built their business on their own likeable personas, as well as their knack for making design accessible across budgets. “We can design homes that are in the tens of millions of dollars, but we can apply the principles and teach people, and have a relatable, warm persona,” says Shea. That’s the brand. Maintaining that quality as they scale will be their next challenge. “I have aspirations of growing nationwide, but also I don’t want to lose that personal feeling that comes from a standalone store,” says Shea.She is acutely aware that personality-led businesses like hers come with unique challenges. For instance, every employee walking the floor will serve, to some extent, as a stand-in for Shea herself—a fact that makes the training of those team members especially critical. Accordingly, the designer spent the last two months developing a rigorous training guide for all her associates, including such minutiae as the number of inches Shea likes to space a rug from a wall and her preferred layering style for bedding. Those signature choices will also be distilled at the in-store design services area, where shoppers can receive free personalized furniture recommendations—the idea being that if you can’t get a fully serviced Studio McGee design, you can still decorate within the world of Shea.“The kitchen is a working kitchen,” says Shea, who envisions cooking demos and community events enlivening the space. Photography courtesy of McGee & Co.The shop spans whole-home categories, offering furniture, linens, lighting, rugs, accessories, home fragrance, and tabletop. Photography courtesy of McGee & Co.But in that space—where design services become a part of a brick-and-mortar mission—where does McGee & Co. end and Studio McGee begin? It won’t be a question much longer: McGee 3.0 will reveal a rebranding next year, with all of the businesses coming under the Studio McGee name. The store's “McGee & Co.” sign is already in place, having been ordered before the branding decision was finalized—but Shea is taking it in stride: She jokes that at least they can salvage the serifed gold “McGee.”Pillows fluffed, shelves stacked—the only thing missing at this moment, of course, are the customers. And not for any lack of trying: Every couple of minutes, a passerby stops to pull on the locked door handles. When this happens, a McGee associate quickly steps forward to spread the news that this shop is all theirs come Saturday. If September 25 is the big debut, the soft opening is the dress rehearsal. “I’m not sure it will be as soft as we’re hoping it will be,” says Shea, as another person cups their hands against the windows to peer inside.