On Friendship and Color-Coded Success With “The Home Edit”

Published Jul 1, 2024, 7:01 AM

Clea Shearer and Joanna Teplin are the dynamic duo behind “The Home Edit.” From their serendipitous start over a blind lunch date to becoming a runaway success, Clea and Joanna share their journey from launching their company to landing a Netflix show, and hosting “Extreme Home Makeover.” They discuss their unique approach to organizing — including their famous rainbow method — and reveal the secrets behind their successful friendship and business partnership.

Hello Sunshine, Hey, bright Side Besties.

Today on the show, we're getting organized with besties and business partners Clear Sharer and Joanna Teplin, aka the masterminds behind the Home Edit. They're telling us all about the blind date that started their friendship and empire, and they're giving us the lowdown on junk drawers. It's Monday, July First, I'm Simone Boyce, I'm.

Danielle Robe and this is the bright Side from Hello Sunshine, Simone. It's the start of a brand new week and the start of a new month. So I don't know about you, but I'm feeling motivated to start this Monday on the right foot.

Feels like a fresh start, right.

Yes, And what better way to kick off this new month than with on my mind Monday. So something that I came across recently that I can't stop thinking about is Jeremy Renner's interview on SmartLess.

It's one of my favorite podcasts.

Tell me I haven't heard it, so you probably know that he a tragic snowplow incident, right and he was in the hospital recovering for many months from this. I think he's still in recovery as we speak. He actually died during this accident and then was resuscitated brought back to life.

Wow.

Now, I know the topic of near death experiences might not sound very bright side. It sounds a little dark, but I'm really interested in what they reveal about life because I think we have a lot to learn from survivors who have gone through something like this. So in the interview, Jeremy said that he felt both exhilaration and an overwhelming piece in his final moments, like he was watching this replay of every single human connection he had ever made in his life. And I just thought that that was so profound. And this actually tracks with some research that I read about heart attack survivors. In one study, forty percent of them reported this flood of positive memories and experiencing a dream like state in those final moments, and doctors have actually been able to measure brain activity even as people are being brought back to life. So Jeremy is completely changed by this incident. He said that he's returning back to work and kind of like coming back down to earth with a renewed belief in the interconnectivity of life and of all of us, that we are all woven together in some way.

Even if we can't see it, but he felt it.

He really felt it in a tangible way because of this accident is so beautiful.

There's this documentary on Netflix called Surviving Death that totally changed my idea about these types of moments. It's like ten episodes all following people who have had these kinds of moments, and it's wild to hear how similar their stories are, even though it's all a different experience. But the idea of human interconnectedness, I love that that's what he felt.

Yeah, it really got me thinking about human connection and how I can be seeking that every day in an intentional way.

You know.

I just got back from my trip to Europe and I had an amazing time just wandering. Like I realized that I needed to reconnect with the little girl and me who loved to wander, and I hadn't been able to do that in many years because I've been taking care of my loved ones and my family for the past few years. But being in Paris for a few days, I stayed in this beautiful airbnb. It it was like in this perfect location. It was so beautifully curated and decorated, and I enjoyed those moments of peace that I had alone while I was staying there. Kind of felt like I got to be a Preisian for a moment and like try it on. But my trip was really punctuated by these moments of connection with friends who were there or family. My cousin Madeline was there, I got to see her, Blakelee, who's been on our show. I hung out with him a bunch. Those were just bright spots in my trip, and there was something really pure about those moments of connection because we were in a different place. We were removed from a lot of the distractions that plague my day to day life. And I don't know, Jeremy Renner's story just reinforce the power of community and connection.

For me. It's something that's going to stick with me for a long time.

Thanks for sharing that. I think I needed to hear that today too. It's interesting how the idea of death has us focus on how we want to live. And speaking of meaningful connections, our guests today are the embodiment of meaningful connections. Fellow Hello Sunshine besties Clea Shearer and Joanna Teplin. They're professional organizers and the founders of the Home Edit.

They're organizing company.

Plus they're authors of two New York Times bestselling books, The Home Edit State Organiz The Ultimate Guide to Making Systems stick, and The Home Edit Life, The No Guilt Guide to owning what you want and organizing Everything. They're also the hosts of the Netflix series Get Organized with the Home Edit, which is so fun to watch and I know it motivated all of us to clean out our closets and our drunk drawers.

These two started The Home Edit in twenty fifteen, and by the spring of twenty twenty two, I mean, they were off to the races hell of Sunshine, acquired their company, and now they're the new co hosts of The Extreme Home Makeover Home Edition Reboot, which is coming soon to ABC.

They're here now to tell us about their first meeting in Nashville, the ground rules for their friendship and business partnership, and if it's time to say goodbye to those shoe boxes in your closet.

It's a millennial epidemic, folks.

That's right after the break stick with us. Clia and Joanna. Welcome to the bright Side. Hi, thanks for having us.

Welcome, Welcome to friends and two friends. This is gonna be really fun.

Yeah, I love it.

Many of us know you both and of course your present day success, but I'm not sure everyone actually knows how it all began.

How did you two meet each other?

So a lot of people assume that Joanna and I have been friends forever and started a business together, and actually the opposite is true. We met through a friend, We went on like a blind friend lunch date, and went into business together that same day. So the day we met is the day we started the home edit. And we did not do background checks or google each other or do anything smart. The only thing that we did do that was smart was come up with our name, our logo, our social handles. We got our website domain, we started our legal paperwork, everything that same day. And you know, again we always say, don't do what we did, but it worked in.

This one particular instance.

Literally, I think within a day or two we were setting up bank accounts together.

So no, it was insane. It was insane, not smart, not smart.

I knew we were both insane when we were trying to set up this friendship date. I absolutely did not want a business partner, and I was unsure about having another friend. I'm just sort of a little bit of a loner these last ten years, I guess. And but the thing is is like, when I met Clea, we had the same story. We both had kids the exact same ages, and we both moved to Nashville sight unseen for our husband's jobs. And so I was like, well, she's impulsive, Like we are very similar, and so I'm like, I just knew we also we.

Brought the same intensity to the conversation when we sat down to lunch. It was like we weren't like, so, like, what's your favorite vacation spot. We were like, now, what are your strengths and weaknesses? Anything duplicative, like tell me your talent, tell me where you're bad at. I mean, we just like we just got right into it. We waste no time.

You were both asking the questions or was one person the question asker?

Oh no, no, we both gotta love.

It was a destined, faded lunch. It lasted four hours and that evening when we got home, we started setting everything up and texting back and forth to come up with you know, the name, the home edit.

We went through a bunch of different.

Scenarios and yeah, organizers are efficient, ladies.

Sure, that's the bottom line should have known.

The biggest surprise is that the friendship that came out of this. I mean, we could have been good business partners, but not the freat Like I always think the business is the most interesting because I truly believe the success of the business is our friendship and that piece couldn't have been foreseen.

And I don't believe.

That the business would have been successful if we were not as close of friends as we became.

And I think that's the magic of it all.

I hear this, and I want to know how, because I'm looking at you two, and I'm like, okay, the power of female friendship, But how did your friendship help amplify your business?

It sustained it.

We know a lot of duos in multiple different industries that ultimately fail because they didn't have the foundation of actual true friendship. And I think that you know that ends up showing after a certain amount of time. And Joanna and I spend an inordinate amount of time together, all of our lives together. Really, our homes that we moved into last year are six hundred steps away from each other.

What, yes, we counted. We're insane. So your husbands get along? Yes, Oh yeah, our kids, everyone's family.

And you know, I think that Joanna and I never could have been this successful if.

We didn't love spending every minute together.

And again like we spend every minute together and then choose to vacations together.

Yeah, I think it's just lightning in a bottle, right, You guys made it work because there's something special about you two, and there's something special about the reaction that happened whenever YouTube came together. So I want to get the timeline straight a little bit. You launched your company in twenty fifteen. You start the company together after only knowing each other for a few hours. Take us back to the early days that followed. What did the home edit look like before it became the home edit that we know today.

One of the things that I think is so integral to our early success is we both completely one hundred percent aligned on the fact that busy people are busy people. If you dive into work, it begets more work. And I have a social media background and a marketing background in general, and I was like, we need to work so that we have content, so that we can share content, so that it continues to spur more work and more business for us. So we started to reach out to friends, neighbors.

I didn't even have any friends, but like, you know, people that I was just like recently in touch with.

And we had one client very very very early on, like literal days from when we started.

It was our very first job together.

And you know, again everything was gelling, everything was working. Joanna had an organizing business in San Francisco and I had never done it professionally, but like, who knew what it would be like to actually organize together?

Right, you could talk about a business, right, I think from this second we started. You know, things can fall apart quickly if you're not matched with work ethic And I think that the reason I never wanted to have a business partner. I had had multiple businesses in the past, and it never had ever dawned on me to have a business partner, because I how can you know if someone's going to put in the same effort that you're willing to put in, Like you just can't know these.

Things group projects, Yeah.

And it was shocking because that's something you just can't prepare for. Like someone can say yeah, yeah, I'm all in, until you guys.

Are You're in the weeds.

And we are literally under SYNCD filthy, exhausted, killing ourselves, breaking our backs daily, you know, just literally in it for the grind.

You can't know.

And the thing is, it's like every day the two of us both showed up every single day.

We both showed up with the same level of energy.

Yeah, showing up paid off because in twenty twenty two, Hello Sunshine acquired your company. Can you give us the full real story, because this is fascinating to me.

Yes, I will give you the full real story. I think it needs to start though. Just a couple months after we formed our business in August, I really thought that we had the biggest opportunity to grow our brand on Instagram. No other professional organizers were doing it at the time. Of course now everyone is, but no one was doing it then. And I grew up in Los Angeles, so I had a lot of high profile people in my network. I pitched to Joanna that we fly to LA This was in October of twenty fifteen, and I said, let's do projects for them in exchange for social post and that way we can really hit the ground running and start to grow our business in more ways than.

Just on the ground.

In Nashville, and that really changed the game of our business. From that moment on in October, we basically were in La every other month or every month for work, and celebrity projects just started to become kind of our thing, like who give.

Us some names. Our first project was Christina Applegate.

We did Selma Blair, Jamie King, Marla Sockloff, Constant Zimmer.

We did a lot of like influencer people and you're not charging anything.

They reimbursed us for product like at the container store, right, and we did the project and we would be able to take content, they would post it, we would post it, and it really started to like create a snowball effect. And then our first really big client was Gwyneth Paltrow. That was she started following us and Joanna and I just decided to shoot our shot and DM her and like all of a sudden, we were in LA pulling up to our house.

And I was like, are they going to open the gate? Like are we sure that they're not allowed to be here? Wait? What did you guys write in the DM? I love a cold DM or cold email.

It was a cold M and it was just like, Hi, Gwyneth, It's such an honor that you decided to follow us. We'd love to do a project for you. Anything you want in your home, we'd be happy to do it. Just we're just in your snow. Yeah, right by the way, we're outside actually yeah, And she wrote back, how lucky am I? That's literally her words, how lucky am I.

We also had Mollie Sims early on too, Now that I'm thinking of that, Molly was before Gwyneth.

I believe, yes, Mollie was a very early project. And one thing that really changed our business was the invention of Instagram Stories, and that allowed us to still show our beautiful projects on the feed, and we were actually able to have personalities, and we were able to show people who we are as friends, as crazy business partners, as literal weirdos, as all of the craziness in our life. That was kind of this really nice actually juxtaposition to perfection. We were like anything but and that's how Reese found us, and she thought that we were funny. At the time, Hella Sunshine was a channel on Direct TV, and so now, obviously Hello Sunshine is a humongous production company, but at the time they were looking to create premium content for their actual channel. And we decided to all make a show together with Molly Simms actually as one of our producers too, because Molly, when we were at her house, she was like, these crazy ladies are a TV show, And so we all kind of joined forces and created a series called Master the Mess, which was on the DirecTV channel and now is on YouTube. But we basically were able to take the success of Master the Mess, package it together and sell it to Netflix as a full series. So Reese found us on Instagram because of Instagram stories, and the combination with our work and our antics is how we.

Have a show.

So now thousands of homes across the country have rainbow colored organization, including my home.

My bookshelf is an ode to you too. It is rainbow colored. Yes, it's quite legendary.

From our remote interviews, everyone points it out.

It's a fun show stopper, I gotta say. But it's so it's so you too. It's become sort of this calling card. Obviously you have so many products and do so much, but the rainbow is something that you guys are really known for. And as I was preparing for this conversation, I thought, how the hell did they take this one aesthetic and turn it into an empire, Like how did you guys figure this out?

First of all, I was rainbow bright for Halloween, like for nine years in a row, so you live it. I have always been like.

A rainbow girly. It's it's always been my thing. And when Joanna and I first joined forces, she had an organizing business prior, and she was very very into like the actual function of how everything worked, as of course she should. I mean, this is about organizing, after all. And I went to design school in New York, and my focus was about really like pumping up the esthetic to make it be instagrammable.

You know.

Again, organizing has been a profession forever, but people were using kind of like found items to contain things like shoe boxes or plastic tubs or whatever. And we wanted to make it really beautiful and really pop. And there were a couple things that I was dead said about, first of all, like creating kind of like a visual vocabulary for the way we organize versus other people. And I wanted to create a specific a labeling system that was kind of signature instead of using.

A label maker.

And organizing by the rainbow is what I've always done with my bookshelves, with my closet, with everything. Because the Rainbow method of organizing is actually a system, and it's a labeling system. It's just labeling things by color, putting them in place in color instead of putting them in place by like a word of a label. So again, if you're looking for a blue sweater, it's in the blue section.

You know, you don't have to look very hard.

And it really blends the functionality of organizing because it is a system with the esthetic value that we were going for. So everything kind of became, you know, our signature rainbow style, and I've always loved the rainbow.

I'm just glad we were able to leverage it.

Joanna, is there an organizing trait that was always your signature even before you started the home edit?

To Clea's point, I was always obsessed with the functionality, like things have to make sense and they have to be you have to remove any barrier to entry for people.

To actually keep the system up.

So I was always on the hunt for like, Okay, if someone's tall, put something an eye level for them, not for you know, you have to think in a customizable way if someone's short, Like I always like to have stepstools all around my house.

My whole family is short. It does not do any favors.

For us not to have easy access to put things away, because you know what happens, people leave it on the counter. It's just thinking about it in those ways so that people can maintain the systems in easy, smart ways.

Joanna and I were always really good at kind of like utilizing each other's individual talents and challenging each other to be Like Joanna's like, we need to make this smarter. Like it's it's it works and it's beautiful, but like we need to make it smarter, or I'd be like, Okay, this is super functional, but like this, it doesn't look like the home edit. This doesn't look like the type of work that we should be putting out.

Did you guys have any ground rules for your friendship or your business partnership, anything that you recommend to other people?

First of all, I'll say Joanna and I have very little rules, like god forbid, Like you know, she's not like sitting on top of my head like any given moment, so.

Like not a lot of boundaries there.

We have one rule that I can think of, and it is if you hire a friend. If you want to bring a friend into this company, you have to be okay to fire them. You cannot, Like there's no allegiance other than this business. If you want to bring someone in because you think that they're going to be great, great, And we have hired multiple friends, but we've always stuck to that role good one. It's business at the end of the day, and we have to do it's best for the company.

Do you guys ever fight like you There's no way you could have been working together for ten years and not navigate any conflict.

I'm going to tell you the honest truth.

Hand to god, we've had under five fights in nine years.

We bicker all the time. Just to be clear, we bicker all the time, but that's the way we just so you like old married couple bicker.

Yeah, we're like sisters. So that's just like the way we talk to each other. But like we've had I'm gonna say, I think like two like actual fights. And the reason why we don't fight is because we know that neither one of us ever has any malice at all. So if we offend each other, if we do something to upset someone else, we can get over it extremely quickly, because if you can take away the fact that no one's ever intending to hurt your feelings, you can understand that things can happen that are just situational and you can just move beyond it.

That's right.

The trust is so implicit that you remove all of that because there is no question of any integrity or anything real in the root of something. It's it's clearly it's always a misunderstanding, always, or it was a core judgment.

You know, it was one or the other, and we're literally is no other.

Answer, and so you get over things so fast because there's nothing to pick apart.

It's just it was a misunderstanding. Word, it was a bad judgment the end. That's the thing.

It's like you, it's sort of like a marriage in the sense that like, okay, the alternative we can either.

Get divorced or we can figure this out, and those are the two options. Your fates are tied. Yeah, like for what like are We're just gonna stop around like this? It helps nobody.

You two are a testament to the power of trust and true friendship and business. And I've learned so much hearing both of you share your origin story with us. So after the break, we want to pivot into some practical takeaways for the overwhelmed, busy people, especially moms out there like myself, who are trying to get and stay organized.

That's up next. Stay with us and we're back.

Okay, clean, Joanna, We have some rapid fire questions for you to help us get organized around the house. So first, what is your take on junk drawers. Are they actually possible to escape or is it just something that everyone has.

There's no such thing. There's no such thing. That's what I was going to say. There's no such thing as a junk drawer. Okay, okay, tell me more. If there's junk in it, you're doing it wrong.

If it's a general drawer, then let's call it what it is, a general drawer.

But let's have an intention for that drawer.

Like it would be a household drawer, multipurpose drawer, general drawer. It has pens, it has you know, tape, it has your stamps, and you know it has like your basic things scissors.

But if there's junk in it, well that's the problem.

So it's reframing, that's right, and it's not to waste those spaces.

Those are valuable spaces.

I bet it's the top drawer and almost everyone's kitchen in America, So do not waste that real.

Estate that is valuable.

Calling it a junk drawer is disrespecting the value of the drawer.

That's that's what we believe.

I love your passion for organizing.

It is contagious. I want to go home and fix my general drawer. There you go.

Okay, I love some clear plastic bins as much as the next girl. But if someone out there can't afford to buy new bins for a space that they want to organize, do you have any tips as to how we can upcycle and still stay organized.

Absolutely. What you can do is use found objects throughout the house. We in the past we have used like antique teacups as jewelry, like ringholders and bracelet holders. You can use any special item in your house to hold, you know, your favorite items.

That's genius, thank you.

I like like old iPhone boxes make great general drawer bins, like anything.

That comes in the iPhone box. Okay, she's the expert. Don't listen to me. No, no, no, look here's my issue.

It's not if you use them great, But we run into people's graves, save them of iPhone boxes and computer boxes that they think they're going to use, but don't use.

No as dividers as divine. Yeah, it's dividers. That's great. You're safe if you use them. Amazing. Just don't keep them thinking you're going.

To use them, because now you have a cabinet full of empty boxes that you're like, are imagining you're going to use.

If you use them, more power to you.

We have like a list of things that are just all like we find all the time.

You're triggered by them.

Yeah, saving things that you may use is costing you money. I mean it's taking up space and you're paying your rent or mortgage for that space. And so that's where we can't wrap our head around. People hold on to things forever, like things in the kitchen that they never use.

They got it for a wedding.

If you got an ice cream maker for your wedding, if you haven't made ice cream, it's time to pass it on.

Yes, okay, takes them a lot of space, a lot of you could be using in that space.

Oh my god, fon, dupots, Come on.

Is there a time frame that you give people like, if you haven't used this in three months, throw it out.

It depends on what it is item. Okay, it depends on the item.

I would say in my most generous I will give someone a year.

Well, and the other piece too, which goes for anybody in a small place or a big place. But you, I always say, this is the first thing I say to anybody. I don't know if I should get rid of it. You either get the item or you get the space. So at some point the space will tell you you're too full, and you have to make the choice do you want any space between each hangar? Like do you want breathing room in case you see something out when you're shopping, or do you want it to be crammed to the gills, And so you're like can barely open your closet door that morning. You have to make those decisions every single day of this. I'll give one caveat. I wouldn't ever start in a closet too, because that you run into a separate issue, which is emotional landmines, and that can detract you and totally disrupt the flow of understanding how important and effective that organizing can be. Do not start there because you will run into like, oh god, if I have another baby, did I gain weight? What if I loose? It's going to distract you. You got to start where you don't have the emotional ties. Start in the case, starting the pantry, start anywhere else. Do not start in the closet.

Right.

They're the queens of tough love. Oh yeah, I love it. So I love that you don't You don't mug about it?

Yeah? No, because we need we need you, We need someone to give us tough love.

It's amazing.

I'm so happy for you both, and I so so appreciate your time. This was fun.

This was so fun. Thank you guys, this was so fun. Thanks for having us.

Clia Sheer and Joanna Teplin are professional organizers, founders of the Home Edit, and hosts of the Netflix series Get Organized with the Home Edit thanks to our partners at Airbnb.

That's it for today's show.

Tomorrow journalists and author Anna Goldfarb is here to talk friendship and catching feelings.

Listen and follow the bright Side on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Simone Boye.

You can find me at Simone Boice on Instagram and TikTok.

Danielle Robe on Instagram and TikTok. That's r O b A.

Y see you tomorrow, Folks. Keep looking on the bright side.

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