Making It Big

Sometimes the simplest things bring a smile to Oprah's face. In fact, she's still raving about an inexpensive gift she received from Stedman. "One day I had just come home late from work ... and Stedman said, 'Honey, look at this. I got you a present,'" Oprah says. "I said, 'Really? What is it?' And he goes, 'It's a box. You can put anything you want to in it.'"

After filling the green box with letters from her students at the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls, Stedman took Oprah to the place where he bought her present—The Container Store!

During her first visit, Oprah says she fell in love with this one-stop organization shop. "It's so cool because it had shelves and shelves of hundreds of thousands of different kinds of containers," she says. The Container Store may be a recent discovery for Oprah, but shoppers have been stocking up on storage supplies here for 30 years.

In the '70s, Kip Tindell and Garrett Boone teamed up with Dallas architect John Mullen to develop a unique retail concept. "It was largely inspired by commercial products we'd found that had been used in industry for years to help organize industry, but they'd never been available for use in the home," Garrett says. "So we thought, 'Okay, we'll take those products, we'll put them in a retail store, and we'll create the world's first storage and organization store for the home.'"