From a $600 Garage Workshop to a $10 Billion Retail Empire: The Unconventional Story of Hobby Lobby

Not oil wells, tech stocks or skyscrapers, but tiny wooden frames. David Green, an 84-year-old Oklahoman, turned a modest $600 loan from 1970 into Hobby Lobby, one of America's biggest arts-and-crafts retailers, and today ranks among the world's richest people with a fortune above $13 billion. The young entrepreneur who flew out to meet him could hardly believe, driving past more than a dozen company buildings on the way to headquarters, that this scale once came out of a single garage workbench.

A $600 bet placed in a garage

Green did not start rich; he grew up in the poor household of a preacher with six children, so sheltered that the kids never realized they were poor. He climbed from shop clerk to district supervisor at the variety chain TG&Y, learning retail from the shop floor up. In 1970 he and his wife Barbara borrowed $600 and began producing miniature picture frames in their garage; according to Wikipedia's company history, the little firm they called Greco Products caught a decorating fad of the era and grew into a supplier selling frames to craft shops.

Of the loan, $450 went to a pedal-powered chopper that cut wooden moldings, with the rest spent on glue and strips, while a travelling salesman hawked the frames shop by shop. Green still keeps the first catalogue, hand-drawn pages commissioned from an artist, and that original cutting machine now stands at headquarters like a museum piece. By a twist of fate, one of the shops buying his frames was called Hobby Lobby; as the business grew, Green borrowed the name and opened his first tiny store in Oklahoma City.

From a small shop to a thousand-store empire

According to HobbyLobby.com's official history, the 300-square-foot shop opened in Oklahoma City two years after the $600 loan became the seed of today's giant; the company now counts more than 1,000 stores, roughly 50,000 employees across 48 states, over 80,000 product lines and a 12-million-square-foot manufacturing and distribution campus in Oklahoma City, making it the world's largest privately owned arts-and-crafts retailer. Family members sit in the top ranks of management, and the Green family owns the entire business.

The figures shift a little with the source, which is natural for a private company; in the conversation Green speaks of about $10 billion in sales this year and 1,100 stores in 48 states. According to Forbes, the Green family's fortune stood at $13.7 billion in April 2024, with company sales estimated around $7.9 billion a year, and workers earning at least $18.50 an hour since January 2022 despite every store staying shut on Sundays. The gap between independent tallies and the family's own numbers suggests growth is still running.

Debt trauma and arithmetic down to the cent

Asked about his biggest mistake, Green's answer comes down to a single word: debt . Bank loans taken during the expansion once pushed the firm toward default, with foreclosure proceedings looming, and ever since the doctrine has been to borrow nothing except for Christmas inventory, returning to zero debt each December. That conservatism may sound old-fashioned, yet the trauma of those years is baked into a balance sheet that has survived for half a century.

Placards on the headquarters wall sum up the operating creed: ask the Lord for guidance, keep a plan with few exceptions, study, study, study, and keep it simple . Green's lesson in consumer psychology flows from the same spring: 70,000 product lines across 1,100 stores means some 77 million stocking decisions, and the only way to run that complexity is radical simplification . Instead of elaborate systems, a handful of rules every employee can memorize absorbs the chaos of scale, turning simplicity into a management technology.

The doctrine takes physical form in the layout rooms, where model aisles dictate down to the centimetre how many units of each item every store carries and how shelves are dressed. Buyers decide what stays and what goes by studying the numbers, and every product card shows monthly units and profit, so stocking discipline rests with the system rather than with individuals. Green's example is striking: one glue brand selling 84,000 units a month earns the chain $255,000 a month, nearly $3 million a year, and that same arithmetic is kept separately for each of tens of thousands of items.

Closed Sundays, no Halloween on the shelves

Faith at Hobby Lobby is not window dressing; it is measured in forgone revenue, with all 1,000-plus stores closed on Sundays while rivals keep ringing up sales. Green openly admits the policy cost serious money in the short run, but holds that worship and family time for employees are worth the price. Likewise the chain pulled its Halloween assortment off the shelves for good; according to TheList's reporting, the decision rests on the holiday's clash with Christian belief, so the company goes quiet every October while going all out for Thanksgiving and Christmas.

The toughest test of the faith-and-retail line came in a courtroom, when the Green family challenged the reform requiring employer health plans to cover contraception. According to Oyez's case summary, the family argued it ran the business on Christian principles and could not fund certain methods, and in 2014 the Supreme Court agreed by a narrow majority. Decided as Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, the ruling held that closely held for-profit firms may claim religious freedom , a landmark in American law.

Money, in Green's eyes, is a trust rather than a trophy; the family's view of itself as stewards instead of owners is not a slogan but a rule written into the profit distribution, an ethic of stewardship over ownership. In the conversation he says 60 percent of profits go to various ministries, and independent accounts confirm the scale; according to MuseumoftheBible, Green took whatever your hands find to do, do it with all your might, from Ecclesiastes 9:10 as his life motto and defended radical generosity as a way of life in his book on giving it all away. In his interview with ChristianPost he adds that he does not see himself as wealthy and credits loyalty to scriptural principles, with the family's support for Washington's Bible museum standing as the most visible monument to that generosity.