Chesapeake Bay Candle: Mei Xu (2017)

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Guy Raz | Wondery

Business

4.8 • 31.1K Ratings

🗓️ 17 June 2019

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Twenty-five years ago, after Mei Xu emigrated from China to the U.S., she loved going to Bloomingdale's to gaze at their housewares. She eventually started making candles in her basement with Campbell's Soup cans, an experiment that led to the multi-million dollar company Chesapeake Bay Candle. PLUS in our postscript "How You Built That," we check back with Dan Kurzrock and Jordan Schwartz, who turned up-cycled beer grain into a snack bar called ReGrained. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, Prime members, you can listen to how I built this early and ad-free on Amazon Music.
0:07.0	Download the app today.
0:09.0	New years is here, and with it brings the possibility of change.
0:13.0	As one behavioral scientist put it, first starts are really powerful.
0:17.0	So as you head into 2023, LifeKit is a great resource to help you plan your life and tackle changes, both big and small.
0:24.0	Listen to the LifeKit podcast from NPR.
0:27.0	Hey, everyone, it's Guy here. So a few years ago, I sat down with an incredible entrepreneur, her name is May She.
0:33.0	And May arrived in the US, basically not knowing a soul.
0:38.0	About 20 years later, she wound up sitting next to President Barack Obama at the White House, advising him on how to create jobs in America.
0:46.0	Because creating jobs was exactly what May Sheen was doing.
0:51.0	With the candle company, she built from the ground up. This episode first aired in March of 2017.
0:57.0	It's a super amazing story, and I hope you enjoy it.
1:04.0	We registered for the New York gift show, which is the holy grail of trade shows.
1:10.0	And we thought that this is going to be the ticket to our success, but we were wrong.
1:17.0	It was a complete disaster.
1:26.0	Brahman PR is how I built this. A show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.
1:37.0	I'm Guy Ross, and on today's show, the story of how May Shee left China for America, used Campbell's soup cans to make candles and turned that into a multi-million dollar company.
1:52.0	So almost everything about the way May Shee's life turned out is improbable.
1:58.0	The fact that she started a business that she makes candles that she even lives in America, none of this was supposed to happen.
2:07.0	And as she describes it, growing up in China in the 1970s was kind of like living in a movie without much color.
2:15.0	When we grow up, there was absolutely nothing. Everyone wore the same thing. Everyone would be eating the same food. Everyone had the same small apartment.
2:23.0	Life was very happy in a sense that you don't have to be jealous of each other. You don't have to be wanting things you could not have.
	...

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