Since age 11, Drew Scott has been starting businesses. Lanyard string. Beanie Babies. A scrapbooking stamp club. A leggings line. Jewelry supplies. By his count, he’s launched more than 10 stores—each one funded by the last. But the one that stuck started the other way around. Instead of building a product and finding an audience, Drew spent years making DIY and home design videos on YouTube under the name Lone Fox, growing a community of nearly five million followers. When he finally started selling, he already knew exactly what his audience wanted—because they told him. That instinct led him from wholesale goods to one-of-a-kind vintage pieces, a shift that more than doubled his revenue. Now he’s opening his first physical retail store. Here’s how Drew let his community shape every phase of the business.
On building the audience before the product:
The first thing I started doing was making YouTube videos and connecting with an audience—reading their comments, seeing what they liked about my projects, noting what I could maybe sell in the future. Over time, I built a community and started sharing some of my ideas for a product line, and it was just this really natural evolution.
I knew a lot of people who watched my videos didn’t actually want to do the DIY themselves. They liked the look but they didn’t want to get out the paintbrush and figure it out. So I wanted the people who watched the videos but still wanted that finished item to be able to purchase it. The store idea just made sense as a supplement to the content.
Every time I started a new business, the ideas came from community. Even back when I was 14 doing scrapbooking content, my audience was like, “We need a stamp club.” And I was like, OK, let’s do it. That’s kind of been the playbook the whole way through.
On finding his niche:
For a long time, I was selling contemporary products—things you could buy wholesale and resell. The problem was, anyone can buy those and anyone can resell them. If you have a wholesale license, you can buy from anybody. And people started calling it out. On TikTok, people were posting like, “You can use Google Lens and find these products so much cheaper.” I would look at my $30 vase and find it for $21 on Amazon.
But the bigger thing was, I wasn’t using any of the stuff I was selling. I was always gravitating toward vintage in my own projects. I’d be out sourcing for a room makeover and I’d find this incredible piece but have nowhere to put it. So I started collecting more and more, and it just piled up. My followers were the ones who pushed me. They were like, “Why don’t you start selling some of that vintage we see sitting around your house?”
That switch is really what took off on the website. We went from selling things anyone could find to selling one-of-a-kind pieces that we go out and source ourselves—getting their provenance, their origin, all the different bits and bobs. And our sales more than doubled.
On making the unscalable work:
The whole nature of vintage is that it’s unpredictable and hard to scale. You’re trying to find one-of-a-kind pieces and you don’t know where or when they’re going to show up. But I’m already designing projects and sourcing for my own work all the time, so it’s kind of second nature. In my free time, I’m scrolling Facebook Marketplace. It’s such an addiction—you don’t know what you’re going to find. You search for something and then it’s like, Oh, a ping-pong table? No. But then there’s this amazing vase next to it.
We started with a drop model, releasing vintage collections every Thursday. But I was collecting things more frequently than that, and I was too excited to not get them on the website as fast as we photographed them. So now we just post things as they come in. We’ll upload 100 products and by the next day, half of them are gone. The smalls go so fast: little objects, vessels, knickknacks. Furniture takes a bit longer because it’s more expensive and people need to measure, but the small stuff just flies.
For storage, I ended up buying a duplex. I live in the upper unit and use the entire bottom floor—all the bedrooms, all the bathrooms—to store vintage. Maneuvering bookcases and hutches down the hallway of a 1920s building. It’s a whole thing. Eventually, I outgrew that and moved into a warehouse space, which was supposed to be a beautiful showroom but turned into a stacked warehouse really quick because I just kept buying.
On expanding into brick-and-mortar retail:
I kept driving by this coffee shop near my house and seeing a banner on the side of a building—retail space with warehouse. I saw it a few times, and then I finally called. I didn’t even jump on it for a month. I was in New York, and when I got back I called again and they said it was still available. I toured it on Monday and signed the lease on Wednesday.
The real push came from customers. We were getting so many emails: “I want to sit in this chair,” “My client wants to see this rug in person,” “Can I come look at pieces before I invest?” We never had a space for people to do that. So now I want people to be able to come and look at pieces before they buy them.
In the store, I’m doing half vintage, half contemporary. That mix is intentional. Not everyone wants to come in and spend $600 on a vase. So we have really great glassware that’s $10 a glass, candles, easy grab-and-go gift items. And then we have the vintage and the furniture. I want there to be a mix of high and low. You might have a $6,000 hutch, but I also just showed you how to DIY a lime wash so you don’t have to pay your painter $6,000 for your dining room. Save here, invest there.
On running 10 businesses and never tying his identity to one:
I’ve had so many different stores and channels since I was younger: scrapbooking, fashion, jewelry supplies, leggings, cooking. I didn’t know I was an entrepreneur. I just loved buying and selling. I love everything about a store—taking the photos, writing the descriptions, putting up the listings. Even if my main thing was something else, I always had a little shop on the side.
The thing that helped me keep moving was that I never got too attached to any one version of myself. I wasn’t the scrapbooking guy or the fashion guy. Each one was just the thing I was doing at the time. And that looseness is what made it possible to walk away from a fashion channel with 200,000 subscribers when the home design content started performing better. My manager was like, “That’s where you’re making all your money.” But I just felt more passionate about the home stuff, and the videos were doing way better—a million views in a couple weeks versus 30,000 or 40,000 on fashion.
Every business taught me something I brought to the next one. I took money from each one and reinvested it into whatever I wanted to do next. Lanyards funded Beanie Babies, Beanie Babies funded the Etsy shop, the Etsy shop put me through college. I’ve always been that way. I’m not a huge spender on myself. I’ll spend on vintage furniture all day long, but that’s for the business. Everything else just gets reinvested.
Check out Drew’s full conversation on Shopify Masters for more on how he approaches YouTube as a search engine, the challenge of delegating after years of doing everything himself, and why he thinks consistency matters more than volume when building a channel.
