It’s three days before Shea McGee’s McGee & Co. retail flagship soft launches in Salt Lake City, and things on the shop floor are remarkably calm. Everything is perfectly in its place: A dining table is set as if for a family dinner, with a wispy arrangement of white anemones; shelves are full but not overly so; pillows have been fluffed and plumped; throws have been draped with just a dab of insouciance. Glass cloches contain candles and small piles of matches, stacked with care.
Yesterday was the store’s big photo shoot ahead of its official opening on September 25, which means all of the styling is still in pristine condition. And for Shea—chief creative officer and, with her husband Syd, cofounder of the firm Studio McGee and the lifestyle brand McGee & Co.—there isn’t a hair out of place, either. She’s just as she’s appeared on screens for more than a decade: Sparkling white smile, wheat-blonde locks tumbling over a crisp white wrap top.
She flutters around the shop floor, leading store associates around from one vignette to another, advising them on styling, product, and other details they’ll need to have polished come Saturday. “I have a tendency to be an advocate for the thing that I love that isn’t our top seller,” she says. “I want to show people how good it is, and I know I can do that if I just get it in front of them.” A camera follows her every move. As Syd and I sit nearby discussing the business, I realize that Shea is now teaching the associates about the vignette we’re sitting in. I try to duck out of the frame and hide our empty cans of Diet Coke, but Syd remains unfazed: The camera at this point is a fixture of their professional life.
The couple have been in the spotlight since the early days of Instagram, when Shea documented their home renovation. (That was McGee 1.0.) Splashy media coverage came in the years that followed; so did a Netflix show, three books, and an even bigger audience (McGee 2.0). Today the mother of three (ages 12, 10, and 5) has licensing deals with Target, Kohler, and Ann Sacks, a mammoth social media following (four million on the @studiomcgee account; @mcgeeandco is approaching two million), and an active YouTube channel, which racks up a few hundred-thousand views per video. The Salt Lake City-based couple is spinning enough plates to easily fill any of the near-dozen china cabinets the company sells through their furniture business, which until now operated primarily online. Their latest endeavor—bringing the McGee world to brick-and-mortar retail—is what Shea calls part of “McGee 3.0.” “We’ve been running a product business for years, and now it’s time to create the experience,” she says.
Estudio EA