The Find, Found Again

You may remember it. The Find started as a tiny consignment and antiques/vintage store at the corner of 50th and Xerxes in Minneapolis. (We gave it a Best nod in 1999.) In its eleven years, Lisa Roberts and Annie Hendrickson’s home furnishings and fashion accessories boutique has zigzagged across town, reinventing itself with each move. Now the dynamic divas are running an international multimillion-dollar brand reaching 60 million homes on ShopNBC. Their loyal followers aren’t surprised.

Behind a nondescript door inside The Find’s current Eden Prairie site lies Roberts and Hendrickson’s “fashion laboratory.” Here, they and their two jane-of-all-trades employees design handbags, camera cases, furnishings, and other yet-to-be-announced merchandise for their store, as well as ShopNBC and their latest high-profile clients—target.com, Fingerhut, and Best Buy. Lined floor to ceiling in satchels, hobos, wristlets, laptop carriers, and briefcases in everything from tiger stripes to polka dots, vinyl to mink, the space rivals the fashion closets of the best women’s magazines.

Five years ago, home-shopping network ShopNBC not only asked to sell The Find’s goods on-air, but asked Roberts to host the shows. A former theater student, Roberts is a natural. She is a boisterous, buxom scene-stealer, even when cooped up in the fashion laboratory. She isn’t the handshake type—it’s all hugs, all the time.

Hendrickson, who is more reserved, refined, and petite, balances out Roberts’s manic energy. While Roberts has essentially become the face of the brand, Hendrickson is often found on the store’s selling floor, using customers for market research. “What happens in the store is such an education for us,” she says. “I’ll ask, ‘Do you like this handbag? Do you like this lamp? What do you like about it? Are the prisms too big’”

ShopNBC gave The Find a boost of capital and visibility, and the pair are expanding their base yet again. The Find’s décor will be offered in Fingerhut’s catalogs, camera bags and wristlets will be at Best Buy stores, and a new line of lifestyle and parent bags—lovingly nicknamed ‘the mother of all handbags’—will be at boutiques nationwide, including locally based Hot Mama. Plus, a complementary, lower-priced diaper-bag line will be available on target.com.

“A couple of years ago, Best Buy had come in and they were just starting to think about developing product for women,” says Hendrickson. “It’s always a long process. They were thinking about computer cases, and it evolved from that.” After sitting next to a Fingerhut executive on a plane, the women were able to secure a home décor distribution agreement, starting with the August catalog.

Roberts proudly proclaims their company’s motto is “Of women, by women, and for women.” Accordingly, every detail is thoughtfully planned out and named by the all-women design team. Ruby Couture comprises the camera bags and wristlets; home décor is marketed under the moniker The Find by The Find; Baby Cakes is a line of lifestyle and parent bags; and Paisley Lane is the complementary lower-priced line.

Though Roberts and Hendrickson are mum about the many product ideas currently in the hopper, they assure us that after thousands of designs over more than a decade, they’re just getting started.

7820 Eden Prairie Rd., Eden Prairie, 952-975-3900. Annual sample sale October 2–5.