Chip and Joanna Gaines on Building Their Own Network

HGTV has featured several star duos over the years—think Property Brothers’ Jonathan and Drew Scott, and Flip or Flop ex-spouses Tarek El Moussa and Christina Haack—but the cable network has never had anyone like Chip and Joanna Gaines. Fixer Upper, their home improvement and renovation series, was HGTV’s No. 1 show from 2015-2018, drawing more than 16.6 million viewers a week at its peak to watch the married couple remodel homes in Waco, Texas. (He did the renovating; she did the redecorating.) But even more surprising than their meteoric TV rise was their decision to leave Fixer Upper—and television entirely—after just five seasons. With their sudden fame, Chip says, "[we] felt like we had lost control of our destiny, our life." So when they signed off from Fixer Upper in 2017 (the last episodes aired in 2018), recalls Joanna, “we both said, ‘We will never do this again.’” While they typically have impeccable instincts, they got this one all wrong. Chip and Joanna are not only returning to TV, but they are also tackling their most massive overhaul challenge. The couple is building an entire network, Magnolia Network, in a joint venture with Discovery. It's the largest extension yet of their wildly popular Magnolia brand. After the pandemic thwarted the original October 2020 launch plans, Magnolia Network is rolling out in stages. The Discovery+ streaming service’s January debut featured a “preview” of more than a dozen Magnolia series, including the two shows starring the couple: Fixer Upper: Welcome Home and Magnolia Table With Joanna Gaines. The network will have its digital launch on July 15—with 150-plus hours of originals available on Discovery+ and a stand-alone Magnolia app—followed by the linear debut in January 2022, when Magnolia officially takes over DIY Network. Fans and marketers alike have been eagerly awaiting Magnolia’s arrival, and Chip and Joanna will figure prominently in Discovery’s virtual upfront presentation on May 18. The company is ready to capitalize on the high demand for Magnolia—and its two chief creative officers—in the upfront (see sidebar). “After what the country has been through the last year and a half, I think they’re even more important to a lot of people,” says Jon Steinlauf, chief U.S. advertising sales officer, Discovery Inc., of the couple. That includes buyers. “They are a wonderful content option if people are looking for safe, captured audience content. And that’s what we need—more quality content that resonates with consumers,” says Carrie Drinkwater, chief investment officer, Mediahub. In this marketplace, “money will chase those eyeballs.” In other words, Magnolia’s pandemic postponement could end up being another lucky break for Chip and Joanna, who had decidedly smaller aspirations when they opened up their first home décor shop in 2003. “We did the math, and I figured that I had to have 10 customers a day, $250 in sales, to pay for the electricity bills,” recalls Joanna. “So that was my dream.” Several years later, as their Magnolia Homes construction business flourished, Chip and Joanna received a call from the High Noon Entertainment production company, which had seen a photograph of their renovation and design work on the Design Mom blog, and wanted to build a TV show around them. Despite Chip’s deep skepticism—“No way this isn’t a scam!” was his response—the offer was legit, and led to Fixer Upper. That show debuted in 2013 and quickly became a juggernaut. Yes, there had been countless home renovation shows on TV before, but Fixer Upper “resonated in such a deep way across so many ages and demographics,” says Allison Page, who then was HGTV president and is now global president, Magnolia and DTC. “There’s something about their authenticity.” That in turn led to a massive expansion of the couple’s Magnolia brand (named after the magnolia bloom that Chip gave Joanna on one of their first dates), which has grown to include a restaurant (Magnolia Table), bakery (Silos Baking Co.), coffee shop (Magnolia Press), quarterly magazine (Magnolia Journal), home goods arm (Magnolia Market), hotel (Magnolia House), eight New York Times bestsellers, and national partnerships with Target and Anthropologie. Hit series Fixer Upper, which ran for five seasons on HGTV, has been revived on Magnolia Network. Their Magnolia Table restaurant inspired two bestselling cookbooks and Joanna’s Magnolia Table series. A 'crushing' decision But the couple quickly became uncomfortable with their TV stardom. “You get on this treadmill, and then five years later, you stop and say, ‘What are we doing this for?’” says Joanna. “We both felt like we needed to step back and get grounded again.” Their decision to end Fixer Upper, reached in mid-2017, was “crushing” to the network, says Page, but it was even more devastating to Discovery Inc. president and CEO David Zaslav, who was in the middle of acquiring Scripps Networks Interactive, HGTV’s parent company, for $14.6 billion. When he got the news, Zaslav says, “I remember my knees buckling." Zaslav was determined to woo them back, following Chip and Joanna’s self-imposed yearlong hiatus with their family—they now have five kids—to refocus. After that, “we went on a free agent tour,” says Chip, meeting with several interested parties about a potential return to the entertainment space. The couple declined to comment on their suitors, but industry sources say they had serious conversations with linear networks and major streaming services, including Netflix. Execs kept offering them any show they wanted, but the couple was unmoved. “We would leave, going, ‘Well, it puts us right back in the boat we just got out of,’ and we weren’t interested in that,” says Joanna. Enter Zaslav, who says Chip and Joanna have “that special thing: a mixture of authenticity, incredible taste, talent and charisma. They’re the example of what we need to be successful in the next 30 years of this company.” Discovery’s Upfront Strategy for Magnolia Advertisers flocked to Fixer Upper in its heyday on HGTV, and demand for Magnolia Network was similarly robust when Discovery first sold it in last year’s upfront, expecting at the time it would launch this spring. “We were oversubscribed with client interest, even in a down year, when a lot of categories had to sit on the sidelines,” says Steinlauf, who sold the network to 50 advertisers in last year’s upfront. Following Magnolia’s delay to January 2022, Discovery approached those marketers with makegood options (which included advertising alongside Magnolia content in Discovery+ and the Magnolia linear previews running on DIY Network), all 50 brands said they still want to be part of the rescheduled linear launch—including Target, Lowe’s, Scotts lawn care and Delta Faucet. Despite the considerable advertiser interest, Steinlauf, who will be selling Magnolia at a premium in the upfront alongside some of Discovery’s most popular networks, says he is “being careful” in his approach. “We’re not looking for [category] exclusivity; we’re looking for the right clients” in categories including home, automotive, financial services, packaged goods and retail. At the Gaineses’ urging, Magnolia will also have the lowest ad load among all of Discovery linear networks—Page says they are hoping for a clutter-free environment similar to Discovery+, whose “ad-lite” tier includes no more than five minutes of ads per hour—and Steinlauf will exclude some categories that appear on Discovery’s other networks but aren’t the right fit for Magnolia. He’ll also be on the lookout for “custom storytelling coming from advertisers who have like-minded passion points with the Magnolia brand.” So the CEO flew out to the Gaineses’ home in Waco, where instead of pitching them show ideas, he asked the couple what they loved about their work. Their response, says Joanna: “That we get to be storytellers. With the magazine, we get to curate these stories, meet people and highlight what they do for a living. That was our new passion.” The network idea grew out of that, though Chip admits “it was not lost on me that there were only five or so folks in the world” with networks built around them, including moguls Walt Disney, Ted Turner and Oprah Winfrey (whose OWN has been part of Discovery for a decade). Nor was the couple daunted by the challenge of building a linear network at a time when many viewers are migrating to streaming. “I’m a relic in a lot of ways,” says Chip. “When I think about a linear network, it doesn’t feel like a dying this or that to me. It feels like an honor and an opportunity to really speak to group of people in that medium.” Still, the couple had one more stipulation that seemed likely to be a dealbreaker. Still scarred by their Fixer Upper experience, they informed Discovery that “the requirement for Jo and I to be on air, even one hour, would be one hour too many,” says Chip. Zaslav, to everyone’s surprise, agreed to the deal, without an on-air commitment. “In the end, my view was that getting them in to be a part of this company was going to create huge value for us, whether they’re on the air or not,” Zaslav says. The deal, a joint multiplatform venture between Discovery and the Gaineses, was officially announced in April 2019. The couple convinced Page, who had recently added Food Network to her purview alongside HGTV, to ditch her cushy gig and take a chance overseeing the upstart network. As Page explains, “I’m more worried about looking back in five years and wishing I’d tried, than saying, ‘Well, that crashed and burned.’” Quarterly magazine Magnolia Journal, launched in 2016, led to the couple’s vision for Magnolia Network. The company has partnerships with national brands like Anthropologie and Target. Building a network With Page on board, the couple began to realize their vision for Magnolia, building on “these authentic moments, these stories that when Chip and I watch them, we feel so inspired to get up and go do something,” says Joanna, who found their subjects on social media and through their magazine. They began assembling shows centered around those compelling personalities, focusing on areas like food (The Lost Kitchen, Ranch to Table, Zoë Bakes), interior design (Mind for Design), fitness (The Fieldhouse), entrepreneurship (Growing Floret, Self Employed) and renovation (Home World, Inn the Words, Van Go). They also were passionate about other key network details, including having “fewer ads in shows,” says Page. “That was something near and dear to Joanna’s heart.” As a result, says Steinlauf, Magnolia will have the smallest ad load of any Discovery linear network. Eventually, Chip and Joanna realized that Magnolia Network was still missing something essential: Fixer Upper. “We felt like even if it’s just this one season, we need a nod back to the past, getting back to our roots and do what we love doing, which is on camera, renovating houses for people,” says Joanna. “So it just seemed a natural extension of that.” But to keep their bearings this time around, they restricted filming to “once or twice a week, a few hours a day,” says Joanna. As a result, “it doesn’t feel overwhelming; it feels like we’re showing up to work.” Still, even now, whenever they go on camera, “Jo and I both feel a sense of insecurity and anxiety,” says Chip. That feeling quickly falls by the wayside when they return their focus to Magnolia’s business side. “I don’t have any insecurity when I step into a meeting with [Zaslav], as we discuss, how do we articulate the future of this network? I really feel that’s what Jo and I were built for.” Even with Chip and Jo back on air, “we don’t view them as talent,” says Page. “We view them as leaders of the network, and one or two of the shows happen to involve them. But their first job is running the network. They are true partners, and I think of the three of us locking arms and figuring out every problem.” The couple’s eight New York Times bestsellers include No Pain, No Gaines, released in March. Their Magnolia Home furniture store showroom opened last summer and has an ecommerce arm. Pandemic postponement Well, there are problems, and then there are problems: In March 2020, two months after Discovery had publicly set Magnolia’s October launch date, Covid-19 shut down production for months and put the network’s debut in serious jeopardy. With just a handful of original episodes complete across Magnolia’s slate, the couple nixed the idea of launching with a heavy dose of acquired and library content. “We wanted to come out with this immersive experience: When you stepped into this channel, it felt like Magnolia,” says Joanna—which would not be the case if the network mostly featured shows the couple had no involvement in shaping. Finally, they settled on the new approach with Discovery: a digital launch of the network in July, when “we feel good in terms of the breadth of what we’re offering,” says Page, followed by the linear debut in January 2022, when “we thought we could really hit enough scale” to support a 24/7 network. To whet viewers' appetites, Discovery included a healthy sampling of Magnolia shows on Discovery+ when that streamer launched in January, showing several episodes of Fixer Upper: Welcome Home and Magnolia Table, as well as single episodes of 14 other series so viewers would understand the breadth of the offering. Already, the early glimpse at Magnolia shows is helping boost Discovery+ (the company has added around 10 million new paying streaming subscribers since Discovery+ rolled out at the beginning of the year). “People are signing up for Discovery+ to see what they do,” says Zaslav of Chip and Joanna. “The shows they’ve developed are doing extremely well.” To Chip and Joanna, Magnolia’s “real” launch comes July 15, when Discovery+ will add 150 hours of new programming: 26 series, two documentaries and two specials as well as access to the complete Fixer Upper library. The same day will also bring the stand-alone Magnolia app, which “we think of as a real brand ecosystem” focused on “the larger Magnolia offering,” says Page. Anyone will be able to download and access recipes, blog content, design inspiration and ecommerce, but the Magnolia Network programming and workshop content (which Page calls “an attainable masterclass”) will be restricted to Discovery+ subscribers—everyone else will have to wait until January for the full network experience on linear. With the upfront approaching, the Gaineses are pitching themselves and their network to marketers as the ultimate example of the brand-safe content buyers are clamoring for. When it comes to the couple and the Magnolia brand, “we can be trusted, we’re open, we’re truthful, we’re transparent,” says Chip. “In this day and age, I think that’s a commodity that’s extraordinarily rare.” After such a long wait, the Gaineses are eager to get Magnolia up and running, on both the digital and linear platforms, prove themselves worthy of having their own network and add the Magnolia Network launch to the lengthy list of seemingly impossible feats they have expertly mastered. (It is unclear how Magnolia Network would be affected by the Discovery and WarnerMedia merger announced Monday morning.) While the cable industry’s future may be uncertain, “we’re extremely competitive and driven,” says Chip. “Jo and I are going to fight for our opportunity to make a difference in this space. Bottom line: I wouldn’t bet against us.”

TV Upfronts

Chip and Joanna Gaines’ Biggest Renovation Ever: Building Their Own Network

Magnolia, the Fixer Upper couple’s TV return, is Discovery’s upfront centerpiece

Jason Lynch

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