Shea McGee did not set out to build a media company. She set out to design homes. But over 12 years, Studio McGee and its sister brand McGee & Co. have grown into something considerably more complex: a business that spans interior design services, a home furnishings line, a Netflix run and now a cookbook . The question McGee is grappling with today is the same one facing many founder-led lifestyle brands: how do you keep growing without losing the thing that made people pay attention in the first place? Particularly now that the landscape has gotten much noisier.

It is not a hypothetical. The home goods space has become significantly more crowded since McGee started posting on Instagram in the early 2010s, and the brands that scaled fastest on venture capital and paid media have not always fared the best. A recent analysis of 50 failed DTC brands found that all relied on Facebook and Instagram for customer acquisition, and when Meta ad costs surged, the model collapsed with average customer acquisition costs rising from $34 in 2021 to $57 by 2024. McGee’s path has been slower and more deliberate, which has insulated her from some of that volatility but also created its own set of constraints, she says.

McGee and her husband Syd funded the business by selling their first home in Southern California. For years, the company operated entirely on its own cash, self-funding the launch of both Studio McGee and McGee & Co. In 2021, when pandemic demand for home products outpaced what the team could handle, they took a small minority investment, the only outside capital the business has ever accepted. At a time when VC investment in DTC brands had already plummeted 97% from its 2021 peak , that restraint looks less like caution and more like foresight.

McGee is candid about the tradeoffs. “It is easy to compare yourself to VC-backed brands that are spending very largely,” she says, adding that she has had to maintain “extreme fiscal responsibility with every single dollar.” Whether that discipline pays off long term remains to be seen, but it has kept the company from the kind of overextension that has pressured many of her DTC peers.

Stepping Back from Netflix

One of the more interesting turns in McGee’s story is her decision to walk away from Dream Home Makeover after four seasons. The partnership gave the brand global exposure, but it also cost the company roughly 10 months per season in production time, and she says it began to shape which client projects the firm took on, not always in ways that served the business.

“It also influenced the type of projects we were taking on as an interior design firm,” she says. Returning to social media gave her speed and format flexibility, though it also meant trading the reach of a streaming platform for a more fragmented, algorithm-dependent distribution model. Neither option is without its complications.

McGee has been on social media long enough to watch it transform several times over. She is direct about what that has meant for anyone trying to build an audience today. “It’s definitely noisier,” she says. “All channels are full and they’re full of beautiful things and beautiful people and amazing ideas and there’s a lot.” The pressure that creates is not just about volume but about authenticity, she notes. What worked a decade ago, a perfectly composed photo and a consistent posting schedule, is no longer enough to cut through.

That reality is part of what has drawn her toward newer, less saturated platforms. After years of navigating Instagram’s evolution from scrappy community to curated aesthetic to short-form video, McGee says she has landed on Substack as the platform that most reminds her of why she got into content creation in the first place. “It feels like those early days of Instagram to me,” she says, “where it was creative and community-forward and people are really just sharing what they’re inspired by.”

The numbers indicate she is not alone in that instinct: Substack reached 47.6 million unique visitors in September 2025 , a 66% increase year over year, and now hosts nearly 100,000 publications earning money globally. Whether the platform maintains that community quality as it scales is a separate question, but for now it represents something McGee says she has been missing: a channel that does not feel like a performance.

McGee is not just responding to a market trend when she talks about slowing down. She says the desire is personal. “I’m craving the analogue experiences as well, not just as much as I think people out there are talking about it,” she says. “I find it very true to my own experience.”

She is not alone. Nearly half of Americans now deliberately set aside screen-free time , according to a recent Talker Research survey, and so-called “dumbphone” sales rose 25% in 2025. Arts and crafts retailer Michaels reported a 136% search boost in analog hobbies in the last six months alone, as consumers reach for things that won’t swamp them with notifications or ask for subscription fees.

That tension runs through several of McGee’s recent moves. Her cookbook, Around the Table , published in April 2026 with Harper Horizon, is formatted seasonally and built around tablescapes and recipes that grew out of material she had long included in brand catalogues. It is a deliberately unhurried kind of product, one designed to pull people away from their screens rather than keep them on one.

“Phones down at the table,” as she puts it, is both the ethos of the book and something she finds herself genuinely craving.

That sensibility is also driving her biggest operational move of the year. McGee is opening a McGee & Co. retail store in Salt Lake City this September, with plans for a second location by year’s end. The stores will offer complimentary design services for furniture alongside the product line. The timing aligns with a broader shift: 80.4% of retail sales are still expected to occur in physical stores in 2026 , and shopping center vacancy is at its lowest point in two decades, at 5.4%, as consumers increasingly want to touch and experience products before buying.

“We’re definitely self-funding these early stores,” she says. “But if we spend the next year or two fine-tuning operations and getting that footprint down, I don’t think we’d be opposed to partnering to continue building at scale.”

Her thesis is that digital and physical are not competing channels but complementary ones, with in-person experience driving consideration that eventually converts online. Whether that thesis holds and whether the unit economics work is what the next two years will test.

AI: Testing, Not Transforming

Like most business owners right now, McGee is experimenting with artificial intelligence, though she is measured about what it is actually delivering. Her team is using it for operational tasks including cost analysis and writing product descriptions. On the design side, she has found it useful for generating rough visual mockups to share with clients quickly, but has not used AI imagery as a finished work product.

“It is not there where it feels realistic enough that we would stand behind it,” she says. She is also firm that AI is not being used to reduce headcount. Whether that position holds as the tools improve is a question many business owners are quietly sitting with.

The Problems Do Not Go Away

McGee is refreshingly unsentimental about what building a business over a decade actually looks like. “I spent a lot of time trying to solve problems as if they were being solved to then never have a problem again,” she says. “What I’ve discovered is that the problems just change.”

She describes the current AI moment as pulling her back into an early-stage intensity she thought she had moved past. “If you had asked me six to eight months ago, I would have said we were in a much better place,” she says. “But now I feel like we’re back in this.”

It is an honest admission from someone who has navigated more than a decade of platform shifts, consumer trends and business pivots, and who seems to have made a certain peace with the fact that the ground never quite stops moving.

The first retail store opens this fall. Around the Table is out. And by McGee’s own account, the challenges are nowhere close to being solved.