Two friends.
Six years.
A long way to go.

We met in middle school. Years later we were working the same shifts at Walmart. Andrew did not want college. He wanted real estate. Kaiden was not sure. Maybe chiropractor school. Maybe nothing at all. Both of us were 16 and broke and full of big ideas.

One night Andrew was at the gym with a close friend. He said something he will never forget.

“I really want to flip houses.”

He had no capital. No connections. A few YouTube DIY videos and some time helping around the family farm was the closest thing he had to experience. It was not much.

Two weeks after that gym conversation, the universe stepped in. Our team lead at Walmart mentioned he wanted to remodel and sell his condo in Saint Peters. He offered us a deal. He fronts the cash for materials. We do all the work. We split the profit.

Five months of non stop work later, we finished it. That 850 square foot condo with a finished basement sold for $123,000 and broke every square foot price record in the zip code.

The agent who sold it was Kyle Wiendel. Kyle walked us through everything and started feeding us small jobs on his other properties. That is when we registered Simply Remodeled, LLC.

“I came up with the name and genuinely thought it was genius.”

Before

After

The world was closed. Work was slim. But Kyle kept giving us hours and teaching us lessons we still use. We were in high school, living in our parents' basements, working every weekend. We did not need much money. We needed reps.

Then we met Abbas. Abbas was a house flipper. Same deal as our Walmart team lead, just bigger and rougher. He fronted the money. We did the work. We split the result.

These houses were in rough shape. Full gut jobs. Long days on hands and knees. Cabinets, flooring, countertops, full bathrooms, plumbing, finished basements. Everything from the studs out.

“Renovation work is harder than anyone tells you.”

We did all of it ourselves. No subcontractors. Just us and a few of our best friends who we still work with today. We showed up every day at 7am and left after dark. We learned how a house actually goes together, one tough job at a time.

Before

After

On those Abbas jobs we met Victor. Victor was Abbas's go to cabinet guy. He had the quiet confidence of someone who had built a real business. One day we told him we wanted to sell cabinets too. The way we said it probably offended him a little. We made it sound easy.

It was not. It still is not. But Victor walked us through his vendors, his product lines, and why he carried what he carried. He became our free mentor.

The first thing we did with what he taught us was go to every cabinet store we could find. We pretended to be contractors. We asked about product, quality, lead times, and price. We wanted to understand the whole market before we sold a single cabinet. Then we landed on a single conclusion.

“They all sucked.”

Cluttered. Overwhelming. Overpriced. Salespeople who could not give you a straight answer. Catalogs with forty door styles no one actually needs. We knew we wanted to do the opposite of all of it.

We started reselling Victor's cabinets. There was one problem. He had to make money and so did we. There was almost nothing left per kitchen. So we added installation to the deal to make up the margin.

Installing while also selling on Facebook Marketplace and scraping together leads was a nightmare. The hook we kept running was that we were the cheapest. Quick note to anyone reading.

“Never try to be the cheapest.”

We learned it the hard way. Being the cheapest did not pull in the best leads. But it pulled in enough of them. Our first full year of cabinet sales we hit $476,000. Messy. Stressful. Moving.

The small showroom was not going to carry the company we wanted to build. So we took a big swing. We signed a lease on a space that had been vacant for 18 years. Drywall and nothing else.

Just Andrew and Kaiden again. Back to the old remodeling days. Three months. Sixteen hour days. Every single day.

We sprayed the ceilings black. Ran new electrical. New HVAC. New lighting. New flooring. Every cabinet display. It came out exactly the way we pictured it. It took a while to fill because we could not afford to buy every display at once. That was fine. We kept adding.

Mid build

Signage day

Open for business

We finished year two of cabinet sales. We hit $1.1 million. Our first million. We saw about $50,000 of it in our pockets. The rest went right back in.

Year three looked a lot like year two. More profit. Better systems. But we had to admit something uncomfortable. On paper, we were not actually different than anyone else. Prettier showroom. Friendlier service. But still marking up everything.

So we cut it all. Countertops and flooring at our cost. Zero. Not discounted. Not reduced. Cost.

Everyone said keep a little margin. Just a couple points. We said no. The whole point was transparency. We offer countertops and flooring at literally the price Home Depot and Lowe's pay before their markup.

“The savings on the countertops and flooring cover most of the cabinets.”

That is the offer. That is why we are still here.

New problem. Too many options. People got overwhelmed walking into the showroom. We had five or six cabinet lines at different price points with small differences in quality. Confusing to the customer, inefficient for us.

So we consolidated to one line. 10 Percent Cabinetry. Clean lineup. One catalog. Six door styles. We ripped every display out of the showroom and rebuilt it with 10 Percent product top to bottom.

Beyond Housing, a Saint Louis nonprofit that has spent decades building homes and rebuilding neighborhoods across our region, launched something new: a Community Chamber of trades businesses that believe doing well and doing good belong together.

We joined as a founding member. Growing by taking care of people is the whole reason this company works, and getting to do it alongside a nonprofit we admire this much is one of the proudest lines in this story. Read the announcement.

We just had the best three months in a row in company history. Six years since a Walmart shift and a gym conversation. Looking back at all of it feels great. Looking forward feels better.

The goal has not changed. Grow into the region’s go-to cabinet company, then Missouri, then the country. Eventually we manufacture our own cabinets and change the industry from the inside.

We are 22. We know that sounds young. But we have been doing this every single day for six years. We know what we are doing.

We cannot wait to build your family's dream kitchen.