Episode 28 - Steve Weissmann, Tumbleweed Tiny Homes

Update: 2022-05-12

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Prefab Review

Hi, my name is Michael Frank and this is The Prefab Pod presented by Prefab Review where we interview leading people and companies in the prefab housing industry. Today, we're speaking with Steve Weissmann the CEO of Tumbleweed Tiny Homes. Nice to have you here, Steve. Thanks for joining.

Tumbleweed

Hi, Michael. Glad to be here and spend some time with you today.

Prefab Review

Awesome! So just to start, can you tell me a bit about the history of Tumbleweed Tiny Homes and how you became involved with the company?

Tumbleweed

Yeah, so I was actually downsizing my life for personal reasons back around 2001 - 2002. And at that point, I was completely unaware of the tiny house movement, or the small house movement as some called it. But I progressively got into smaller and smaller places. And at one point, a friend of mine says, “hey, I've met this guy who lives in a house that's even smaller than yours. You should meet him because he's getting some press about it. And so she introduced me. And he was in a Tumbleweed. I just fell in love with it and that was in 2006. And I started volunteering my time with the company and then in 2007, I wound up buying into the company.

Prefab Review

And so at the time, Tumbleweed was just a small business somewhere in Sonoma County or Sonoma proper.

Tumbleweed

Yeah, I was living in Sebastopol at the time. And to call it small would be generous. It was smaller than small. It was tiny. It was a tiny company. You know at that point in time the revenue was about $4,000 a month and mostly came from selling plans for people to build their own. So originally, the first Tumbleweed was built in 1999 and it sort of morphed into a business over the following years as people were like, “hey, I want one.” and so when I got involved, Tumbleweed had a few house plans that you could buy and build from.

Prefab Review

Got it. And this is just like carpenters doing something in kind of a non-scalable way in like someone's garage or a small warehouse or something like that?

Tumbleweed

And maybe every year one house would get built. Yeah, but the people who were buying the plans were even less skilled than carpenters. So I think it was a lot of dreamers, a lot of idealists, that were wanting to do something radically different than everybody else. They really wanted the place. They were doing it because they wanted to live there and they wanted a place that would say something about who they are. It was a form of self-expression.

Prefab Review

Got it. And did you have a background in carpentry or anything like that?

Tumbleweed

Yeah, a pseudo background. So my dad was a contractor and I was on-site with him a little bit. You know, especially when I was younger like in high schoo - spending summers on the job site with him. I got some practice and then I did do a couple of fixer-uppers on my own. So I had that experience. And besides that, I had previous business experience as well. I did real estate investing and I owned several restaurants before getting involved in Tumbleweed.

Prefab Review

Awesome. Okay, so where we left-off. You're a small company doing a few thousand dollars a month of revenue building on kind of a standard trailer chassis? Can you talk a bit about the evolution?

Tumbleweed

Yeah, so that was 2007 when I bought in. And of course in 2008 the housing crisis comes and hits us and now we're scratching our heads saying, “well, where does the future of this go?” Everybody was getting out of their homes. The price for homes was coming down and the way to buy one of these in the past was people would refinance their home and buy it. So recognizing that the sales of the tiny houses were going to all but disappear, we really focused on the DIY aspect. So we started doing seminars in person around the country. And that actually turned out to be pretty cool. It was a pretty good business model. We came out with a really nice book that sold very well and so that kept us alive and the movement started to catch on. And as we were the pioneer in the industry, the movement grew in the late 2000’s. From that we started getting a lot of web traffic and by, I think it was about 2013, we really hit high on the web counts. And we had 5,000,000 visitors to our website in one year. And at that point, tiny houses were really starting to become a mainstream thing. And the next evolution was we werre going to actually start building these en mass. And we became a licensed RV manufacturer so we got a plant and we actually got licensed and started building these.

Prefab Review

Got it. Okay, so that plant was in Sonoma? Because you're in Colorado.

Tumbleweed

No. So that was in Colorado Springs. So before, as I was mentioning we'd sell about one a year and I'd work with somebody. We'd often do a backyard build and then, as we said, we're going to get serious about it, that was in Colorado. And it's kind of a funny story. There were these brothers that grew up Amish and they came to one of our workshops and said, “we want to build tiny houses.” And we wound up partnering with them. And so they had a factory where they were building sheds and chicken coops. And so they started building some tiny houses there as well. And as it grew, we got a much larger space. So that's the current factory. Where we’ve now got a 20,000 square foot space. And when it grew, they didn't want to move on with the tiny houses. I think that they had their own ideas of where they wanted to go. so I wound up buying them out and doing it on my own starting in 2015 - 2016.