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Ep. 311 How I Raised It with Stephen Schenk of Stapelstein

·44 min·2 clips

Stephen Schenk bought out his initial investors after their first profits and moved Stapelstein into steward ownership.

1. How I Raised It interviews Stephen Schenk of Stapelstein about building a play-material company in Germany and financing it without losing mission control. 2. Stephen Schenk is the founder of Stapelstein, and host Nathan Beckord frames him as a startup founder who raised capital and then chose a different ownership path. 3. The episode asks how a company built around playful movement, sustainability, and child development can grow while avoiding pressure for a conventional exit. 4. Schenk says he studied product design in Germany in 2015 and grew up in an educator’s family, which shaped his focus on pedagogy. 5. He points to a movement gap among children, saying about 90% of kids age six and up do not meet the World Health Organization’s minimum movement recommendations. 6. Stapelstein is described as open-ended play material that can be used to create landscapes, move, play, sit, balance, and even store objects. 7. Schenk says the product looks like a colorful bowl when turned upside down, and he also compares it to a fancy hat or a stackable object kids can carry. 8. He says the ambiguity is by design, because children reimagine and reuse objects in ways adults often do not. 9. The company began with two business angels who invested about 50,000 euros each, giving Schenk roughly 100,000 euros of initial capital. 10. He says about 50,000 euros of that went into first prototypes and molds for industrial production, and the company later grew to about 40 employees. 11. Schenk says Stapelstein chose German manufacturing and expanded polypropylene because he would not compromise on sustainability and quality. 12. He says the company became visible in Europe and German-speaking countries, which made copycats and alternatives more common. 13. Schenk argues that copycats are a sign of success because they would not appear without demand for the concept. 14. He says he was hurt by copies at first, but later decided that worrying about them was “lost energy.” 15. He says the duplicate products can still help bring the mission to more children, even if he rejects their production standards. 16. The most important ownership shift came when the first investors wanted profits after the company’s early success, while Schenk wanted to reinvest gains into impact and innovation. 17. Schenk says he bought them out, took on the cost of that decision, and then moved Stapelstein into a steward-owned model. 18. In that model, he says decisions stay inside the company, profits are locked in, and the business cannot be bought by a third party. 19. The interview is direct and founder-focused, with Nathan Beckord pressing on valuation, investor returns, patents, and what steward ownership means in practice. 20. Listeners interested in mission-driven startups, child development, and unusual financing models will get the most from it; listeners wanting a pure consumer-brand growth story may skip it.

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