One summer day in 1995 a highly creative, overly impulsive, and un-dieingly determined 18-year-old thought to himself, "I want to take a beanbag and Oversize it." So he did.
Shawn David Nelson's huge Sac was seven feet across and took three weeks to stuff. He tried bean bag beads, but they made a mess, and were really not that soft. He then filled it with everything he could find, from packing peanuts to pillows to foam from those yellow camping mattresses, chopped up on a paper cutter. Now all Shawn needed was a name for his Sac. Harnessing the retro spirit of the 1970's and combining it with the idea of a "bag" gave birth to the name "LoveSac."
Shawn D couldn't help but take his Sac everywhere. It was perfect at parties and dangerous at drive-in movies. He became known as "the kid with the big Sac"--not a bad reputation for a kid at his station in life . Word spread as fast as a rumor in a small town, and soon neighbors and friends were desperate to get their hands on their own Sac. But Shawn D took off to Taiwan for 2 years as a missionary for his Church, becoming fluent in Mandarin Chinese, and forgetting entirely about his big Sac. Upon returning, he remembered that he had this “thing†under the deck out back. He dragged it out, dusted it off, and took it to dates at the drive-in movies once again…the response was overwhelming.
Shawn sewed the first five Sacs on his mother's sewing machine. The machine gave up way before Shawn did. He continued to roll out the 10 yards of fabric for each Sac in his parent's basement, cut it into figure-8 shapes, and hand deliver them to a neighborhood seamstress for sewing. Using labor supplied by close friends and young business partners, Shawn finally registered the name LoveSac as a Utah company October 31, 1998. While buying scrap (new) foam from a Sofa factory one day, Shawn discovered that they had an old grain-grinder, converted to a foam shredder in their back room that was out of use for decades. They soon let him use it to shred foam and stuff his Sacs, in return for disposing of their leftover sofa foam—and they thought these Sac kids were kind of funny....
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