In 1955, a young Korean War veteran named Jim Warner took a bookkeeping job at a small appliance store on the edge of St. Paul. The store was called Stellian - a mashup of its owners' first names, Steve and Lillian Farkas. Warner counted the money, learned the trade, and by 1960 he was running the place. In 1971 he did the thing most employees only daydream about: he bought it.
Then he did something stranger. He renamed the business Warners' Stellian - note the apostrophe after the "s" - deliberately making his own last name plural and possessive so that his wife and children were, quite literally, inside the brand. It reads like a grammar quirk. It was actually a succession plan. More than 70 years after the first store opened, all nine of Jim Warner's children own the company, four of them run it day to day, and 17 of his 37 grandchildren work there full time.
01 / What they actually doThe store that sells the whole kitchen
At its core, Warners' Stellian is an appliance store - the largest independent one in Minnesota. Walk into a showroom and you will find refrigerators, ranges, cooktops, wall ovens, dishwashers, washers and dryers, water heaters, furnaces, air conditioners and outdoor grills. The range is deliberately wide: a $500 dishwasher sits under the same roof as a five-figure Sub-Zero and Wolf luxury kitchen. Mainstream brands like Maytag, Whirlpool, GE and Frigidaire share floor space with premium lines like Miele, Bosch, Viking - and Speed Queen, the American-made, commercial-grade laundry brand that has become a quiet cult favorite among people who want a washer that outlives the mortgage.
But the appliances are only the part you see. What separates Warners' Stellian from a warehouse of boxes is everything that happens after you buy one.
02 / The moatOwning the boring, expensive last mile
Most appliance sellers treat delivery, installation and haul-away as an afterthought - a subcontract handed to whoever bid lowest that week. Warners' Stellian does the opposite. Deliveries roll out on the company's own branded trucks, driven by its own uniformed crews. Repairs are handled in-house on the brands it sells. And in the last few years the company pushed further into the parts of home life that used to require three different phone calls.
It launched Warners' Stellian Plumbing, a licensed in-house plumbing operation serving homeowners across the Twin Cities and the Des Moines metro. It built out a water-treatment business - free water testing in the stores, then water softeners, reverse-osmosis systems and PFAS filtration installed and serviced by those same plumbers. Free tap-water tests sound like a gimmick until you notice they double as a lead-generation machine for a recurring services business.
03 / Who buysHomeowners on one side, builders on the other
The customer base splits cleanly in two. On the consumer side are homeowners across Minnesota, Des Moines, and now the Kansas City metro, buying in showrooms and online at warnersstellian.com with financing and rebate help. On the other side is a B2B contract division that sells directly to builders, remodelers, architects, designers, and the HVAC and countertop trades - the professionals furnishing entire houses at a time. That contract channel is the kind of steady, relationship-driven demand a big-box chain struggles to service with a rotating floor staff.
04 / The peopleAn org chart that reads like a family reunion
Most family businesses die in the third generation - the founders build, the children maintain, the grandchildren sell. Warners' Stellian is a working counter-example. The founder's nine children are the owners; four second-generation members run operations; and 17 of Jim Warner's 37 grandchildren are on the payroll in sales, operations, merchandising and marketing. That continuity shows up in the workforce, too. The company is known for unusually low turnover and long tenures, with employees who started cleaning used appliances for resale and stayed for decades. In a category where the big-box floor staff rotates constantly, "the person who sold you your last fridge is still here" is a genuine competitive edge.
It also concentrates expertise. Selling a Sub-Zero built-in or specifying appliances for an entire custom home is not a scan-and-bag transaction; it rewards salespeople and installers who have seen the same brands, the same failure modes and the same kitchens for years. Depth of knowledge is exactly what a rotating retail bench cannot replicate - and it is the thing the contract-sales division runs on.
05 / The math$2 million to $86 million, no investors
The growth story is not a hockey stick. It is a staircase. The company did roughly $2 million in revenue in 1987, around $15 million by 1999, and an estimated $55 million by 2003. Today it is estimated near $86 million a year. There is no venture round in that history, no private-equity recap, no IPO. Every expansion - Richfield, Apple Valley, Maple Grove, Woodbury, Edina, and eventually Iowa and Kansas - was funded by reinvested family profit. It is the slow-compounding version of a startup, and it is a big part of why the family still owns 100% of it.
06 / The green angleNothing to the landfill
Selling appliances generates a mountain of waste - old units hauled away, and the foam and cardboard that packages every new one. Warners' Stellian turned that liability into a program. It recycles the appliances it removes and bales the foam packaging that would otherwise be landfilled. As the company puts it plainly in its own material: today, none of that material ends up in the landfill.
07 / The mapCrossing a state line for the first time in a generation
For most of its life, Warners' Stellian was a Minnesota story with an Iowa footnote. That changed in June 2024, when it opened its first Kansas City metro store in Leawood, Kansas, at the Cornerstone of Leawood - the company's first location outside Minnesota and Iowa. A 70-year-old family business running a careful, cash-funded expansion into a new state is not the flashiest headline in retail. It may be one of the more durable ones.
08 / The takeawayThe anti-big-box playbook
Everyone spent two decades predicting that independent appliance stores would be flattened - first by big-box chains, then by online-only sellers. Warners' Stellian bet the other direction. Instead of racing to the lowest price, it went deeper into the parts of the job nobody wants to own: the truck, the install, the plumbing, the water test, the haul-away, the recycling bale. Each annoying step became both a revenue line and a reason a customer comes back rather than clicking "add to cart" somewhere anonymous.
It is a copyable idea, with a catch. It works when you control the last mile and can afford to reinvest patiently across generations. It works less well if you are optimizing for a quarterly number or planning to sell. The Warners, by every available sign, are planning to do neither.
ExploreLinks & where to find them
Warners' Stellian Appliance Co. Inc. · 550 Atwater Cir, Saint Paul, MN 55103 · Retail / Home Appliances · Family-owned since 1951.