Hobby Lobby survived its first year thanks to the hippies it now shuns

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One day in 1970, Hobby Lobby’s oft-told origin story goes, twenty-eight-year-old David Green was sitting at a lunch counter in Oklahoma City sharing frustrations with fellow managers. As they imagined what kind of enterprise they might create on their own, one suggested that they manufacture clocks. “I have a better idea,” David said. “Little miniature frames.” A fad had emerged in home decor of hanging picture frames in clusters, each displaying a painting of a subject such as a sunflower or lighthouse. Customers kept asking for the small frames, and David had a hard time finding them.

“That sounds like it could work,” one of them said. The next day, they located a professional frame chopper through an equipment supplier with the steep price tag of $450, and signed a twelve-month loan for $600 to cover the cutter, wooden sticks, canvas, and other materials. The $600 loan comes up repeatedly in the founding myth of Hobby Lobby—a symbol of the humble roots of the big-box behemoth. Setting up in the garage, the partners created samples and sent them out with a traveling salesman. He came back with orders for a whopping $3,500. The partners begged their supplier for more materials on credit and began furiously creating frames, ending up with $300 in profit.

Casting about for a snappy name, they noticed a customer in Houston calling itself “Hobby Lobby.” With little thought of trademark infringement, they took the name for their own store.

As orders poured in from across Oklahoma and Texas, the partners cut at night while David’s wife Barbara and their sons, Mart and Steve—nine and seven years old—glued frames at the kitchen table by day. “What a sight!” David later rhapsodized. “I sure wish we had a picture of all of us working together around the kitchen table.” They paid Mart and Steve seven cents a frame, while Barbara worked for nothing, prompting David to later joke that the business was built on “child labor and slave labor.”

In the summer of 1972, they opened their first retail store, a three-hundred-square-foot space in downtown Oklahoma City. Casting about for a snappy name, they noticed a customer in Houston calling itself “Hobby Lobby.” With little thought of trademark infringement, they took the name for their own store. It had a “nice ring to it,” David later remembered, “figuring our little operation in Oklahoma City was no threat to them.” (By the time they expanded into Texas, the original Hobby Lobby had gone out of business.)

The store carried only a meager inventory of sequins, beads, and painting supplies in addition to the frames. Business was so slow the first month that their daughter Darsee, then in kindergarten, could sit on the floor for hours playing with beads, undisturbed. But traffic picked up during the Christmas season, and the company grossed $3,200 its first year, even as David continued his day job working sixty-hour weeks as a manager at department store TG&Y.

David, then thirty-one, attributed its success to an unlikely source: the flower children of the Age of Aquarius, who were eager for materials for homemade crafts. “The long-haired hippies of that era would come into our store and sit down on the carpet to string together beads of various colors,” David remembered. “Thank God for them.” Eventually, business thrived so much that they were able to open a second store on the west side of the city. In 1974, the company took in $150,000 in gross revenue, with $36,000 in profit.

That was enough for David to consider quitting his job at TG&Y and working full-time for Hobby Lobby, giving up a $26,000 annual salary. He prayed with Barbara about the decision, with a Bible verse from Ecclesiastes as his inspiration: “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, for in the grave, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom.” Together, they decided to take the plunge. “It was a sense of providence,” he said. “This was what God meant for us to do.”

The bet paid off, as the company increased its revenue the following year by almost five times to nearly $750,000. Sadly for David, his mother didn’t live to see it. In April, Marie Green passed away at age seventy-one in Midland, Texas, with one of David’s sisters holding her in her arms. Just before she died, Marie sat up and cried out, “Do you see them? Do you see them?” David’s sister asked what she meant. “Angels,” Marie said. David was happy to hear it. “At the end of my mother’s life, God himself sent a company of angels to welcome her into his kingdom,” he concluded. David was disappointed, however, that she had never got to witness Hobby Lobby’s commercial success. “I regret that she never saw it,” he said, “but I do not regret she constantly urged me to do great things for God.”

By now, evangelicals were ascendant in Christian life. The godless ’60s had radicalized many Christians who saw the toxic stew of drugs, rock ’n’ roll, and shallow commercialism as a sign of the end times and vowed to reverse the demonic tide. “Street ministers” waded into the counterculture with coffee-shop ministries to convince bead-buying hippies to “get high on Jesus” instead, and self- described “Jesus freaks” combined Pentecostal worship with exuberant folk rock. At the same time, Christian broadcasters multiplied like proverbial loaves and fishes, with worldwide viewership growing tenfold between 1970 and 1975—from 10 to 110 million people.

Children should be exposed to the Bible at a young age, setting a tone for the rest of their lives, he taught, and spanking and other forms of corporal punishment should be used to maintain discipline.

The new wave of televangelists blended charismatic preaching with calls for donations as well as increasing calls to political action. Most prominent among them was Pat Robertson, a soft-spoken Southern Baptist minister who turned a failing Virginia television station into a burgeoning media empire, the Christian Broadcasting Network. His signature The 700 Club blended evangelical and charismatic elements in a veritable political salon, hosting guests to talk about political issues of the day. Robertson helped launch Jim Bakker, a minister with Assemblies of God—the largest Pentecostal sect—and his wife, Tammy Faye, who eventually cofounded the rival Trinity Broadcasting Network with their program The PTL Club . Fiery Louisiana Pentecostal preacher Jimmy Swaggart started his own national program, which railed against the forces of “secular humanism” that had settled into the halls of schools and government, turning people toward false idols of sexuality and selfishness.

No Christian crusader espoused “family values” more than James Dobson, who created a nationwide radio network to spread conservative Christian ideals and mobilize voters. In 1970, he published Dare to Discipline , a jeremiad against the liberal parenting philosophy of Dr. Benjamin Spock. Children should be exposed to the Bible at a young age, setting a tone for the rest of their lives, he taught, and spanking and other forms of corporal punishment should be used to maintain discipline.

As he churned out book after book, Dobson became increasingly galled by the acceptance of homosexuals, who had burst into American political life after the Stonewall riots of 1969 and were now demanding social and political acceptance. Scripture, he said, taught that “homosexual offenders” would never “inherit the kingdom of God.” Dobson resigned from the American Psychological Association in 1973 over its removal of homosexuality from its list of psychological disorders. In 1977, he launched the Christian ministry Focus on the Family, with a weekly radio program broadcast on forty stations, warning with his folksy Southern drawl about a “crisis” for the American family, in which traditional gender roles were being undermined by gay and feminist propaganda.

In the midst of this strident political rhetoric, David Green felt inspired for the first time to put his wallet where his convictions were, showing that his business was more than just a moneymaking enterprise. In September 1979, he flew to Cleveland, Tennessee, for the Church of God of Prophecy’s annual assembly, just as his father had done decades earlier. David filed with other congregants into the church’s brutalist concrete tabernacle to listen to speaker after speaker extol the virtues of Christ and detail the coming battle of Armageddon, when the Antichrist would fight Jesus for control of his kingdom. The church leader in charge of translating and distributing biblical literature around the world made an impassioned call for funds, likening the texts to life-giving rain. “Our Church dollars are producing more souls in the faraway places that are so dry and thirsty and hungry for the living waters,” he said.

David shifted in his seat, thinking of the doilies his mother had sold at church bazaars when he was a child to support missionaries overseas. Until now, David had always made his tithes of 10 percent to the church. What more could he give? Surely he couldn’t risk any of the money he needed to expand Hobby Lobby. Maybe later, he told himself. I need to use every dollar now to grow this business. The following morning, after leading a pledge of allegiance to the Bible, church overseer M.A. Tomlinson announced a new crusade focused on upholding family values as the heart of the church—echoing the broader message of evangelicals such as Robertson, Swaggart, and Dobson. “We are all aware of the attack Satan is making on the entire family structure,” he said. “Our concern requires that we arise and launch a counter-attack.” Everyone in the audience, he said, must work to spread God’s word, “not just when everything is pleasant, not just when we have no opposition—we must work while it is day, while we have the opportunity!”

From then on, Hobby Lobby would be a “company that gives,” David vowed.

David thought about the message later as he gazed out the airplane window on this way home. At that moment, he heard a quiet voice inside say, You need to give $30,000 for Bible literature. He recognized it as God, but he pushed it away. That’s impossible , he prayed. God, I don’t have $30,000. But the voice insisted. You’re serious about this, aren’t you? he thought. Maybe there was a way. If he broke the amount into four payments of $7,500, he could pay one a month through the rest of the year. When he got home, he prayed with Barbara, and they agreed it could work, so they dropped four postdated checks in the mail to Tennessee.

A few days later, David got a call from a church official who told him that four missionaries in Africa had held a prayer meeting for literature funds on the same day the Greens had sent the checks. “Looks like God answered their prayer!” he said. When David heard that, “something clicked inside me.” All of his lingering guilt about not living up to his mother’s plea “to do something for the Lord” disappeared, and for the first time, David felt at peace. “It settled permanently inside of me that God had a purpose for a businessman,” he said. “He had called me. He had blessed me. There must be a role for people like me in the work of the Kingdom of God.”

From then on, Hobby Lobby would be a “company that gives,” David vowed. “Since I believe there’s a real heaven and a real hell, I want to direct as many people toward heaven and away from hell as I can.” That gift was more precious—and more generous—than any other purpose he could think of, potentially affecting the world for thousands of years in the future. “Giving like we do is exciting,” David said. “It’s an adventure.”

In the coming years, David and his family would devote more and more of their money and time to that adventure, working to ensure that Jesus’s message of salvation reached around the globe.

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From The Gospel According to Hobby Lobby . Used with the permission of the publisher, PublicAffairs. Copyright © 2026 by Michael Blanding