Joanna Gaines Reveals She’s ‘Wrestling With Her Role’ in the Magnolia Business: ‘It Has Become so Intertwined With Who We Are’

While chatting about The Stories We Tell, her first solo memoir, Joanna Gaines revealed she feels a change coming in her relationship with the Magnolia business. She wrote about it in her new book, sharing that she and Chip Gaines have given “every inch” of themselves to their empire, and now she’s “wrestling with [her] role” as she evaluates the focus of her energy.

Chip and Joanna Gaines have 2 decades of history with the Magnolia business

Around the same time they married, Chip and Joanna started the Magnolia empire with the Magnolia Market in Waco, Texas. Waco History reported Joanna began selling the brand in a boutique stall in a shopping village, but she outgrew it quickly.

The couple bought their first stand-alone retail store in 2003 and transformed it. That was also one of their first fixer-upper projects. They eventually landed on HGTV hosting the show Fixer Upper and purchased the famous Silos to accommodate the boom in tourism that came with their television popularity.

Among many other achievements, Chip and Joanna launched the Magnolia Network in 2022, featuring lifestyle shows curated by the iconic couple.

Joanna Gaines reveals she finds it difficult to distinguish herself from the Magnolia business

While confessing the Magnolia business has been like a baby, and that’s in addition to the five kids Chip and Joanna have, she’s been evaluating her place. In The Stories We Tell, she wrote, “Right now, I’m wrestling with my role in our business.”

“Since 2003, Chip and I have given Magnolia every inch of us,” she added, “and because it has become so intertwined with who we are, sometimes it’s difficult to make out where Magnolia ends and where we begin,” she revealed.

Joanna explained that her connection with the business had given her some concerns, partly because she was once a perfectionist. “All these years I’ve thought, when Magnolia fails, I fail, and when I fail, it follows,” she disclosed.

“In some ways, that reality has lessened what I’m willing to share with the world — the parts of me that want to learn what else I could grow to be, or, God forbid, the parts of me that aren’t so pretty.”

But all that doesn’t mean she sees an end in sight. She told Hoda Kotb on Today, “In a lot of ways, I feel like it’s just getting started. She’s — I say ‘she’ — 20 years old, but there’s still so much life. So I’m excited about what she — it — will grow into.”

Joanna Gaines is ‘instinctively’ preparing for change

While chatting with Kotb on Today, Joanna went into a little bit more detail about preparing for change. “I sense it’s coming. I don’t even know what it is, but I do feel like my heart — like instinctively, I know I’ve got to prepare,” she explained.

“… For me, it always starts with this internal gut instinct,” she also noted. “And I felt like, with that instinct, I need to ready myself.”