New-construction homes are ripe for organization, and Taylor Morrison—one of the country’s top 10 builders—is banking on that fact through its recently announced partnership with The Home Edit.
“We hear again and again from our fans just how intimidating a big move can feel, which is why we’re so excited to partner with a home builder like Taylor Morrison,” said Clea Shearer and Joanna Teplin of The Home Edit, a subsidiary of Hello Sunshine, in a press release. “What better time to organize and set up functional spaces than when you’re starting fresh in a new home, and that’s exactly what we’ll teach viewers how to do when they tune into the New Home, New Zones series.”
Stephanie McCarty, chief marketing and communications officer at Taylor Morrison, admits she had high aspirations to be more organized when moving into a new home in summer 2020. However, last fall, she realized she needed professional help. She hired a local team in Phoenix that transformed her closet and pantry over the course of a few days.
“When they left, the feeling I had about my home and these places was some kind of zen, I knew I wanted to hold on to that feeling forever,” she says. “Everything had a space, my kids knew where their stuff was. After a couple of weeks, I was like, ‘How do I bottle this up and find a way to give this to Taylor Morrison homeowners?’”
Brand Alignment
Finding the answer to that question became a side passion project for McCarty, who last summer got to pitch her “killer opportunity” to The Home Edit’s Shearer and Teplin. The teams spent several months talking through logistics, and what sealed the deal to move forward is how well the brands align.
“When I started to talk about who Taylor Morrison is beyond just our existence and what we do, they were like, ‘I have to be a part of this,’” McCarty recalls, noting that the company’s philanthropic efforts, such as building and donating fully furnished homes to support patients at the Banner MD Anderson Cancer Center in Arizona, struck a chord with Shearer and Teplin.
Shearer has publicly shared much of her experience following a breast cancer diagnosis in April 2022; in November 2022, she announced she is cancer free.
Taylor Morrison is known for being “a generous builder,” according to McCarty, and that's in large part because of chairman and CEO Sheryl Palmer, a 2021 recipient of the Hearthstone BUILDER Humanitarian Award for her lifetime commitment to public service. Palmer had a life-threatening brain tumor about 10 years ago, an experience she credits as one that “most impacted” who she is as a leader, according to author Jacob Morgan, who interviewed Palmer when talking with hundreds of the world’s top CEOs for his book, “The Future Leader.”
“Once Sheryl, Joanna, and Clea met each other, the rest is history,” says McCarty. “They all understood the opportunity for how big this could be.”
The team at Taylor Morrison continually studies how Gen Z and millennials make purchase decisions, and McCarty says those demographics put a lot of weight on what influencers and people who have massive social media followings are saying is good or not good.
“These brand influencer opportunities, no one in our space is thinking about it,” she notes. “Through [Taylor Morrison’s] acquisitions, we have a lot of markets, so how do we get our brand out there? This [partnership] makes our brand relevant, and we’ll be exposed to so many people. [The Home Edit’s] demographic is who we're selling to, and we’ll have our brand injected into their following.”
The Road Ahead
The New Home, New Zones video series, which launched this week, offers home organization tips from Shearer and Teplin for new homeowners or anyone gearing up for a move. New episodes from the series will release throughout the summer.
Starting Aug. 1, Taylor Morrison homeowners as part of their closing gift will receive a custom booklet—an abbreviated version of some of the books available from The Home Edit team, says McCarty—that is specific to the builder’s floor plans and spaces.
Also in the works is collaboration on the reboot of “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,” in development by ABC, which will feature Shearer and Teplin as hosts and Taylor Morrison as a home builder. The first episode is set to take place in Austin, Texas, and Taylor Morrison has local and corporate teams working on that pilot. (Home builder Taylor Woodrow, before the merger that created Taylor Morrison, participated in “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” in the 2000s.)
“The environment today is different, it’s a lot harder to build a home. I think when you have not just your trade partners on-site, but also volunteers, that’s when real magic can happen,” McCarty says. “For today’s consumer, building a quality home is table stakes. What else are you doing to be a good steward in the communities you build in? With efforts like this, you can build really good homes and continue to push the envelope on sustainability and do good for the environment and for people. I know we sell homes as a result of that.”
The work between Taylor Morrison and The Home Edit is in its infancy stage, and there are many layers to where it is going, according to McCarty.
“We want to bring Joanna and Clea to some of our grand openings, do meet and greets,” she says. “We want the entire organization to be able to absorb it. There’s so much more to come.”
