Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Guy Raz | Wondery

Business

4.8 • 31.1K Ratings

🗓️ 23 September 2024

⏱️ 71 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 2014, Ben Weprin decided to take people’s best college memories and spin them into a new business: Graduate Hotels. Each of the chain’s properties was decorated to reflect the character of the college town in which it was based, with photos of famous alums or life-sized sports mascots in the lobby. After 13 years in commercial real estate, Ben got the idea for Graduate after renovating a dilapidated Days Inn in Chicago, and realizing that a hotel can tell a story as well as—maybe even better than—a box of cereal or a pair of shoes. Although the Covid lockdowns threatened to bankrupt Graduate, Ben was able to secure the chain’s future by selling it to Hilton, and today the 35 (+) chain is expected to add dozens more properties.

This episode was produced by Devan Schwartz with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by Neva Grant with research assistance from Katherine Sypher. Our engineers were Robert Rodriguez and James Willetts.

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Transcript

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0:53.0	No.
0:55.0	No one had done.
0:57.0	No one had done it. Why anybody done it? Why hadn't somebody built a brand? There's all these brands around whatever it is, but nothing around university nostalgia.
1:14.0	Why anybody done?
1:15.0	I figured out pretty quickly, it's hard.
1:17.4	Easy to say, hard to do, but that's actually a great recipe for a new business too.
1:23.0	Welcome to how I built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind
1:36.4	the movements they built.
1:39.4	I'm Guy Raz and on the show today how Ben Wepren found a wide open opportunity in a
1:46.8	space most of us would never look, chain hotels and grew graduate into a brand that's made its mark on college towns across the
	...

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