Hobby Lobby Pres. on Vision Behind Brand

HOBBY LOBBY

Hobby Lobby began on August 3, 1972, with a few hundred square feet of retail space located in north Oklahoma City. This was a retail outgrowth of Greco Products, a miniature picture frame company founded in 1970 by Steve's father, David Green, when he borrowed $600.00 to buy a molding chopper and set up shop in his garage. 

Hobby Lobby is mostly known as an arts and crafts store and it also includes several other departments which include decorations, etc. With over 45,000 employees and over 900 stores in 48 states, Hobby Lobby has grown into the largest privately-owned arts and crafts retailer in the world and is one of the few companies that are closed on Sunday. The headquarters are located in a 10 million square foot manufacturing, distribution, and office complex in Oklahoma City. An affiliated company, Mardel, is a popular Christian office and an educational supply chain found in six states. Hobby Lobby also has offices in Hong Kong and Shenzhen, China. 

Steve’s father, David, is the Founder and C.E.O. of Hobby Lobby, and his mother, Barbara, is a buyer for Hobby Lobby. His brother, Mart Green, is the Founder of Mardel Stores and currently serves as Chief Strategy Officer for the Green family businesses. His sister, Darsee Lett, is the Vice President of Hobby Lobby Art/Creative.  

STEVE’S JOURNEY

In 1981, Steve graduated from high school and started working full-time as the Hobby Lobby Store Operations Supervisor. In 2000, he was promoted to Executive Vice President and named President of Hobby Lobby in December of 2004.  
Steve and his wife, Jackie, have been married for over 39 years and reside in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. They are the proud parents of one son, five daughters, and nine beautiful grandchildren.  

MUSEUM OF THE BIBLE

In 2009, the Green family purchased its first biblical artifact and has since acquired tens of thousands of items which now comprise the Green Collection which is among the world's largest private collections of rare biblical texts and artifacts. They formed the Museum of the Bible Scholars Initiative in 2010. In the summer of 2011, 400 items from the collection were put on display in a traveling exhibit called Passages which began in Oklahoma City and then moved to Atlanta, Charlotte, Colorado Springs, Springfield, MO, and Santa Clarita, CA. 

On March 1, 2012, over 100 items were put on display at the Vatican in Rome during Lent in an international traveling exhibit called Verbum Domini. This international exhibit has since gone to Cuba, returned to the Vatican in 2014, and returned to Cuba in 2016. The Book of Books exhibit was on display in Israel from 2013 through 2014. 

In 2017, they opened the 430,000 square feet Museum of the Bible located in Washington, DC where the Green Collection is now housed. Steve devotes a significant amount of time to supporting this endeavor and its related projects. A few of the artifacts you will see at the Museum of the Bible include: 

• The original draft of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” 
• Easter Morning which consists of three rondels (small, ornate, circular windows) set beneath tracery glass (Tracery is an architectural device by which windows or screens, panels, and vaults are divided into sections of various proportions by stone bars or ribs of moulding).
• Thomas Jefferson’s Letter to the Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church in New London, Connecticut in which he reflected on religious freedom. Written at the end of his presidency, he wrote, “No provision in our constitution ought to be dearer to man than that which protects the rights of conscience against the enterprises of the civil authority . . . I trust that the whole course of my life has proved me a sincere friend to religious, as well as civil liberty.”
• "Sha’ar Hashem He-Ḥadash:" Daniel Bomberg’s "Miqra’ot Gedolot"-- Daniel Bomberg was a 16th-century Christian publisher from Antwerp who is best known for printing Hebrew texts. This edition, known as a Miqra’ot Gedolot (Large Scriptures) because of the large size of the folio, became the first printed version of the Hebrew Bible to contain the entire Masorah (the authoritative Hebrew and Aramaic text of the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible in Rabbinic Judaism) along with the Tanakh (the canonical collection of Hebrew scriptures, including the Torah, the Nevi'im, and the Ketuvim), targumim (an Aramaic paraphrase or interpretation of the Hebrew Bible, of a type made from about the 1st century AD when Hebrew was declining as a spoken language), and rabbinic commentaries. 
• Hours and Psalter of Elizabeth de Bohun (pronounced Boon), Countess of Northampton (1313–1356). This pair of beautiful 14th-century manuscripts are now bound together. Based on the heraldry present in the manuscripts, she commissioned the Book of Hours (elegant devotionals) while married to her first husband, Sir Edmund Mortimer (d. 1331), and the Psalter while married to her second husband, William de Bohun (d. 1360), first Earl of Northampton and Constable of England. 

To learn more about Steve Green, please visit SteveGreen.us, HobbyLobby.com, and MuseumOfTheBible.org.