Importance Of Effective Marketing Strategies For A Wood Marketing Company
Steve Larosiliere
April 24, 2024
Steve Larosiliere
“It’s a kind of thing which if I’m just getting out my wooden hand planes and I zen out in my back shop, that’s great. It’s wonderful, but it no longer serves the purpose of my clients. It’s just me dorking out on wood. Right? Totally acceptable, but not in the case that now all of a sudden, people need to get paid.”
Welcome to Building a Furniture brand with Ethan Abramson, the show that talks about the business behind the furniture business. In this episode, Ethan sits down with Martin Goebel, owner of the St. Louis Missouri and Chicago Illinois-based furniture company Goebel Furniture.
Martin’s furniture education background is impressive on its own, but he has combined it with his business knowledge, creative passion, and hard work to make his company into the powerhouse it is today.
Along with his raw skill in furniture building, Martin is also a scholar of furniture manufacturing history, and he has drawn from both of those backgrounds to set his company apart from the rest.
Martin started woodworking at the age of sixteen through a high school shop class. His father is an architect and he grew up working with his hands-on projects ranging from skateboard ramps to basement renovations. He had a natural knack for working with tools and the workflow of building projects, which would serve him well going forward in his business.
After high school, Martin went to College of the Redwoods, now known as The Krenov School. Martin notes that he was fortunate enough to be attending the school during the final year that James Krenov was teaching in 2001-2002. He took about five years off from college, during which time he built furniture for art galleries in a 400 square foot garage behind his grandparents’ house.
Martin later went on to get his Master’s in Furniture Design at Rhode Island School of Design Providence and work on contracts in design engineering with Thomas Moser Cabinetmakers, and many other contract positions. Ethan notes that the time Martin spent with Thomas Moser Cabinetmakers must have been a dream position where he undoubtedly learned a lot.
“Absolutely. Moser did really well with hiring talented people. And I’m not referring to myself at this point, I was pretty green out of graduate school. They put in a gentleman that was from North Carolina as their manufacturing manager, and this guy Tim was just an absolute machine.
He was sort of at the end of his career and worked in the North Carolina mass manufacturing industry for years, and had started partially retiring to Maine. He took me under his wing and I think that was the most interesting interview that I’ve ever had in my life. He knew the ins and outs of the furniture industry, absolutely knew how furniture should be manufactured, knew the numbers, knew what worked, what didn’t work, you know, it was just invaluable.”
Ethan explains that combining traditional woodworking techniques with modern automated manufacturing can frequently clash, and he asks how Martin has managed to combine these disparate elements together to make his shop run effectively in terms of both the physical setups as well as the mental approach.
Martin notes that he wouldn’t use the term seamless, but he and his company try to not make the same mistakes twice. Referencing his knowledge of the history of furniture, Marin believes that the technology and materials that came from World War II caused American furniture production to evolve in a different way.
While the craftsman inside of him loves the idea of everything being purely handmade, he believes that ideal to be for leisurely woodworking. A concept that can’t apply to a business where people need to be able to be paid reliably. This dichotomy led Martin to create a hybrid process that incorporates digital design as well as handmade elements to create top-notch furniture at a price that is actually attainable.
“I remember in probably 2006 or 2007 I redesigned a coffee table 11 times one year. It’s not because they didn’t like the coffee table, it was a custom coffee table at the price of a custom coffee table. So they were gonna have me redesign it. I thought that was the dumbest possible thing for me and the dumbest thing for everybody else. But if the price dictates it, you’ve got to do it.
Now we’re selling a product that I won’t say is widely attainable, it’s definitely a luxury item. But it’s what I would consider entry-level luxury. So if you’re driving a BMW 3 series, or you go on a scuba diving trip to Mexico, you can afford our product line furniture. Do we do the higher end? Absolutely. But a lot of the technology was brought into this process so that it’s now scalable. We can control prices and do any number of things, which I think from a business standpoint is more responsible than producing 30 pieces of art every year.”
Ethan notes that Martin has a lot of people working at his shop, and although he is a small company in the grand scheme of businesses, he is a large business within the furniture company ecosystem. Ethan then asks Martin about his hiring practices, what he looks for in an employee, and his overall methodology.
Martin explains that his ultimate goal is to make what they create available to as many people as possible. His products will not ever be the cheapest or most attainable ones in the world, but he intends to take incremental steps to get closer to that point and allow his work to enhance the lives of as many people as possible.
He believes that furniture making is similar to cooking in the sense of taking raw ingredients or materials that are sometimes better and sometimes worse and they do certain things to them to improve the end result. While certain restaurants are better than others, it’s safe to assume that the vast majority are getting the same quality carrots or olive oil, and most are starting on an even playing field.
From there, it comes down to how those raw ingredients are manipulated to create a better or worse product. Martin got so overwhelmed when he was handling every aspect of making, selling, marketing, and designing furniture that he began to hate the process. By the time he was 28 he was burnt out on making furniture, and he knew his number one goal was to hire more people both to reorganize the crafting process as well as bring in more ideas.
“That’s really where then I started adding technology into my process. If you have one plus one craftsman, you get two or two and a half. However, one plus one craftsman plus technology can yield 20 or 25. Call it a 10x multiplier with the same input from those craftsmen.
In the case of hiring people, it’s about a group of people that need to be very comfortable with collaboration and with team effort, and the team effort is no longer just the three guys that are building furniture in the back. It’s material procurement, It’s the guy taking out the trash, it’s our office manager Kelly, it’s any number of people that make the world go round, and everyone is equally important.”
Website: https://www.goebelfurniture.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/goebel_co_furniture/
