Photo by Mark Wellman
Becoming Thos. Moser
Tom Moser’s furniture is not for the timid. Even those with the discretionary income to invest in this exquisitely crafted furniture—a dining room set can cost as much as a small car—need a certain amount of self-esteem to own a Thos. Moser. It’s a bit like being married to a head turner; you have to feel worthy of something this beautiful.
Tom Moser’s success in the fine furniture world, some of it recorded in his 2002 book, Thos. Moser: Artistry in Wood, is legendary. He’s the Bates College professor-turned-furniture-maker who, instead of cutting corners or manufacturing goods overseas, built a profitable company by creating uncompromisingly high-end hand-crafted furniture, building a brand image worthy of such heirloom-quality products, and charging what it costs to profitably create, market, and deliver them.
Moser did it, in part, by constantly learning. Artistry in Wood relates a time early on when he agreed to make a desk for a retired school teacher for $350, all she could afford. Moser whipped together a badly-made eight-drawer desk in five days. When the teacher expressed her disappointment, he took it away and came back a few days later with a simple writing table—something worthy of both his signature and her $350 check. She loved it. He used the first desk at the workshop for holding paint cans, as an object lesson.
Thomas Moser the man, unlike the lovingly packed furniture that leaves his company’s
Auburn facility each day, continues to be a work in progress. With the business now largely handled by others, including three of his four sons, Moser, once the company’s lead furniture designer, has taken up sculpting in recent years, creating realistic, life-size 3-D portraits, often of friends and family. Perhaps they are immortal humans to go with his furniture, which he claims will last at least 100 years.
Please tell us a bit about your background, where you grew up.
I was born in Chicago, grew up in suburban Chicago in Northbrook. I am a first-generation American. My father was from Austria and my mother from Germany. She spoke with a very heavy accent, in broken English. My brother and I had what they used to call an Old Country upbringing. Strict, but very nurturing. I was born in ’35, so that makes me 76 today.
What kind of a youngster were you? Did you have any heroes?
When you turn 50 or so, Social Security sends you an accounting of payments you’ve made over your working lifetime. I started making social security payments when I was 11. By 13, I made $2,000, which was a lot of money back then. I worked shining shoes, washing dishes, caddying, working on the golf course parking cars. I was always hustling.
And I loved to make things. Mostly models. I would take wooden orange crates—they were free, you could go get them at the A&P—and whittled them. I made trains, airplanes, made all the World War II fighter planes. Every now and then, I’d get a balsa wood kit, which was really
special.
As far as heroes go, when I was a little kid, the WPA worked by the house putting in roads, make-work. One of the guys had one arm; we called him one-armed Louie. I’d watch him shovel with one arm and he worked as hard and he shoveled as much as any of those two-armed guys. Maybe it subconsciously occurred to me that we can overcome obstacles.
You certainly had some obstacles to overcome as a teenager, when both your parents died. How did that affect you?
When I was just 14, my mother died of cancer of the uterus, which is dangerous, painful, and drawn out. My father died, also of cancer, on my 18th birthday. So what happens to a kid when they lose their parents? Often it turns into anger—you know, “Why me?”, a chip on your shoulder—and that’s how it played out for a while. I left high school, one month into my senior year, and took a job in Chicago working at Marshall Fields. Some months later, after my father died, I joined the Air Force.
How did you end up as a college professor?
While in the Air Force, it became obvious to me that I wanted some education. So when I got out, I applied to Boston University. They didn’t accept me because I hadn’t finished high school, but the State University of New York at Geneseo did accept me as a vet. Those were the good days: $57 a semester. They had three majors: early elementary ed., library science, and speech education. I did speech education. I admired very much the professors and their way of life and I wanted to emulate that.
So you went on to get your master’s and PhD at the University of Michigan and Cornell. By then you were married and had a family. When did you first meet your wife, Mary?
When she was 12 and I was 14. She was my neighbor. Mary was kind of my girlfriend when I was in the service. She sent me a Dear John letter when I was stationed in Greenland and I was miserable. Two years later, I was visiting her mother and I saw her. We went to Ravinia, which is a summer concert place in Illinois, and we kissed on the porch and that was it. We’ve been married 54 years.
How did you two end up in Maine?
When I was a junior in college, a professor said, “You know, you should go to Bar Harbor, Maine, it’s a beautiful place.” So Mary’s doctor—she was pregnant with our second child—said, “You’re going to have two babies in diapers. Why don’t you take my tent and go off for a week before the next one is born?” So when she was eight months pregnant, we were on our way to Bar Harbor, but only got as far as East Boothbay. It was so foggy that you couldn’t see anything—I had to open the door to see the white line—so we stopped the car. We heard ding, ding, ding, so we knew we were by the ocean, and felt around for a flat space to put up the tent.
The next morning, a shadow came across the flap of the tent. “Hello in they-uh. Anyone in he-yuh? You’re gonna have to move this-here tent, ’cause I’ve got to get to Augusta.” So we crawl out and we’re smack in the middle of this old lobsterman’s driveway! He helped us slide the tent over onto his lawn, and we spent five days there, ate dinner with them. So we had this love affair with Maine.
A few years later, when we were in Saudi Arabia, I got different job offers at the Hague in Holland, in Bangor in Wales, at the University of Michigan at Marquette, and at UMaine in Orono. Orono was two-thirds the salary of Michigan, but we wanted to come to Maine, so we went to Orono in 1966. The next year, I applied for Brooks Quimby’s job at Bates and got it. I taught there for six years, as a tenured associate professor.
All this time, you and Mary are also rehabbing and selling old houses, and you were making furniture. Your book Thos. Moser: Artistry in Wood opens with your decision to
quit teaching and start a furniture making business. Can you tell that story?
First of all, in 1972, college campuses were very strange places. They had gone through a very abrupt transition, rejecting traditional learning and replacing it with non-graded classes, sensitivity studies, and T-groups; it was not a nice place to be teaching anymore. I was apologizing for teaching people Aristotle and Plato and the Socratic method. It was just a mess.
I had a sabbatical leave coming, so I sat down with Hedley Reynolds, the president, and said, “Look, I’d like to leave for a year. Will you hold my job for me and give me until the middle of next April to tell you whether or not I want to come back?” He said, “Sure.” Keep in mind, Bates would take my kids tuition-free, so I’m talking about half a million dollars in potential tuition I’d be walking away from. Usually when you’re on sabbatical, it’s full pay for one semester, half pay for one year. I took no pay for one year and bought an old grange hall in New Gloucester and started building furniture.
We started in 1972, and we lost money. Our total revenue for the first year was $17,000. Second year, we doubled it to $34,000, but still lost money. By the third year, we actually broke even; the fifth year, I made more money than I spent. But we had about $80,000 in debt and it didn’t look like we would ever get out of it. So we sold our house and paid it off. That house had been built in 1782. It had nine fireplaces, two big chimneys, and we’d spent seven years restoring it. God, we loved that place. But we left it.
You and Mary, like many couples, built your company together; you also had four young sons. What was her role in the business?
Without Mary, none of this could possibly have happened. She was a traditional mother, raising the kids, running the household. But she also did all the advertising and all the selling and all the accounting for the business, which freed me up to work on the bench. She put together an in-house ad agency so we could get the 15% discount. She’s the one who started the ad series in The New Yorker. We were in The New Yorker 27 years, one of its longest continuous advertisers.
Whenever I give lectures to woodworkers or craftsmen, one of the principles they have to understand is that it takes as much time to sell a product as to make it. It’s not just an aside; selling is fundamental to being successful. You either sell it wholesale and let the guy take the other 50% of it, or you do it yourself, but if you do, you better be prepared to work 80- to 90-hour weeks, because that’s what it takes.
Were your four boys part of the business, too?
Absolutely. When they got off the school bus at 3 o’clock, they got off at the shop. My oldest son, Matt, was my best lathe guy; he was a whiz bang on the lathe. And to this day, three of them still work at the business; Matt went off on his own. They all left—one went to the Peace Corps, one went to Denver, another to Boston, and one went to Arlington, Texas—but they all came back to Maine.
How did you manage to grow beyond a small operation from New Gloucester, Maine?
New Gloucester, I used to say, is not the crossroads of the western world, kind of off the path, so we had to advertise. Our first ad was in 1973. It was a full-page ad in Down East magazine, featuring a grandfather clock and a little stand. A very good friend of ours and a mentor, Paul Guilmette, who had Guilmette Realty in Auburn, paid for half of that ad as a gift. It was a $350 four-color ad. That, incidentally, was also the moment in time where I cut my academic throat, because Hedley Reynolds and all my colleagues knew I turned my back on academe.
At first, we sold furniture to our neighbors and friends. The next orders came from doctors from southern Maine; we advertised in the New England Medical Journal, and that worked pretty well until they said they didn’t want any non-medical ads anymore. Once we were in The New Yorker, we had what we called 2-1-2 weekends, for the area code, especially in the fall of the year. We figured out that 18% of what we sold in those days went to people who drove a Volvo. I mean these weren’t just rich people; these were rich people with taste. If they were in a green Volvo station wagon, we knew we had a sale.
Did you have any other mentors or any training back then?
As far as woodworking goes, mentors were mostly the craftsmen I worked with. We were all self-taught. So we learned from one another.
There was a man named Bill Geofrian, who ran Heritage Lanterns in Yarmouth. I remember spending a whole Saturday with him talking about cost accounting. I didn’t even know what the term meant. If I had money in the checkbook, I thought I was making money. That was the closest thing I had in terms of an indicator. Bill took me through the steps of materials, labor, overhead, cost of goods sold, and then the multiplier. To this day, I still think in those terms. I think of gross profit, net profit, overhead, contribution to profit. Without that mindset, without having a strong paradigm, you can’t make it.
I learned about selling directly from a man named Dean Lieth at Troy-Bilt Rototiller Company. Troy-Bilt sold their products by mail order, direct to the customer. The word is disintermediation, meaning there’s no middleman. Bill End, who was 25 years with L. L. Bean and was the CEO of Lands End, also helped me with direct marketing.
The company still sells directly, which makes us highly unusual. We never sell wholesale.
Selling direct means higher margins are much higher.
They have to be—52% or 55% even—because we spend 34% to 37% selling.
Part of your MO early on was to study overseas operations to help you create the best possible workflow. Where did you go?
I learned about manufacturing in Europe, mostly Denmark. I visited a number of factories and shops there—I don’t speak Danish, but they all speak English—and I learned how to organize serial production from the Scandinavians. I also learned it from northern Italy, in Udina, and Kyoto, Japan, from other companies similar to ours, family companies.
Serial manufacturing is really about divisions of labor. So when we set up the building in Auburn, the north half of it was where the machinery was. That was where we made parts, about 17 weeks’ worth. We had the first CNC [computer numerical control] machine used to make wooden furniture parts in America, adapted from making aircraft wings.
Now we’ve gone back to the future. Now there’s no queuing, no parts waiting to be used. You shouldn’t have boxes full of legs, you should have enough legs, not just in case, but just in time. We’ve since moved to those lean manufacturing
principles.
At some point, you also hired an outside administrator to run things. Why?
I knew I didn’t have the horsepower to run the company; I had to hire a professional. In 1985, I hired a guy who had an MBA from Harvard University who had been with Digital Equipment Corporation. His specialty is what we now call ERP,
enterprise resource planning. This was all new to me, but in the five years he worked for me, I absorbed from his brain whatever one gets from a Harvard MBA. I learned the language, the way of thinking. We had one manager for 13 years, Harry Fraser, who is now the head of Johnny’s Selected Seeds. God, what he taught me.
Thos. Moser now has showrooms on both coasts. How did those come about?
Our house was actually our first showroom. In 1974, we bought an old church vestry for $5, cut it into four pieces, moved it into New Gloucester, and that became our showroom. In the mid ’80s, I bought a building just off 295 in Portland and we moved our office and showroom there. That worked fine for about 15 years. We sold it at a significant loss, the only time I ever lost money selling real estate. Then I said, “Freeport’s the place, because millions of people a year drive slowly through that town.” We rented a building just north of L. L. Bean, and have been there since 1993.
Around that time, we had a guy working for us who was getting his MBA from Harvard; he and the professor of retail did a study of where to place our next showroom. So we opened one in Philadelphia, in the inner city. From there we went to Madison Avenue in New York, Washington, D. C., and eventually to San Francisco, Boston, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Now we have six showrooms. We shut the one in Chicago. Even though it’s my hometown, we’ve never been able to get it to work.
What was Mary’s role during those years?
Mary worked as my partner for at least 15 to 20 years, and then we came to a juncture in the road. It was, either be my lover and wife or be my business partner; we can’t go on like this. So she stepped out of the operational portion of the business and it worked out well.
For years, you designed all the furniture, until your youngest son, David, grew into that role. Three of your four sons still work at Thos. Moser. How did you avoid feelings of jealousy between them?
Well, there’s an assumption there, that I avoided something. [Laughs.] A family-held business is tough; where it’s the toughest is their interaction with one another, their wives, and their families. And it’s tough between them and the people who manage and run the company, to whom they report. That’s where the rubber hits the road. It’s taken a long time, but I think we’re at a certain comfort level now, where everybody who works in the company respects what the boys do. And they’ve earned that respect.
In your experience, is there anything that makes it more challenging to do business in Maine than other places?
Costs. We finally got natural gas in our shop. Before that, we were running propane, which was incredibly expensive. The electricity is incredibly expensive. I don’t know where we are with taxes; they’re talking about 8.5% now or something like that. If you die in Maine, that’s 10% of your estate. So how many people want to die in Maine? That’s why they’re moving to New Hampshire and Florida.
There are some endemic issues, but they are balanced off by some positives. I could not do what we have done from New Jersey. I could have done it possibly from Pennsylvania, certainly Oregon or Washington state, but by and large the Maine magic is what made us. We owe a great deal to that whole mystique. We’ve been offered, many times, the chance to leave and go someplace else, but, no, we’re going to stay put.
Aristotle once said, “Excellence is not an act but a habit.” Looking back, what kind of habits worked for you as a business owner that you’d encourage others to cultivate?
Be judicious about who you surround yourself with. Hire people, engage people who are smarter than you are, and who are happy in their own skin. Stay away from angry people, people who feel like they’ve been misused. Attitude is far more important than demonstrated skill, because that skill can be taught if there’s a willing attitude.
The other thing that goes with that is, give people freedom to make mistakes. Because, ultimately, it’s only through mistakes that we learn.
Any last thoughts?
I want to sell furniture. I want people to understand that when they buy something from us, like that chair over there, which is probably 1,200 bucks, they’re going to give that to their grandchildren and, unless it burns, that chair will service at least three to five generations. So it’s worth $1,200.