Woody Allen Meets Sanford and Son

Mogol, who’s very sentimental, worries that his father, who’s going on ninety, doesn’t really understand or appreciate what he does. “He looks at my success as an account of my financial wherewithal,” Steve says. “I mean, he gets it more today—he can’t deny the publicity that I get or the big projects I get from companies that he knows of—but he doesn’t understand the other part of my feelings about how much I love doing what I’m doing.”

Steve Mogol may truly love what he does, but he’s frustrated. He doesn’t think that he’s where he wants to be yet. He’s had some major disappointments in the past few years. In 2003, a deal to sell restored vintage furniture through Restoration Hardware fell through. Last year, a deal to outfit the new Urban Outfitters headquarters in Philadelphia collapsed. In a 1997 story in Twin Cities Business Monthly, he projected earnings of “close to $500,000” a year. “I haven’t reached that yet,” he says. “I should be at $2 million to $3 million a year. But you have to have factories. You have to have employees. We don’t have a sufficient amount of people working, we don’t have a sufficient amount of space, and the organization needs to be improved, and I guess it all revolves around management. I’m the captain of the ship and it always comes back to me. It’s my fault.” 

Mogol does have employees. A seemingly never-ending rotation of Minneapolis College of Art and Design students mostly, with an annual turnover rate that’s been described as almost 100 percent. His helpers are an artsy-looking lot, some with pink hair and tattoos, some with beards and nose rings, whose duties are divided between transporting the furniture—either picking it up or dropping it off—and restoring it: the painstaking job of blasting, polishing, and painting that each piece goes through. “It took us five years to perfect the process of restoring aluminum chairs,” Steve says. “It’s a very demanding job. It’s hands-on. It takes a certain type of person to do it.”

For many reasons, Mogol believes that the building is less than ideal. He’s tried to buy buildings elsewhere, but he’s been either outbid or “screwed” by condo developers on better properties. “The perfect scenario would be to have a production facility—having the blasting, the wet paint, the particle paint, the woodworking shop, the upholstery shop—all under one roof,” he says. “The offices should be well run. Everything should be at your fingertips. I know how to do it, I just can’t get it done. You’ve walked around here and you’ve seen stuff in boxes, and some of the stuff in boxes has been sitting in boxes for many, many years, expecting to have the boxes moved out of the rooms and the rooms redone and then you can bring them back and put them away. Well, time flies. And you just can’t get to certain things. There are higher priorities. And then you get jobs coming in, and those are always the highest priority. Unless there’s something that overrules it.”