Furniture titans Mitchell Gold and Bob Williams met in a New York City bar in 1989. “That was back in the days before the Internet, when to meet someone, you had to go to a bar,” laughs Gold.
At the time, Gold was a sales executive in the furniture industry, while Williams worked as a graphic designer at Seventeen magazine.
“We knew right away that we wanted to work on something together,” Williams recalls.
In their newly opened Natick signature store, the two relax into a wide sofa upholstered in soft gray cotton and tell their story. Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams is an international brand with over $150 million in annual sales. Featured in movies and design magazines and on TV, their home furnishings collection, loved for its relaxed and modern styling, is sold in a growing chain of stores as far afield as Seoul and Dubai. Located in Taylorsville, North Carolina, the company, which proudly celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2014, employs over 750 people, the county’s largest employer and a model of enlightened workplace practice. Mitchell is now married to Tim Gold, while Bob’s partner is Stephen Heavner, but the two are still best friends, as committed as ever to their business partnership and to a shared vision.
It began with shared passions: good food, entertaining, and comfort.
“We thought that upholstered dining chairs would be a real future trend,” Gold says. “We had them and knew how nice it feels to be comfortable at the dining table. They were available, but they were in the high-end design showrooms. We could do them at a more popular price, and we could deliver them in four weeks versus four months.”
The two bought a defunct chair-making factory in a small North Carolina town and, with an initial investment of $60,000, set out to bring comfort and style into dining rooms.
Williams brought a new design sensibility to the enterprise.
“Those upholstered dining chairs in design showrooms came in six shades of beige,” Gold laughs. “Bob wanted to make them in florals, in these beautiful rich velvets. I was on the sales end of things, and right away, I could see people responding to them.”
Their instincts proved right again when they upholstered sectional seating furniture in washed denim and khaki, and when they reinvented slipcovers. Always, the emphasis was on comfort and ease. Furniture, they believed, should serve lives that include dogs and children with sticky fingers and friends who curl up on the couch with a glass of wine.
“Executives in our industry worked in suits and ties, but we wore jeans and oxford-cloth shirts,” says Williams as the two explain their concept of the word “comfort.” Not only the guiding principal for modern furniture that’s clean-lined and undemanding, it also sums up an approach to life that is short on pretension and long on happiness.
“Comfort also means the ability to feel good about yourself. Supported and respected at your job. Safe in your home and community. Proud of the legacy you are leaving behind.”
Within the company and without, the two are known and rewarded for their progressive principles. In 2007, Out magazine named Mitchell Gold as one of the “Top 50 Most Powerful Gay People in America,” and the Alexander County Chamber of Commerce regularly names theirs the “Large Business of the Year.”
In 1997, the company moved into a 60,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art facility a few miles down the road from their original site. Gold and Williams like to point out that all their furniture is still manufactured there. Made in America is an entirely doable business model, they insist.
“We are not greedy about markup, and we run a very efficient operation,” Gold explains. “And we invest in our employees, so that we have a skilled labor force that stays with us for a long time.”
Among the benefits offered to its employees by Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams are on-site child care, a physical fitness center, on-site healthcare, and Café Lulu, the health-conscious gourmet company cafeteria headed up by a Johnson & Wales–trained chef. The café’s namesake was an English bulldog—the furniture company’s mascot, who figured largely in early furniture testing and advertising campaigns.
“Other companies don’t do these things because they think they are too expensive,” Williams says. “But that’s the mind-set of bean counters who look at numbers in an incomplete way.”
“We have better productivity,” his partner chimes in. “I would much rather be looking for new employees because we are growing than because we keep having to deal with staff turnover.”
They are, indeed, growing. New showrooms are popping up, with a glamorous new space scheduled to open in Burlington, Massachusetts, this fall.
Beyond that, the two refuse to speculate. The past has proved an unexpectedly glorious ride, and they cannot imagine a future that’s any better.
Article appears in the Fall 2015 issue of Northshore Home magazine.