How Penny Mustard Does Style

For whatever reason, some people assume that work from smaller, locally-owned shops won’t be on-trend. There’s a common misconception about a lack of quality, too. Ben & Arvid from Penny Mustard are here to bust the myth that quality, style, and local craftsmanship don’t mix.

ARVID: “We’ve partnered with small, Midwestern shops, mainly for the quality thing. And by partnering with these small Midwestern shops, they will build it exactly the way we want it, and they will build it right to Ben’s picky details.

You see all this beautiful stuff that all of these companies have – are cutting edge styles, okay. That the customers want. And then you start trying to find that beautiful style and the quality that’s really good. And that’s almost impossible.

So it’s just worked better for us to look at that style and say, what do we like about this style? What’s important about this style? What makes this style, what it is? And then we are inspired by that style to create our own style that we think is just as good or better, and then adding all of the quality to it as well. And at a pretty fair price.

You think about how our furniture is made locally and made in these small shops. And what do people naturally think of? They think Amishy stuff, country styles, real ornate, but not…”

BEN: “Just not up to date.”

ARVID: “Not up to date.”

BEN: “Out of date. How can these little shops know what to do?”

ARVID: “And I, and that’s just not true. Go to our website and look. We spend hours and hours and hours designing this stuff and being inspired by other designs. And I don’t think the public instinctively knows that – they just think locally built. They think clunky. It’s not.”

BEN: “Yep. I know one quick story on that…

One of our furniture builders, he was building a line that we had designed. It was only out a year and it didn’t do all that well.

And so I said to him one day, ‘Hey, we need to discontinue this. And this is what I want you to build. Okay.’

And he’s like, ‘No, no. How about we just tweak this?’

I’m like, ‘No, no. We’re gonna discontinue that.’

[Builder] ‘No, no. Let’s just tweak it.’

[Ben] ‘No, we’re going to discontinue that.’ I’m like, ‘This is what I want you to build.’

And he’s like, ‘Can we just tweak this?’

And I’m like, ‘No, no, that’s dead. That’s gone. That’s over. We have to move on from that. Okay.’

And he’s like, ‘But it’s still easy to build.’

I’m like, ‘It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. It has to be the right look.’

And so anyway, I finally convinced him, we just gotta be done with that. And we got it. And that takes a lot. They’re going to have new jigs. I got it, you know, it takes a lot, to come out with a new look.”

ARVID: “A lot of work.”

BEN: “Right. And it’s a lot of work for him. But that’s been a number one seller for a long time.

And I even joked with him about that today. And we talk about that. I’m like, ‘Do you remember when,’ you know, I said ‘We should do this’ and you said ‘No.’

And you know, when I bring out new items to him, he listens better now than he ever used to, which is good.

You have to be on top of that style. You have to be willing, no matter how much it hurts if something isn’t the right look, you gotta move on from that. You’ve gotta have the right look. You gotta be up to date, fresh, and on top of it.”