Starting Penny Mustard

Every successful business begins with a little bit of risk. Or, in the case of Ben & Arvid Huth, a LOT of risk. This is the Penny Mustard story.

ARVID: Of all the things to go into. Why did we choose going into the furniture business? I don’t really know.

One afternoon I wasn’t at work and decided to ride my motorcycle back home. Why I decided to do that, on that day? I don’t know.

And I happened to go home and mom and dad were visiting with their insurance man, Daniel Marks.

I was telling him I was looking for a part-time job. And he said, “Well, you should stop in and see Mike.” He said, “I worked delivering beds for him when I was in college.”

Anyway, I worked for them for two years delivering beds. And then, one of their salespeople quit and I told Mike, “Well, gee, I’d like to sell.” I said, “Well, I’ll do both jobs and if I’m not a very good salesperson, just fire me from the sales job in the fall. You’ve got nothing to lose and I’ll just go back to delivering.”

So, I sold furniture there my third year in college and decided, I dunno why, I was getting kind of sick of college.

Well, my college roommate at the time – Jim – he and I were gonna partner up and start our own store. And, well, we got into it and talked more serious about it. He was interested and we talked to Mike, who was going to maybe help us out a little bit.

BEN: Well, I had gone with you guys on that one trip where we were looking at different markets. We had gone to Madison, Milwaukee, Green Bay, Appleton.

And, that was the day Jim got cold feet and backed out. I don’t know if he told you that that day, but I could sense that.

So, I finally called Arvid and I said, “Hey, I want to, I’ll meet you at the Farmer’s Cafe on Cadott and buy you supper. And I got something I want to talk about.”

So I met him there, bought him supper, and told him what I could bring to the table. I kind of did some math of what I could get if I sold my seven cows and my ATV and my snowmobile and here’s what I could bring to the table.

ARVID: Ben was able to finance things a little bit more, which wasn’t a ton of money, but it was, you know. I think we started the whole thing on $10,000 or $15,000. So between the two of us, we scraped that amount of money up. I sold my snowmobile and that motorcycle that I’ve driven. And so, yeah, that’s where it went from there.

And then we, Ben and I, with Mike Blas went and looked at some real estate in Milwaukee. It was the market we decided to look into and we met with a real estate broker. We ended up going back to Eau Claire and the real estate broker never bothered calling us back. He didn’t want anything to do with a couple of dumb kids. And at that point, Mike Blas backed out.

BEN: We were scared at that point. When he backed out, we were even more scared because he knows more than we know.

ARVID: We were a hair’s breadth away from backing out ourselves at that point because… what did we really have? We didn’t have much at all. Then, if he wasn’t going to be our partner, we’d lost everything, but we decided to go for it.

And we ended up coming down to Milwaukee and meeting with another real estate broker, Mike Goldberg. And he took us seriously and he found a little spot and he found a landlord, Leo Lichter, who said, “Yeah, I’ll take a chance on these kids.” He was an old guy and he didn’t care. He rented us a little 3,000 square foot space.

And, we packed up the stuff we had and moved down there and started selling furniture and it’s just kind of been successful since.

So, I didn’t think Ben had a whole lot of skills either at that point. Milking cows wasn’t much of a skill for selling furniture, but he’s done fine.

Origin stories are some of our favorites, especially this one. Cows, snowmobiles, and all.