Today we’d like to introduce you to Sean Wood.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I grew up the son of a toy designer, my father is best known as the designer of Hot Wheels cars and he worked for Mattel Toys for over 50 years, I was steeped in design and hot rod culture throughout my childhood. Everything was about design in our house. In my late teens, I opened a custom hot rod upholstery shop in Los Angeles. I had some formal training in this and had a good run, working on beautiful cars and also some furniture commissions. This helped me get through college, which was initially in the field of design but I changed it to business.
In my 20s, I strayed very far from being a creative person. It was a recession when I graduated and finding work relating to my degree (with not much more than upholstery experience) proved challenging. I had an opportunity in healthcare administration and within a few years, I was a hospital administrator – a very young one to boot! I was upwardly mobile, earning great money and learning a ton. And of course, I was totally miserable. Corporate healthcare was not for me.
Eight years on at 30 years old I rebooted and quit that career and got divorced. Ahhh – tough times but huge times! Complete reinvention, I had the amazingly good luck to be hired as the business manager of a nonprofit start-up art school in Napa founded by Robert Mondavi. Surrounded by creatives, artists and teachers was a game changer and my ideals and priorities shifted profoundly, My life has been inspired by the act of observing, creating, and being grateful ever since.
The second even bigger thing that happened to me at that time was meeting Leslie, now my partner at MorningWorks and wife of 20 years. For the sake of brevity, I’ll just say that meeting her turned my life from shoulds to could, and the happiness and possibility scales went way higher than I had previously imagined. We designed and made an off=grid rammed earth style house in the Napa Valley and that rekindled my love for design. We went on to make three more homes which included the furniture.
Furniture, specifically chairs, has always been my primary design interest. Ten years ago we decided to just go for it. We made one more house, actually converted a barn into our studio and home, and based our business on this location This is in rural Sonoma County, about an hour north of San Francisco. It took a number of years to get on our feet and become established but ultimately our clients began returning to us and MorningWorks Studio became a legitimate sustainable business.
At MorningWorks, we make chairs that reflect our love for traditional handcraft and modern design. Our work is made to order. Our clientele is mostly design professionals, but we also enjoy working directly with homeowners and end clients.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
As in many creative fields, to be good is not enough. You need to be really good but more importantly, your work needs to resonate with people. And finding a way to get your work in front of people and get recognized is a big challenge. For about seven years, our pieces were only in a small number of showrooms, and these catered strictly to the trade. The number of people that sat in our chairs was very few but I am so grateful that we had that opportunity.
It took years for those few to become a few more and for this to become a critical mass. 60-hour weeks in the shop for over five years to earn a modest living and the ever-present concern that the whole endeavor could fail. (But hey, it beats corporate healthcare administration!). Thankfully the demand steadily increased, a number of years ago the demand for our chairs reached a point where we decided to pull out of showrooms.
From that point forward. we sell our chairs directly from our studio and this provides price advantages to our clients and revenue advantages to us. We share all of our work on Instagram. And between the work generated from this and repeat client work, we manage to maintain a comfortable waitlist.
We’ve been impressed with MorningWorks, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
MorningWorks Studio makes chairs and benches from our barn in rural Northern California. Our work is inspired by our love for modern design and our interest in traditional handcraft. We make all of our pieces to order, and the entirety of our operation consists simply of Leslie and Sean Wood, As such, our output is limited to about 100 pieces each year. We sell our work to designers and end clients throughout North America. We post all of our work.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.morningworks.com
- Instagram: @morningworks
