AADL Talks To: Nawal Motawi, Owner of Motawi Tileworks

Tue, 09/24/2024 - 3:54pm

When: August 19, 2024

In this episode, AADL Talks to Nawal Motawi. Nawal tells us about her early years as an artist, how she began Motawi Tileworks, and how the business grew and changed over the years. Nowal also discusses her design processes, and what the future might hold.

Transcript

• [00:00:09] AMY CANTU: [MUSIC] Hi, this is Amy.
• [00:00:10] ELIZABETH SMITH: And this is Elizabeth, and in this episode, AADL talks to Nawal Motawi. Nawal tells us about her early years as an artist, how she began Motawi Tileworks, and how the business grew and changed over the years. Nawal also discusses her design processes and what the future might hold.
• [00:00:27] ELIZABETH SMITH: Thank you for joining us today, Nawal. First, we like to ask, where did you grow up and what brought you to Ann Arbor?
• [00:00:38] NAWAL MOTAWI: I grew up in fabulous Fremont, Michigan, population 3,500. [LAUGHTER] I came to Ann Arbor for college. My parents told me I had a choice of any good school in state, [LAUGHTER] and I decided after high school, having a really good experience in my art classes to try to get into art school, so I came to Michigan and entered the Art School, in my mind conditionally, only to see how I liked it, and I thought if it wasn't good, I would bail and go to LS&A.
• [00:01:17] AMY CANTU: Apparently, you did enjoy it? [LAUGHTER]
• [00:01:20] NAWAL MOTAWI: I did. It's funny though. After a year and a half, I dropped out of art school in disgust.
• [00:01:26] AMY CANTU: Oh, why?
• [00:01:26] NAWAL MOTAWI: Actually. I dropped out because I felt in order to get ahead, it was just really about marketing that you had to sell yourself more than anything else, and I felt the critiques were a lot of baloney. I just wasn't buying the whole art thing, [LAUGHTER] and I decided that I wanted to be an outdoor leader, and I went and pursued a completely different vein of learning for a couple of years. I'm the eldest of five children. My parents eventually said, well, we're going to pay for college through this date. If you're still in school after that, you got to pay for it yourself. [LAUGHTER] I totaled up my other credits and my art school credits and decided to finish at art school. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:02:14] AMY CANTU: It was good advice. You later studied at the Pewabic Pottery in Detroit. How did those early learning experiences shape your career?
• [00:02:21] NAWAL MOTAWI: It was a big deal. When I went back to art school, I actually focused on completely different things. I studied ceramics for the first time, and continued in figure sculpture. I got part time jobs after college. One of them was at Pewabic Pottery, and of course, there I learned about the Arts and Crafts period and Arts and Crafts aesthetic, which I really appreciate. I got to know their glazes, which were really a bunch of recipes that had been spread around by local professors that I also had. It was very interesting, and I always say that if you study ceramics in Southeast Michigan, you learn about Pewabic Pottery one way or another, so I ended up getting a job there, making tile. Actually, I drove my poor manager crazy, [LAUGHTER] and my manager at Pewabic suggested I look into the bookkeeping opening that they had. [LAUGHTER] I learned a little bit about keeping the books and finances doing that, and it certainly paid a lot better, and they let me have a little studio at Pewabic down in the basement, actually. I could make tiles and pots and fire them in the odd parts of the kilns, and I even took a project or two that came into the pottery, but it was maybe the client wanted it way too fast, and they were already full. I would work nights and weekends, [LAUGHTER] so I picked up the job and they let me actually fire in the kilns. A couple of commemorative type projects were things I did when I was working at Pewabic.
• [00:04:07] ELIZABETH SMITH: How long did you work there, and then how did that transition to creating your own Motawi Tileworks?
• [00:04:13] NAWAL MOTAWI: Good question. I worked at Pewabic, working my way from full time to not-time over about four years. I started in in '88, and then I went to three quarter time, and then I started doing a residency at the Center for Creative Studies, and then I went to half time. [LAUGHTER] Then eventually, I got a chance to have my own studio, and then I went to very occasionally [LAUGHTER] at Pewabic. I faded away from the scene there in a very natural way and into the project that became Motawi Tileworks.
• [00:04:57] ELIZABETH SMITH: Before we dive into Motawi Tile Works, I just wanted to ask outside of your ceramics career, what involvement you had around town. We saw an article in the Ann Arbor News about Longsword demonstrations. [LAUGHTER] I was curious about that and then what other local arts you've done around town?
• [00:05:13] NAWAL MOTAWI: Oh my gosh. Well, I love social dancing, and I fell in love with Celtic style dancing. There's a group called the Morris Team. This English performance dancing. I danced with that group for about 12 years, and an outgrowth of that group was Longsword, which is part of that same English ritual dance tradition, and there's also a dance you do with flexible swords that's called Rapper sword. Has nothing to do with rap music, came way before then. [LAUGHTER] But the swords are flexible, and the dance is very dynamic. All those things were things I did in my 20s and 30s a lot, and at 60, [NOISE] I'm finding it difficult. [LAUGHTER] But that also led me into folk dancing, contra dancing type of thing, and playing music for that. Mama plays a squeeze box. [LAUGHTER] That's me. I play a diatonic button accordion. My latest dance craze having gone through Salsa, which is great here in town and swing dancing, which is great here in town. I'm into something called Bal, B-A-L, Folk, F-O-L-K. It's essentially a repertoire of European dances that get mashed together into this thing that's emerged called Balfolk. It includes all different dances. But the music is a European in flavor. It's still like fiddle tunes, only different and more interesting and beautiful to me.
• [00:06:49] AMY CANTU: How many people are involved in that?
• [00:06:51] NAWAL MOTAWI: In Balfolk?
• [00:06:51] AMY CANTU: Yeah.
• [00:06:52] NAWAL MOTAWI: Well, in Europe, thousands. In the US-- hundred. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:06:58] AMY CANTU: Based on past interviews, it seems like your family has had a lot of experience in entrepreneurship. Can you tell us a little bit about how your family supported your business at its beginning?
• [00:07:07] NAWAL MOTAWI: Well, that's true. Of course, my grandfather was an entrepreneur and my mother was very much an emancipated female, let's just say. She encouraged me in art above my dad's objections to art school, which I didn't realize till later, and then when I wanted to start the tile works, I was thinking of trying to go back to school, and my dad said, look, why don't you just start the thing? My mom came up with this idea to buy a house and rent it to me on very reasonable terms, which was the house at 3301 Packard. It's still there. It's got a cobblestone lower story. They bought a house. They invested in real estate and rented to me, and I started the tile works in that garage, really.
• [00:07:57] ELIZABETH SMITH: What was the house used for at the time?
• [00:07:59] NAWAL MOTAWI: I rented it with a couple of friends. It was a flop house, I guess. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:08:05] ELIZABETH SMITH: When you first started, your brother was also involved?
• [00:08:09] NAWAL MOTAWI: I had my brother working with me after he finished school. One, I have three brothers. This was Karim, and he worked with me in the garage. There was one inflection point where we got to where I said, will you work for me regularly? He said, I won't work for you. I will work with you. I have to say, I had no idea of the ramifications [LAUGHTER] that were to follow, and I said. The first person that worked with me, that's Karim, was hand pressing the tile. I got out of making physically the tile almost as soon as I began, and I was selling and marketing and designing and developing glazes and everything else to do with it in the garage days back then.
• [00:09:06] AMY CANTU: You began by selling tiles at the Farmer's Market here in Ann Arbor. Can you talk a little bit about how that impacted your work, and do you still visit the farmer's market?
• [00:09:16] NAWAL MOTAWI: I did start selling tile at the Farmer's Market. I realized I didn't have a marketing budget, so I had to figure out how to sell them any way I could. The fee at the time was $11 per day. I started out just selling little Christmas ornaments made of clay, and I also had samples, just concept boards of layouts. Ann Arbor has a very art appreciating and affluent society, and that was very, very important [LAUGHTER] to my being able to start the business. I couldn't have done it in Fremont, Michigan. But at the Farmer's Market, I did actually sell a project or the idea of a project to a lady named Cynthia, bless her heart. [LAUGHTER] I still remember it very well because she saw me at the market, and she had already commissioned another Michigan artist to do the tile backsplash for her kitchen. This wasn't her first rodeo. She came out to the garage and I showed her some tiles. I said, this is a range sample. They might look like this or this or this. I'll need a non-refundable design deposit. I said, with my fingers crossed behind my back, of $250, and she said, okay [LAUGHTER] .
• [00:10:40] NAWAL MOTAWI: [LAUGHTER] I did a fireplace for Cynthia, who lived in a brand new duplex on Fourth Street, back then, which has since been torn down, but her next-door neighbor in the duplex saw her place and said, I want Motawi for mine. I did a fireplace and a backsplash for her. Remember the Ann Arbor News that was a paper? [LAUGHTER]. Back then in 1993, so at this time, Karim was working with me. And so there was a picture in the paper of Karim and I in front of Cynthia's fireplace. I can't really measure the marketing impact, I don't know, but I was so jazzed. [LAUGHTER] In those days, to get publicity, we did art fairs. The Farmer's Market was the first tiny version of an art fair. Then we did many for a few years after that. One year, I think I counted 20 weekends out of 52 in a year. [LAUGHTER] I was showing my tile at art fairs.
• [00:11:46] ELIZABETH SMITH: You also participated in the Ann Arbor Art Fair, is that correct?
• [00:11:49] NAWAL MOTAWI: Well, eventually, but when, my early days, I couldn't get in. My work wasn't good enough. I spent years in anguish hoping to get into the Ann Arbor Art Fair [LAUGHTER] and eventually did. But it was a little bit after my formative years, to be honest.
• [00:12:08] ELIZABETH SMITH: Do you still show at the art fair?
• [00:12:10] NAWAL MOTAWI: You know what? We have stopped showing at the art fair because I don't make enough money at it anymore. When I do the art fair nowadays, I take a full staff to set up a booth, and then I put two people on a half shift each day. I pay four people a day to man it, and then so [LAUGHTER] it takes an awful lot of sales to make up for that, and it just doesn't work. I've decided that as a mature company, we don't need that particular marketing impact, and it was like many other marketing choices, the effectiveness of the art fair was very hard to measure.
• [00:12:52] AMY CANTU: How long was it before you expanded and moved? We noticed in 1993, '94 classified ads that you were looking for a space with over 1,500 square feet?
• [00:13:03] NAWAL MOTAWI: That's right. The garage was 600 square feet. Within three years, we had outgrown it, and we found a space at 33 North Staebler Road, which was a very junky building. There was definitely no fire safe or anything like that. But the rent was very reasonable. I moved to that building. My parents sold the house, made a little gain. Glad they did. We moved to 33 North Staebler. While I was there, I broke through two different adjacent walls over the next half dozen years. I enlarged twice from 33 North Staebler. And then in 2001, 9/11. Just before that. In July, my family, including, I had a husband by then, and my parents, a brother, and my husband and I put in money, and we put a down payment on a commercial building at 170 Enterprise, where Motawi Tileworks is now. We did that in July and moved in. I've been there ever since. Plan A was to stay there until I outgrew it. At various times we've thought we had. [LAUGHTER] But we've learned some things along the way that have made that not necessary yet. At this point in my career, I'm not anxious to re-up. I now own that building free and clear.
• [00:14:41] ELIZABETH SMITH: Congratulations.
• [00:14:42] NAWAL MOTAWI: Thank you. Yes.
• [00:14:45] ELIZABETH SMITH: Your tiles are sold throughout the country in hundreds of locations. You started out as a small business with just a couple employees. Now you have over 40, is that right?
• [00:14:54] NAWAL MOTAWI: Well, if you count both companies. In 2011, I bought Rovin Ceramics, which is a pottery supply company. And when I say I bought it, I bought inventory. It's not the company that you would pay money for. The clay business is very low margin because you're buying dirt and selling it. You buy dirt, you mix it with water, and you sell it to artists and public institutions. That's what the clay supply business is. Motawi was a customer of Rovin Ceramics when I bought it in 2011, but we're only 10 or 15% of that company's revenue. Between Rovin Ceramics and Motawi Tileworks, I now employ just under 50 people.
• [00:15:46] AMY CANTU: You taught for a while at the Ann Arbor Art Association, now the Art Center. Do you still teach classes? What would you recommend for somebody who was interested in learning tile making?
• [00:15:58] NAWAL MOTAWI: I really enjoyed teaching for those few years at the Art Center. It was only two or three. To learn tile making, the way I did it was I got a job at a pottery. [LAUGHTER] You know what? The tile industry itself does not share secrets. It's not like that. You know what? It's tricky. I think you pretty much have to apprentice or work at a tile place. There are a few books around, but there's no easy and obvious way into the market without talking to someone who's in it, like myself. When I first got into the tile business, I was searching for a way in because I was not Pewabic with 100 years history. The art fairs was one avenue. Actually what happened in the early days, even in the garage is the business found me. I advertised in Traditional Building magazine, which is just a little trade magazine, a little black and white ad. This type of store that I didn't know about started calling. It was a Tile showroom, the place where you'd go to pick out tile for your house. Well, I didn't know about those. I guess they did sell to some, but I wasn't really familiar with that side of the business. There was no art tile scene. I went to the International Tile and Stone Exposition. [LAUGHTER] In 1991, I think it was, and I walked around and I found two art tile makers, total. I talked their ears off, the ones that spoke English. I learned a lot from that visit, essentially, a woman who was a specifier said, "You know, just decide how you want to do business." Meaning, as far as sampling for customers and things like that, because I had seen how Pewabic worked, and some of the things they did made sense, and some of them didn't work that well, even for them, and I was trying to avoid some of those mistakes. [LAUGHTER] I did. The tricky part, of course, I didn't know business, I didn't know costing. In the very beginning, my prices were very low, and they were not going to produce a sustainable business. That took a few years to sort out.
• [00:18:20] ELIZABETH SMITH: On the topic of the Art Center. Ten years ago, you created a partnership with them in order to sell your tiles in their shop. Is that something that you still have going on? What other locations around town sell your tiles?
• [00:18:31] NAWAL MOTAWI: You know what? The project that we had with the Art Association, we called it Motawi Downtown. Yeah, I learned in the process there was one town where I didn't need a retail location, and that's Ann Arbor [LAUGHTER].
• [00:18:45] NAWAL MOTAWI: It was an expensive learning experience. The Art Center carried my tile on a wholesale basis before that, and they still do. That's much more healthy.
• [00:18:55] AMY CANTU: Has Motawi expanded beyond tile, and would you like to pursue other types of ceramics?
• [00:19:00] NAWAL MOTAWI: Good question. Other than tile, Motawi spent a little bit of time creating slip cast ware based on the Arts and Crafts period Teco pottery. I had a customer who came to me and said, if you can make these pots, we can sell 5,000 of them a year or something like that. I thought, well, this is great. I had a person on staff who had worked at Kohler and so knew something about slip casting, and there was a little recession going on. We took that extra time that we had, and put it into learning how to slip cast and making a bunch of forms. It was another project that I learned from. [LAUGHTER] That didn't turn out to be profitable. We couldn't make them cheap enough for my buyer, and my buyer decided they wanted all different designs right at the tail end of our learning process, and we made some mistakes, some big ones that made our costs higher. I think I know what my mistakes were. If I went back there, I would at least make different ones this time. Motawi Downtown and the vessel making didn't work. Those were big explorations. Rovin Ceramics, which I bought in 2011, was also a hard learning experience, but I wouldn't take it back because that company supplies the tri-state area of clay, and it produces these really nice boutique clay bodies instead of just something you give kids in elementary school to mess around with. Nicely thought well researched clays is what Rovin will get you, and they'll also make custom bodies for people. Even some of the colleges asked for a certain mix of clays to be in their clay body that they were using for student work.
• [00:21:04] ELIZABETH SMITH: You're still operating that?
• [00:21:06] NAWAL MOTAWI: Rovin, is still operating. Yep, it's growing.
• [00:21:09] ELIZABETH SMITH: I was curious about your work being described as historically informed. You mentioned the arts and crafts inspiration, but what other artistic styles inform your approach to art making, and has this changed over time?
• [00:21:22] NAWAL MOTAWI: You know what? I've always been drawn to historical design. The arts and crafts period really grab me. I love the stylized florals. Art Nouveau, the same thing. As I've moved on, I've taken a liking to some mid-century modern things, but not Atomic age. I'm not really going in that direction. More recently, I've looked at Jugendstil, that would be Vienna Secession artwork of the Wiener Werkstätte in Vienna. There's a lot of graphic artwork from that group that I really enjoy and have made into tiles. It's still mostly historically inspired, and I look at lots of things. I look at a lot of fabric patterns and historical tile. I'm always noticing patterns and designs everywhere. Anything could be a tile. A tissue box could turn into a tile design. I've even gone into the Salvation Army and just taken pictures of fabrics, and at least one of those is one of our tiles.
• [00:22:26] AMY CANTU: It's interesting. We know that you have licensing deals with Charley Harper, Frank Lloyd Wright, and other notable artists and architects of the 20th century. How did that come about? Can you tell us a little bit about that?
• [00:22:36] NAWAL MOTAWI: Great question about the licensing. I didn't know anything about it before Frank Lloyd Wright. I had worked with a member of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundations Board professionally. This gentleman, Gerald Lee Morosco is an architect. He knew my work because he specialized in bungalow. He was serving on the board of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. He came up to me at the arts and crafts period Conference that we go to. There's one major conference. He said, hey, Nawal, would you like to license Frank Lloyd Wright and make tiles? I actually went in what I said to him was, "I think I might have your people call my people." Actually, I said, "I'm a little more interested in doing Louis Sullivan right now, so give me a year and I'll get back with you." Of course, the Louis Sullivan stuff we made, but it doesn't sell like Frank. Anyway, we cut our teeth on licensing with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. Getting a lawyer to look at their 40 page contract, which had all kinds of exciting clauses in it. But we got used to dealing with paying in advance on the royalties and paying additional royalties as we went along. I became comfortable with that with providing artwork for approval and working with the foundation. There were a couple of different times when people introduced me to Charley Harper's artwork. But I think it wasn't until 2013, I got into the Charley Harper license. Because I saw that they were licensing to Pomegranate who publishes calendars and note cards and things like that. I said, there must be a licensing agent somewhere. We went hunting, and we found Todd Oldham, who was a designer. He had just done a book. He was a major fan of Charley Harper. He done a book on Charley Harper, and so we contacted their office. They took a look at our work and our distribution network and picked us.
• [00:24:53] ELIZABETH SMITH: Wow. I was curious about some of the technological advances and how that's changed how you produce tiles and how the tiles themselves look.
• [00:25:02] NAWAL MOTAWI: Good question. The first thing that got better was kilns. In the old days you used to have to go and turn them up, turn up those little wires manually. I have to say, I get really focused on one thing, and I forget to do things. Turn the kiln off in the right time. I was always over firing kilns, basically, letting him get too hot or something. When the automatic shutoffs came along, that helped me a lot. You used to even have to turn them up bit by bit . The first kiln we ever had, it didn't shut itself off, but it turned itself up.
• [00:25:46] AMY CANTU: Wow.
• [00:25:47] NAWAL MOTAWI: You weren't running back and forth all the time to check on it. That was one thing. Another major thing, of course, I went from carbon paper and drawing squares to Adobe Illustrator, which is a vector artwork software tool. It makes the squares. That we're still using it pretty much the same way in a rudimentary way. I'm anxious to see us do more with that. Right now, we still count the pictures of the squares by hand. The computer can do that, but it needs a certain set of parameters, which we haven't dealt with yet. I know that there will be added efficiency to our work, and it does make it, even in Adobe Illustrator, is just much faster to go through iterations of ideas than drawing them out on paper for god's sake. The other thing we do, so when I first started making raised line tiles, the way that we created that raised line is I would take an etching tool and carve into a blank plaster mold. I would transfer the design probably with carbon paper onto the plaster, and then dig it out with a stylus. Now, I make the design in Adobe Illustrator, thereby getting perfect circles and really straight lines, and especially I was one with the French curves. I can get the curves and I can agonize over them, which I do for hours. That gets transferred perfectly onto the tile design. We take our Adobe Illustrator file, send it to a CNC router, and then we actually carve a negative in hard wax. Then to get the master model, we pour urethane into that wax mold. We get a model and then we pour plaster over the model to get a production mold.
• [00:27:49] NAWAL MOTAWI: This is a little tricky. Not everyone understands models and molds and things, but a model is a positive, a mold is a negative.
• [00:27:57] AMY CANTU: That's really interesting. I'm curious as an artist, how much you're seeking out or looking for new ways and new technologies to improve versus holding back and enjoying what it is that your process and trying to hang onto it versus bringing something new into the room.
• [00:28:17] NAWAL MOTAWI: Interesting. You know what? Through the Tile Heritage Foundation and some trade shows, I've been able to learn and see how people do things. People at my size and level make our tile in all different ways. It's not even that it's more advanced. There's different ways to roll out a slab and take a cookie cutter and cut clay. Some companies do it that way. We press it into a shape so we can get the relief that we like. We used to do that all by hand. Now we use a hydraulic press to do that pressing for us. We still have to make all the molds and all that business. But now the machine provides the horse power [LAUGHTER]. We still have to cut the excess clay off and everything. The RAM press of course, the air release press was a major innovation for us and that's why we moved out of the garage. I couldn't fit the RAM press, [LAUGHTER] and the sister machine that it needed in the garage.
• [00:29:19] ELIZABETH SMITH: I was curious about if you had any competition in town. I know that your art tile is pretty niche and specific but are there other ceramics around that you talked to, worked with, competed with?
• [00:29:31] NAWAL MOTAWI: That's a good question. Because I really don't think about competition at all. You may call that hubris. In one way, of course, I came from Pewabic Pottery, and I saw the tile artist there, David Ellison, makes this beautiful, neoclassic work. I love his work. There's a community of local tile makers but I never felt super competitive with them because our work is so different. That if you want what they make mine is not going to make you happy. On the nationwide sense, people ask me now, what's the competition and I say anything that you put on a fireplace or a kitchen backsplash is competition. That's humongous. That's stone, that's wallpaper, that's pictures of tile, that's stickers, all the stuff you buy at Home Depot. I don't worry about that either, because I can't. [LAUGHTER] That makes no sense. In a way I'm competing with too many things to get specific about it and I'm never looking over my shoulder at what someone else is eating my lunch. I just don't feel that way about the business and I never did.
• [00:30:42] AMY CANTU: What are some of the favorite projects that you've worked on? What stands out to you personally?
• [00:30:48] NAWAL MOTAWI: I know what's jumping to mind right this second is a house that I owned in Ann Arbor at 1217 Bending. I bought this house in 2010 or something like that and I tiled it up. But in this it was a mid-century ranch, California style ranch place, might have been a Metcalf or some noted architect's house. Anyway, I did it up in really cool mid-century modern, the back splash in the front hall and a bathroom that's just crazy. That house was featured on the Tile Tour that we did in 2014. I got it all done just in time. I still love that house. There's a tile we called Zelda and the Zelda Fireplace. [LAUGHTER] Might be one of my favorite pieces still. A funny thing about that place is, I bought it, and then I tiled it up and sold it to some nice people and they put it on the market several years later, my mother bought it. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:31:46] AMY CANTU: Did she? [OVERLAPPING]
• [00:31:48] NAWAL MOTAWI: We were trying to get her to move to Ann Arbor from the area where we grew up, so we could be closer to her and she couldn't find anything she liked. Then that came on the market [LAUGHTER]. Isn't that neat?
• [00:32:02] AMY CANTU: That's great. I could see why that's personal to you.
• [00:32:04] NAWAL MOTAWI: Well. [LAUGHTER] It is.
• [00:32:08] ELIZABETH SMITH: Could you tell us a little bit about the Tile Tour that you just mentioned?
• [00:32:11] NAWAL MOTAWI: Oh, my gosh. Yes, it was based on the whole remodelers home tour kind of thing. We just thought it would be cool, just as a big publicity thing, because, of course, there wasn't anybody else involved. It was just us planning it and working with the homeowners, sending cleaning people into all their houses right before and manning all those stations and doing all the publicity. I think in the end we were afraid that it would be overrun so we cut it off at 300 people and it sold out. Then people were automatically assuming that we would have it again next year. They're like, I'll go next year. We said, whoa, [LAUGHTER] That was so much work and we haven't done it since. It's 10 years ago now. [LAUGHTER] It might be something to think about again but it takes so much extra from your staff.
• [00:33:09] ELIZABETH SMITH: What about public art tile? I know a lot of your tile is in personal homes, private homes, but are there any places around town in Ann Arbor that people can see your tile works publicly?
• [00:33:20] NAWAL MOTAWI: There are in Ann Arbor. My favorite public piece, and the first public piece we had is the boy reading mural that's in the Pittsfield branch of the public libraries. It's actually a mistake piece that we made while we were making a bigger one for Disney. We got commissioned to make this project, this child reading this book, and we were working away at it and I hadn't really done anything quite like that. I found myself in a Kinko's one night, enlarging the paper back in those days, and I realized we'd been making the mural too small by about three feet. [LAUGHTER] We gave everybody a t-shirt and lunch for two weeks, I think, and we started over and made that Disney mural. But then we kept this other five foot piece and brought it out during the next recession and glazed it, and then set it up in our studio and waited for a home for it. Then I think it's Susan Walters, I believe, was her name she bought it for the libraries. She asked the Friends if they would accept this donation. We were very proud to get that up. But I think a lot more people see the installations that are in the hospitals. There's a--essentially a quilt on every floor in the main hospital. It's made up of glass tile from a glass tile maker I know and then stock pieces of Motawi just put together into this crazy quilt with a different color and theme on every floor. I know people see that, we hear about it a lot and I'll tell you a funny story. We go on field trips as a company sometimes. I give everyone the day off but they have to come with us, and we go tour our own installations because people working in the kiln room they don't see the finished product. They may never even really see the design. On one of these trips we went to the hospital and there's this whole giant pile of us, walking through the corridor and we round the corner into the elevator lobby in this giant group. There's a woman right there. She's touching a tile, her nose is about two inches away, and she's just having a moment with it. She sees us all come around the corner and scuttles away in an embarrassing fashion. But we were so touched. Can you imagine? It was the sweet little moment.
• [00:35:53] AMY CANTU: The perfect moment. Wow.
• [00:35:56] ELIZABETH SMITH: The company celebrated its 30th anniversary two years ago. What do you envision for the future of the company?
• [00:36:04] NAWAL MOTAWI: Oh, good question. Going forward, I know I don't want to be doing it forever. I've said for years that I would like to be able to choose my involvement with the company as I get older and right now, my choice is to spend much less time. For the last few years, the administrative team, the leadership team, has learned how to manage all these things like how much inventory to carry, how to think about new design, how to look at the sales, how to keep track of the money. We're an open book company. Everyone knows how to watch the money and what things should be looking like, we budget. The truth is the senior team is going to be mostly running the company from now. I'm still around as a guide, and I haven't figured out exactly how succession might work. I'm definitely thinking about an employee owned trust situation wherein they buy it from me. I think there's also the buildings to think about. I'm not quite sure, but I feel very confident that it will go forward, and at this point, at least, I'm still the principal artistic director for the company, and I will continue to do that. But you might not see me there that much because I'm guiding from behind. I'm not even conducting from out front.
• [00:37:36] ELIZABETH SMITH: Was there anything that we missed that you wanted to talk about?
• [00:37:40] NAWAL MOTAWI: There is something I'd love to mention, which is we did something highly unusual for a company, our size that we still do. We actually used Toyota Lean thinking principles. When we first started learning about this, it was in 2003. We had gotten through the 2001 recession, and I felt like we weren't really making enough headway, and my business partner, my brother was still there at the time. He found a book called the Toyota Way. It turns out it was written by Jeffrey Liker, he is a professor at University of Michigan, and he's like, one of the best experts on Toyota thinking and style work in the whole country. We called him up, said, can we talk? Well, Jeff Liker had a graduate student at that moment who posited that you could use Toyota style business practice, which is what they called it then. In a high variability, low volume manufacturing environment. Which is the opposite of a car company, where they're making very high volumes, and the differences between the cars are not much, so they make a lot of the same thing. The trouble that this person ran into, so this was Eduardo Lander. He had run a plant in Venezuela, and he was at the university studying, and he thought you could do this, but he needed case studies in order to prove his point, to have his doctoral thesis. We agreed to be a case study. A much more notable one was Zingerman's mail order, which now there's books and everything about that. But we were also part of Eduardo's dissertation. We learned Toyota style thinking back in 2003. Believe me, it took a while to rethink things. It's not at all common sense. I found it's really learned pattern of thinking, and we employ the same techniques that we started back then. We have a can ban system, which works very well to keep the art tile business basically going. We also engage in continuous improvement and some disciplined problem thinking methodologies, thanks to our learning in the Toyota business practice thinking. There's so much more to learn. We've got some good things going, but we're still at the tip of the iceberg as far as that goes. Yeah.
• [00:40:25] AMY CANTU: Well, that's really interesting.
• [00:40:26] NAWAL MOTAWI: I'm really proud of it. The other thing that I've been interested in, I've been a charter member of the Small Giants Community. Small Giants is the name of a book written by Bo Burlingham, who was a business journalist for Inc and a lot of other places. He's written a whole bunch of books now. The book was about companies who chose to be great instead of big. Our friend Zingermans was one of the poster children, definitely one of the featured companies, and we all know that they've chosen to stay local instead of franchising all over. That really appealed to me, not that I had choices. Although, interestingly, for a while there, we were selling to tile show rooms all over the country. We were sending samples. We were in 125 different stores. I discovered when we started doing Lean thinking that I wasn't making any money. That we were doing a lot of work for very little return, maybe even losing money on that whole side of the business, which was like, half the business at the time. I worked my way out of it completely. I don't sell to any of those places anymore. I don't wholesale our architectural tile. We do wholesale the art tile to museums and gift shops and all that kind of thing. But the project work is all direct or through the trade. We don't sell to a store that just sells tile anymore. Well, I take it back. There's one left. Our very first tile show room is still with us because they love us and we loved them. They had to just take a lower discount. Isn't that funny? There's all these little things that have happened, so I've been in and out of that business, but we've always done commissions directly for homeowners, and we're still doing that. But the point about being great instead of big and really thinking about a human centered enterprise, you have to make a profit. Otherwise, there's nothing. Rule number 1, don't run out of cash. I'm careful to be fiscally stable or paying attention at the very least. Well, I know how much a trained person cost me to create. I think most companies under value a good trained person. I wouldn't trade them in for a cheaper, one of the same. That's crazy. There's so much other knowledge. They're not going to learn everything off an SOP. Then you become a community of people. We offer really good benefits for the kind of little company we are. Vacation and sick and this and that, tile gift certificates and lunch. We're not doing giant stuff like tuition reimbursements and sponsoring soccer matches or anything. But I feel like we're getting longer and longer tenure with our employees, and I'm trying to make a healthy culture where you're not uptight. You're not worrying about the boss looking over your shoulder and saying, hey, don't do that or don't talk to your friend. You can talk for a few minutes. Don't trap them into a 15 minute conversation every time they go by. But you can chat, you get back to work. We have production targets, and everyone knows what they are, and we talk about them every week, and we see how we're doing against them. If we're on target, that's good. If we're beating target, then maybe we'll get a little bigger bit of profit sharing at the end. Let's see, once we get over a certain amount of revenue, there's a base amount, which if we don't make that, sorry, no sharing. But once we make that 10% of all net income, I actually share over 400,000 it is right now. Then as we get higher and higher as we sell 100,000 more and more then I up the percentage. One year the companies, they did so well that everyone got $3,000. Yeah, they were happy. They were sort of sad the next year. It's taken them a while to recover. It's still a good year if you don't get the hugest possible bonus. That way, I get people who want to stay and want to be there, I'm able to share some of that wealth without being silly to myself and without endangering the company in any way.
• [00:45:12] AMY CANTU: It sounds like, like with Zingermans, you were never really at risk of leaving Ann Arbor. [OVERLAPPING].
• [00:45:20] NAWAL MOTAWI: I could have.
• [00:45:21] AMY CANTU: You could have.
• [00:45:22] NAWAL MOTAWI: Ann Arbor could have a mountain and Lake Michigan, and I'd be just so happy. But I'll take the river and Bird Hills Park. Yeah, I like it, but one of the things I want to do is get away a little bit.
• [00:45:40] AMY CANTU: Travel?
• [00:45:41] NAWAL MOTAWI: Yeah. I'm doing more of that these days. Yeah.
• [00:45:46] ELIZABETH SMITH: What are you most proud of?
• [00:45:48] NAWAL MOTAWI: Oh, my goodness. I'm really proud when people stay for a long time. My 20 year people, I've had a few that have been with me that long. I'm proud of the reaction I get when I say, I own Motawi Tileworks, and people say, oh, I love Motawi, which is what they say. They don't say, oh, yeah, I like it. It's kind of cool. They say, I love Motawi. My little heart goes, oh, man. One of the happiest funny little moments was when Natalie Merchant came to town, some years ago, and she called up our place, and I must have talked to her and they said, we're Natalie Merchant's people, and we want to know if you want some tickets to the show. I went around to the staff and said, who's Natalie Merchant? They all said, get the tickets. We went to the show, and while we were there, she gave us a little shout out. All my people were sitting out in a row, and they were so happy, and I felt like just some giant mother hen because they were all so jazzed. That kind of stuff makes me happy. [MUSIC]
• [00:47:09] ELIZABETH SMITH: AADL Talks To is a production of the Ann Arbor District Library.