Early last week, when furniture maker Martin Goebel talked to SLM, President Donald Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs had not yet been paused. There was a 49 percent tariff on Cambodia, a 46 percent tariff on Vietnam. The stock market had tanked. Goebel, whose Goebel & Company has sold furniture to everyone from Nike to the chieftainess of an African tribe to Grace Meat + Three, was not happy—but the reason behind his discontent might not be what you’d expect.
Goebel explained that Goebel & Company had been designed exactly for this moment. Raw Missouri wood comes into his shop in the Near North Riverfront neighborhood. High quality, bespoke furniture comes out. “I have no subcontractors. It’s raw material in, finished product out the door. I don’t have a bunch of components that come out of Mexico or Canada or Vietnam. It’s vertically integrated,” he said. It’s the kind of made-in-America company that seldom exists anymore, but which Trump seems determined to favor.
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There’s just one problem.
For the past four years, Goebel’s time, attention, and money have been tied up battling two foes: the rainwater seeping into his North City shop, and the insurance company refusing to fund repairs to the roof.
“I built a company for literally 14 years, to get to this moment,” he says. “[But] my company is now put in jeopardy simply because an unscrupulous insurance company doesn’t want to validate a claim that is fully within the scope of my coverage.”
Goebel has been engaged in a protracted legal battle with Cincinnati Insurance Company since January 2022. His attorney, Thomas SanFilippo, calls the insurer’s actions “unconscionable and criminal.”
Goebel, 43, is a St. Louis native, a graduate of the University of Missouri–St. Louis and the Rhode Island School of Design. He got into woodworking via his high school shop class and for a time operated out of his grandparents’ garage in Frontenac before opening a showroom in Maplewood in 2017. His work can be found locally at high-end restaurants Nixta, Vicia, and Brennan’s, among others. He’s sold to Bayer, Bunge and WashU. He says his ethos is to make both the desk for the billionaire CEO and the dinner table for the mom whose five kids are going to put it through hell.
In September 2019, Goebel moved his operation north to a 15,000-square-foot one-story building on Wither Avenue in the Near North Riverfront. The building was constructed in 1919 and had housed a number of concerns in its century of life: a beverage distributor, an envelope company, an engine repairer.
A year and a half after the move, in March 2021, a storm hit the building, peeling back a portion of its roof. Rainwater leaked in, never good for anyone but particularly perilous when the water is dripping on woodworking machinery that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. “The roof has now degraded so badly that you’ll see the sagging in some areas of the point where it’s going to come in one morning,” Goebel says. He jerry-rigged a drainage system to get water off the roof using pool pumps, a horse trough and many, many barrels. “I have to pump that directly on the street, because the barrels were becoming so full,” he says.
In a lawsuit Goebel filed more than three years ago against Cincinnati Insurance, the furniture maker says he says an adjuster came out, looked at the damage and after 15 minutes of looking at the roof, offered Goebel $100,000—-well below the estimates Goebel’s gotten to actually do the repairs.
“We were carrying a $1 million policy on the building itself, another $300,000 on the contents. So to be threatened by an adjuster to take $100,000 or you get nothing?” Goebel asks, incredulous.
None of the three attorneys representing the insurance company responded to an email requesting comment. However, court filings and depositions suggest that the insurance company is claiming skepticism in regards to how the roof became damaged. At one point in a deposition, an attorney for the company asked Goebel if he actually saw hail damaging the roof.
Goebel responded: “I was not outside watching hail hit my roof, no.”
In July 2023, a series of severe storms further battered his workspace. One tempest tore trees out of Bellefontaine Cemetery and collapsed a wall on the building next door to Goebel’s space. His roof was damaged further. More water rushed in.
“It’s one thing that now we have the damage, and that’s to the infrastructure of the building, but what has now been incrementally ratcheting up is the death by a thousand cuts,” he says.
Goebel or a member of his small crew secure every piece of machinery with a tarp at the end of the day, whether it’s supposed to rain or not, and they untarp every machine every morning. “You don’t know when it’s going to rain,” he says. He says there have been days when a microburst storm, not on any Doppler radar, will drop three-quarters of an inch of water in 20 minutes. Goebel says in those situations he has to run around “like crazy” putting out barrels to collect water and tarping machinery to protect it. The last thing he can think about is making furniture.
“We can come in on any given day, we can have a project 99 percent finished, and water can come in and, boom, it’s gone. And that has happened.”
Marc Bowers, the executive director of STL Makes, a nonprofit trade group that advocates for small and medium-sized manufacturers, says a standoff with an insurance company hits an operation like Goebel’s especially hard.
“When that hits small business, it comes out of Martin’s ability to sell more product. That is a direct math equation I can work backwards and tell you exactly how many people are not employed because of what [Goebel] had to do to compensate for someone who thought, ‘Oh, screw them. They don’t have enough employees to be a threat,’” Bowers says.
Goebel says he’s directly feeling the cash crunch from not being able to pound pavement and make sales two years ago.
“There wasn’t enough budget to go to my contacts in New York, L.A. I joked for years, I’m a 1950s vacuum cleaner salesman. I knock on doors. You don’t knock on doors, there’s no sale,” he says.
His attorney SanFilippo thinks, in a perfect world, Cincinnati Insurance ought to be held criminally liable for this. The Missouri Merchandising Act bans the sale of goods or services based on false pretense, false promise or deception. The insurance business, however, is exempt.
About that exemption, SanFilippo has this to say: “Thank Jefferson City.”
And so the case remains pending in civil court, where it’s expected to go to trial this summer. In the meantime, not long after Goebel spoke to SLM last week, Trump paused most of his “liberation day” tariffs.
However, there is still much on the table that would benefit a purely domestic operation like Goebel’s. A big tariff on China was left in place, as was a 10 percent universal, baseline tariff on most countries trading with the U.S. Those levies are minor only in comparison to what Trump had announced a few days prior. It should be good times for Goebel’s company.
“The damages I’ve incurred in the last four and a half years are one thing,” Goebel says. “It’s a totally new ballgame now.”
