Meanwhile, McWhorter, while attending Wake Forest University, took a job in Winston-Salem with current business partner Andy Turner at his amp repair shop.
#MOJOTONE STUDIO ONE PATCH#
The company began as Mojo Musical Supply - catalog sales company out of Petaluma, California, but hit a rough patch in the late 1990s and was looking to sell.
The road to Burgaw was an interesting one for Mojotone. We’ll do all kinds of custom stuff - specific dimensions, colors.” Some companies will do two to three at a time, other guys will do 400 to 500 a month. The shop across the street mainly does all of our stock cabinets… so the tweed stuff, the blackface stuff, Marshall stuff. We build cabinets for over 100 different amp companies. One across the street and this one in this building does most of our OEM stuff. “We do faceplates for a bunch of different amp companies, logos for companies, pedal parts. “We do the circuit boards and faceplates for all of our kit amps,” says McWhorter. The current Mojotone main building houses much of manufacturing and shipping, while the smaller units across the street house a second wood shop and laser CNC machines.
Just looking at a single speaker cabinet, there is a company that makes the handle hardware, another that makes the leather handle, the coverings, the copperhead screws, the feet, corners - all of the additional hardware. Mojotone has over one thousand suppliers and over 5,000 SKUs. You can see, we’re pretty packed in here.” So we’ll be able to go high with everything. It has 30-foot ceilings, where these are 14. We’ll be able to fit all three building inside. “We’re moving to a 40,000 square foot building that is just right down the road. “This building is 25,000 square feet and we have two 5,000 square feet building across the street,” explains Mike McWhorter, chief executive officer of Mojotone. It was a shell building that the county built to attract business. The company was relocating to a new facility about a mile and a half away. Boxes lined a few of the main building corridors and inventory was being palleted, wrapped and readied. But there was something different happening as well. The crew of 50-plus staff at the Burgaw, North Carolina facility was fulfilling orders, milling cabinets, wiring pickups - all the things they would be doing any other workday. ON THE DAY of our visit, the headquarters of leading music equipment manufacturer and supplier Mojotone was abuzz with the normal activity on a Wednesday morning.