Today we’d like to introduce you to Monique Caulfield.
Hi Monique, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I was born and raised in San Diego. From the age of nine, I grew up with my dad and brother. I grew up going on a lot of adventures. My dad and I would spend weekends fishing, hunting for treasure with metal detectors, and camping. I was a passionate soccer player and loved archery, bone carving, surfing, and bungee jumping. In other words, looking back it isn’t totally shocking that I find myself owning an axe-throwing bar restaurant.
My mom lived in Los Angeles, and I would come to LA for the summer and holidays. She had a bookstore in Santa Monica called Mandala Books that was a community hub for people of varying religious traditions, ethnicities, and passions ranging from healing to metaphysics to political discourse, psychology, rebirthing, and alien abduction. You name it and her store welcomed, inspired, and gave community to people with a huge range of interests. Time working in the store opened my eyes to the world and to the incredible variety of people and beliefs that were all rolled up into this one great city.
I fell in love with LA and discovered its neighborhoods through one of my main passions, great food. My mom and I would spend weekends exploring and trying food from all over the world. Koreatown was one of our favorite spots. Especially the old Woo Lae Oak location at Western and Wilshire, a regular haunt, which was just a half block from where Mo’s House of Axe is now.
My father died when I was 17, which was devastating for me. Soon after that, my mom’s store had to close. I was adrift and a bit lost at the time. I sold my car and just about everything else I had and took off for two years backpacking around the world. At some point, I knew it was time to go home, face my grief and find my way in the world. I always had an instinct for business and took inspiration from my time in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific to come up with an idea for a new venture. At the age of 19, I founded my first business, Pacific Sensuals, a manufacturing and marketing firm dedicated to socially and environmentally sustainable products. Pacific Sensuals worked with cooperatives in South America and the South Pacific, producing aromatherapy and herbal products. I started with $5,000 in seed money and a credit card, my then-boyfriend and now amazing husband Danny Baron let me run the balance up on, and with a lot of hard work, we established distribution in nine countries, manufacturing facilities on three continents and were able to help fund the growth of clinics, schools and community programs tied to the people we worked with. We eventually sold the business which is a story in itself.
After moving on from Pacific Sensuals, I decided to build in a different way and in 2000, co-founded Baron Building and Design West with my brother-in-law Jeff and husband Danny. We were a property development company focused on green building, and I ran the group’s acquisitions and operations for five years. I loved running crews and collaborating on the design. That period informed what would come next.
My husband Danny is a writer and director, and he had a script he was passionate about. I decided I would apply my skills as an entrepreneur to getting his project made and started learning to produce which eventually culminated in a big adventure with over a year on the ground in India making the musical comedy Basmati Blues starring Brie Larson, Donald Sutherland, and Utkarsh Ambudkar.
Coming off of that experience I was planning to take a break between film projects, but everything changed when I discovered axe throwing in 2018. From the first night out hitting the bullseye, I was hooked, not just on the game, but the culture and positive energy that surrounds it. It felt like everything I loved rolled into one – It was adventurous, empowering, had team spirit, a playful element with the illusion of danger but in a controlled way (think archery), and it’s just plain old kick-ass fun. I immediately dove into creating Mo’s House of Axe along with my family. I knew from the start we would do something different by drawing on West Coast roots. We set out to create a unique, luxury axe-throwing concept in the heart of LA that would have wide welcoming arms, be a little bit rock and roll, and have an atmosphere that would transport people out of the bustle of the city into a party in the woods. We launched in 2020 with 20 lanes of axe throwing, a full bar, and a restaurant with a delicious menu. It was a huge success out of the gate. We were sold out nearly every night and working nonstop to hold this tiger by the tale.
Unfortunately, there was one little hitch, our doors opened in February of 2020 only five weeks before Covid hit. We would quickly find ourselves closed for a year and a half and fighting to save the business. In the end, along with my incredible husband Danny and our great partners, we were able to navigate the challenge and Mo’s reopened in July of 2021. It’s been a roller coaster ride for everyone in hospitality and experiential entertainment since covid and we’re no exception. But over the past year and a half, we have built up momentum, an incredible team of over 60 amazing staff members and the Mo’s community. We’re just about to launch our new axe leagues in June, have a killer new brunch and there are many other adventures to come.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
I think my previous answer gives a sense for some of the challenges. Just in terms of Mo’s House of Axe of course covid closures were a massive blow we are still navigating. Coming out of covid into the tightest labor market since World War II and almost immediately being hit by the Delta wave, then slowly gaining momentum again only to be shut down along with massive holiday party cancellations in December with Omicron and then 2022 found us facing brutal cost increases spiking expenses 30% on up to 400% on core supplies thanks to supply chain issues and inflation. Add to that pressure on consumers thanks to gas prices and their own costs going up it’s been challenging to say the least. But by Fall 2022 we have found corporate clients coming back for team building, holiday parties, film premieres, and customers in the 40-plus range and families coming back again. It’s starting to feel like we can hit our stride and make Mo’s all that it can be.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about Mo’s House of Axe?
We are a luxury axe-throwing bar and restaurant that is all about infectious energy and fun. There are a number of axe places around the country, but I think we are different in a number of ways. We approach the axes as an element in a full-service, entertaining night out. This is no batting cage – we have a gorgeous playful interior and we’re not serving pizza and beer – we have everything from venison rack and cowboy steak to burgers and fries and mac ‘n cheese. We have a DJ on the weekends. And I think the most special thing we have is a great coaching staff who are great teachers and leaders of fun. We spent a lot of time figuring out what we thought was the perfect place to get together with friends and family and that’s what we made.
We are about community, welcoming everyone and overdelivering. One of my favorite things is teaching someone to throw that doesn’t think they are an athlete or are filled with negative self-talk coming in. Watching them land an axe, cheering, and walking taller makes my day and our coach’s day. It’s about fun and it’s about empowerment. We’ve taught such a broad spectrum of people and that is deeply satisfying. More than half of our customers are women and yes, we have strong guys in flannels but also everyone from 8-year-old grandkids playing alongside their 87-year-old grandmother to people in wheelchairs and we’ve even coached two blind throwers, they all landed axes and left Mo’s official axe throwers!
There are also many levels of care and intention around the space I wish every customer knew about. As environmentalists, we have tried to create a space that reflects what we value. For example, we invested heavily in developing specialized targets that took two years of research and development to create. These end-grain axe targets use 1/30th of the wood of normal axe targets. We now have a fraction of the wood waste. For the decor, we lined our walls with real Western Red Cedar and to avoid unnecessary logging, we brought in trees from a fire road project up in Idaho that had to be cut for fire safety. Our taxidermy is conservation kill taxidermy done through the state of California when animals are culled due to environmental impact. There are other things like that around the place but hopefully, that gives the idea of where we are coming from. The customers may not know about it but we know and it informs the energy of the place.
We’d love to hear about how you think about risk taking?
I wrote earlier about my path through life which has always been a winding one. Nothing went as I originally planned and frankly, it has always felt like a jazz riff rather than a song with sheet music. For example, my original life plan was to follow in my father’s footsteps to become a doctor. At 17, I had been accepted into an accelerated medical program at UC Boulder and though my path was clear and laid out for me. Then my father died and my college tuition evaporated in the aftermath. I gear shifted, moved into the back of my mom’s bookstore, and started taking courses at the more affordable Santa Monica College. But soon after I remember clearly being in a gross anatomy class working on a cadaver and thinking “This is not my path this is dad’s life not mine.” I realized that day I had to step back to find myself. Not long after that, the Northridge earthquake hit devastating my mom’s bookstore. I was actually sleeping in the back of the store when it hit and the brick building and piles of books collapsed around me with a wooden table being my savior. It was the terror and displacement of that experience that lead me to sell what I had and to travel the world for those two years which profoundly changed my life.
I truly believe that everything is a risk. We’re in these bodies and there is no way to know what is coming or when so it is all about who you are on the journey with and if it lights up your heart. Going out and trying to launch a business of course, carries risks but taking a desk job as a compromise to be safe is far riskier for me. Playing it safe doesn’t mean things will work out. You can fail not following your dreams so I can’t imagine not just going for it and I am surrounded by the best people which makes it all work.
Pricing:
- $35 for 75 minutes for a session with a coach teaching you safety, technique and games
Contact Info:
- Website: www.moshouseofaxe.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/moshouseofaxe/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MosHouseOfAxe/?ref=py_c
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/moshouseofaxe
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCC_3EaffuF6_VoJULKUk4_A
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/mo-s-house-of-axe-los-angeles
