How a sharpened focus on the market let Terri Alpert carve out new niches for her two catalog businesses, Uno Alla Volta and Cooking Enthusiast

By Mark Del Franco

Alpert asked the French manufacturer if it could produce these with U.S. versions of the electrical parts. “They assured me that they could and that they had experience doing so,” she recalls. “I needed to prepay for the samples, but when they arrived, they were a total disaster: electrical fixtures were not UL approved; the cord which had been a subtle clear was an ugly black; and the lampshade didn’t even fit on this alternative light bulb socket. After all this expense, I didn’t even have something I could legally sell in our outlet store.”