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

Topping notes that the company’s had to migrate away from certain vendors “because they couldn’t handle the handcrafted volume we were giving them.”

For Alpert and her companies, handling such matters with myriad artisan vendors is a far cry from how she launched the business. In the beginning, she and her husband Bruce were on a quest to find a good chef’s knife. “We would go looking on the weekends,” she recalls, “and when we were done, I knew more about knives than anyone.”