A Chat With February’s Profile, Mike Stopka, President/Owner of Design Toscano

Well it came to 1990 and I had a friend in the Chicago-area who was in the statuary business from Italy. And they had all these statues that they brought over, over 100 years ago. Be it Venus de Milo, pure garden and home statuary, etc. I asked Fabio, the owner, ‘Can I take your wholesale catalog and re-cover it and market your products?’ That was just at the point I’d finished graduate school so I was looking for, for a better term, a hobby. What I did was take their catalog, literally in the kitchen, rip off the cover, put a new cover on it, put a price sheet in and we’d advertise in the back of magazines. So in 1990 we advertised, like a lot of catalogers, I think Helen Ballard started the same way and Steve Leveen did the same thing, in the back of these publications. A multistep process. Now remember getting the first label back, because you had catalog sections and mailing it out. At this point, in it for four years, I still was doing my, for lack of a better term, my day-job, my real job, and in the evening we’d do the business logistics. We hired a local art gallery to be the phone center. Everything was drop-shipped from the statuary company. So for three years we used their media, with some flyers we developed, and grew the business through space advertising. Then we got up to about $4 million in sales and I told my wife, ‘It’s probably time for me to quit my other job and really run Toscano as a full-time enterprise.’