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

Of course during the early period there was no Web, or very limited. And now you look at where we are and what’s important is the Web. Where we’re leveraged nicely is the product and the exclusivity. We know that it’s difficult to find prospects. The cost of the catalog, with paper going up as much as it has, postage going up, your prospecting comes down. The big if is can you replace all of that or more of it with names generated through the Web. If you sell a commodity, let’s say books, it’s much more difficult to compete on the Web. Or if you just sell, let’s say carpets, it’s difficult because you have all these people competing with you. If you look at truly how Toscano started back in niche marketing, in the back of magazines, you were selling niches. Helen [Ballard] was selling a table, I think the dolphin table originally. Steve Leveen was selling a pen. It was a niche that you were marketing to. As long as that niche is big enough, and you have multiple niches, I think the prospects for the Web in search is pretty amazing.