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

So if you take our categories, you can look through the catalog, how searchable are they, how competitive are they and do you have a good position in it? And if you look at our products, we’re sitting very nicely on it. I’m just going to open our catalog … animals. Nobody sells more garden or home statues of animals. It’s one of our best searches and one of our best products. If you’re looking for classic animals — statuary or gifts for the garden, home or even furniture — we’re very strong there. If you’re looking at garden and different types of garden, I mean garden has classic, religious, we own it. We’re looking at having more initiatives in Christian statues, Catholic statues. We have so much and the breadth of that, so we should search out well and price out well. So if somebody wants to compete with me selling Madonna’s for the garden, we should win that category. It’s not a huge category, but it’s big enough. Fountains, a little more competitive, but if they come to the Web site we should do quite well because people come to Toscano for statuary and gardens. For historical furniture, we don’t sell something that you find in IKEA, there has to be a reason why it works. It’s either heavily carved, it’s based on history or it has a novelty component, be it a book table or an animal resin table base. You look at those components. An area we’re good at, but it won’t be good as well for the search, is wall art. We sell canvas transfer, which are really higher end of prints under glass. But that’s much more competitive. That’s going to do well for us, but it’s not going to do great because there’s so much competition. You look for Egyptian as an example, which is a very strong category. We have so many Egyptian products, be it gift, furniture. So if someone types in Egyptian and they’re looking for Egyptian statues or museum statues, we’re going to come to the top. Medieval, medieval being suits of armor or historical furniture, goblets, swords, etc. Same thing. There are people that are out there, but nobody has the size that we do and the buying channels that we do for those components. Just walking through the pages … you have fairies for the garden and collectibles. If someone types in that they’re looking for a garden fairy, looking for a garden gift of a fairy or looking for a fairy that hangs on the wall, we have that. Nude statues. We sell a lot of classic Greek and Roman statues, both male and female. A lot of people avoid it, we don’t. So if you’re looking for nude statues, classic art, we’re going to rise to the top. Angels are very strong, both for collectibles and the garden. Stained glass, a little more competitive, so if someone’s searching for stained glass we still should do well given our size and breadth and our contacts and our margin, but you’re going to have a little more price comparison you have to be worried about. I’m giving the components that we’re into.