A Chat With November’s Profile, Mark Desrochers, co-founder/marketing director, Classic Designs by Matthew Burak (Text & Audio)

Catalog Success: Where’s your company headquartered?
Mark Desrochers: St. Johnsbury, Vermont.

CS: When was the company established? Was this also the same time it began mailing catalogs?
MD: We don’t look back too much, so we’re actually pretty weak at recalling some of these dates. Matt [Burak] was a furniture maker, and he had a long and successful run as a furniture maker. We incubated this table leg business for a few years inside of his furniture business. We split it out in December of 1999. It’s more realistic to say the idea was … we wrote the business plan in ’95. December of ’99 was when we incorporated the business.