Kaplan, Ziccardi Create Artisan Group
December 10, 2001
New York - Burt Kaplan and Susan Ziccardi have established Artisan Group, LLC, a textile marketing services group.
"Call us a converter if you want," Kaplan said. "Building a brand and building customer confidence in that brand is what Unisource is all about. We plan to offer consistency, quality and product integrity. We will try to create a super source of product created by us to meet today's needs, not yesterday's.
"You have to be creative and think outside of the box. The textiles industry won't go back to the way it was."
Prior to this venture, Kaplan was the president of Cone Decorative Fabrics and Ziccardi was the design director. Kaplan was a vice president of Richloom Fabrics Group prior to joining Cone one year ago. In August, Richloom purchased certain assets of Cone Decorative Fabrics, specifically the converting business of John Wolf Fabrics for $9 million.
"Working at Cone was the best year of my life," Kaplan said. "I had to take a money-losing operation and turn it around. I'm proud of the fact that Cone was able to get Richloom to buy it."
Cone lost almost $5 million on the converting business this year on fabric converting sales of an estimated $35 million.
"Call us a converter if you want," Kaplan said. "Building a brand and building customer confidence in that brand is what Unisource is all about. We plan to offer consistency, quality and product integrity. We will try to create a super source of product created by us to meet today's needs, not yesterday's.
"You have to be creative and think outside of the box. The textiles industry won't go back to the way it was."
Prior to this venture, Kaplan was the president of Cone Decorative Fabrics and Ziccardi was the design director. Kaplan was a vice president of Richloom Fabrics Group prior to joining Cone one year ago. In August, Richloom purchased certain assets of Cone Decorative Fabrics, specifically the converting business of John Wolf Fabrics for $9 million.
"Working at Cone was the best year of my life," Kaplan said. "I had to take a money-losing operation and turn it around. I'm proud of the fact that Cone was able to get Richloom to buy it."
Cone lost almost $5 million on the converting business this year on fabric converting sales of an estimated $35 million.