A glow from Christmas past - Christopher Radko's Christmas ornament business - Company Profile

Nation's Business, Dec, 1994 by Janet L. Willen

To hear Christopher Radko tell how he founded the Christmas-ornament company that bears his name, in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., is to hear a Christmas story. It begins in 1983, when he was a 22-year-old aspiring talent agent.

"I bought a new tree stand because I was tired of cleaning out the old rusted stand that we had for 50 years," Radko says. Although the new stand was guaranteed to hold a much larger tree, Radko's 14-footer crashed to the floor of his parents' Scarsdale, N.Y., home a week before Christmas, smashing almost all of the nearly 2,000 ornaments on the tree. There were balls depicting Christmas scenes, figurines with faces like Dresden dolls, a garland of train cars, and lights. Most of the decorations were handblown and hand-painted Polish, German, Czech, and Italian glass pieces that had been in the family for as many as four generations.

He looked for replacements, but "nobody had good old-fashioned ornaments," he says. "Everything was very poorly made without any attention to detail--flimsy glass. And most of it was artificial materials, plastic this and plastic that, Styrofoam. There's no magic in decorations like that."

He tried to find ornaments in Poland while visiting a cousin the following spring, but the country was under martial law, and research was nearly impossible. Then, by chance, Radko spotted handblown glass beakers and vials in the window of a pharmacy. The owner led him to a small glassblowing factory. Radko sketched the pieces he wanted and had workers make them for him.

Back in New York, his friends wanted to buy the items, and he says, "A light bulb went off in my head: Maybe I can supplement my very modest income with another modest income, selling Christmas ornaments." He was working in the mail room of a New York City talent agency and earning about $12,000 a year.

Through his cousin, Radko commissioned two dozen more ornaments, which he sold immediately. Another light bulb went off: "If friends would buy, then maybe I could sell to stores." He called government offices to learn about importing and wholesaling. He visited upscale specialty stores, gift stores, museum stores, and department stores in New York, and he contacted retailers in other major cities by mail. "I would just kind of brazenly go in there and say, 'Look at these things,' and they would actually say, 'OK, we'll buy some.'"

Radko continued working at the talent agency full time, using his lunch hour for sales calls and his vacations for shipping. He financed his business through credit cards and loans from family members. He had $20,000 in sales his first year--1986--and over $100,000 the following year; he left the talent agency in 1987.

He now has a 21,000-square-foot warehouse in Dobbs Ferry and works with factories in the Czech Republic, Italy, and Germany as well as in Poland, his mainstay. The original Polish factory has grown from four employees to 150.

Radko started publishing a catalog about six years ago; the 1994 edition lists 545 items, an 18 percent increase from 1993. Radko creates new designs each year as well as new colorations of old designs. The ornaments range from traditional balls, finials, and garlands decorated with snowflakes, Santas, and angels, to whimsical items like pineapple slices and a ball with Teddy Roosevelt's image. The only ornaments he doesn't design are those from Germany, which are made from molds that were carved and duplicated from about 1870 to the 1930s.

Each ornament takes about a week to make. Balls can cost from $63 to more than $100 wholesale for a box of six, or $20 to $30 apiece retail. Radko says his revenues are in the "very comfortable seven figures." He employs 12 people full time in Dobbs Ferry and has 75 sales representatives around the country.

Radko's Christmas story isn't about decorations only. The gross margin from two of his ornaments--$90,000 last year--goes to charities helping to fight AIDS and pediatric cancer. He also pays all expenses for an American teacher spending two years instructing children in a Polish orphanage. "Christmas," he says, "is about sharing, giving, remembering."