Company: Castique, Inc., of Warwick
Owner: Marion Manning-Lovett
Number of employees: Three full-time, numerous part-time
Type of business: Manufacturer of stone statues
Year founded: 1995
1998 Sales: about $1 million
If you’re subject to barrages of mail-order catalogs or have even slight
Martha Stewart tendencies, there’s a good chance you know the work of
Marion Manning-Lovett. You just don’t know the woman.
The East Greenwich resident with a flair for art and a mind for business
is one of the state’s quiet success stories. Her wholesale operation
occupying about 7,000 square feet of Warwick’s Pontiac Mills is
responsible for a significant share of the stone Buddhas, Venus de
Milos, angels, farm animals, gargoyles, and forest creatures that have
largely replaced plastic planters and pink flamingoes on lawns and in
gardens across America. Her most recognizable creation by far – a
chuckling pig – has been moving to Gardener’s Supply at about 700 pieces
a week, according to Manning-Lovett. A grinning cat, a pair of kissing
frogs and an art-deco vase depicting a goddess and a calla lilly are
becoming fast favorites, she said.
Manning-Lovett considers her business an accident, despite having
succeeded at two previous ones with her husband, Merrill Lovett. The
woman who ran a temporary employment agency and owns a thriving taxi
business had no experience casting objects in cement and gypsum before
1994. Last year, she racked up about $1 million in gross sales doing
just that.
“I think it will double this year,” Manning-Lovett said. “I hope so.”
“This was a hobby,” Manning-Lovett said, recalling how she nearly
destroyed her kitchen teaching herself the mold making and casting. It
wasn’t until she took some of her creations to a gift show in Boston and
returned with $8,000 worth of orders that she considered turning her
latest avocation into a job.
Even then “people told me it couldn’t be done,” Manning-Lovett said,
adding that the friendly warnings only spurred her on.
Four years later, Manning-Lovett has three full-time employees –
including a daughter and son-in-law – and numerous contractors working a
day and night shift. Her pieces created for indoor and outdoor use
appear regularly in about 80 home and garden catalogs, including Gump’s,
Art & Artifact and Ballards, to name a few. They’ve also popped up in
foreign countries, including Iran, Japan and China. In this country, the
statues retail for between about $6 to $300, Manning-Lovett said.
Designs that are public domain (Michelangelo’s David, Queen Nefertiti,
among others) are fair game at Castique. Others spring from Manning-
Lovetts’ imagination, or those of her workers. When a local artist
pitches a design, Manning-Lovett prefers to buy it outright, rather than
pay the creator in royalties.
Manning-Lovett’s experience running two service businesses gave her a
leg up on customer relations. But life as a manufacturer came with
unique challenges. To learn the ropes, Manning-Lovett said she relied
heavily on the Rhode Island Manufacturing Extension Services (RIMES) and
the Central Rhode Island Development Corporation (CRIDC).
The consultants “sat with us as though we were children and told us how
to do it, which is important,” Manning-Lovett said.
George de Tarnowsky , CRIDC growth team director, said Manning-Lovett is
“typical of people who come out of an art background.
“She’s actually been very good at marketing,” he said. “The thing she
needed to straighten out was her production system and she still had
some problems in terms of maintaining cash flow.”
Today, Castique is “moving along nicely,” he said.
Moving into the future, Manning-Lovett will have to maintain a constant
flow of new and innovative designs, de Tarnowsky said, adding that Asian
companies have been known to copy the old ones for manufacturing abroad.
In that way, de Tarnowsky compared the business to the jewelry industry.
“The ones that survive are able to come up with their new designs a
month ahead of the market, so to speak.”
Soon, Manning-Lovett hopes to extend her line to include decorative
hardware, such as copper-coated knobs for kitchen cabinets.
“For some reason I feel like it’s going to develop into a bigger
business,” she said.
