Customized Brass Hardware Maker

(Post: English)
"By now, Scott Baxter could be comfortably retired even though he's just 46. In 1991, Baxter formed Icon CMT, a company that provided Internet infrastructure to Wall Street and which he took public and then sold to Qwest Communications ."

He went on to co-found Hawk Holdings and sell its search engine to Ask.com.

But after building a house in Bergen County, N.J., he was unimpressed by his choices for doorknobs and decided to create yet another company.

Using $3 million of his own money in 2006, he built a foundry in Chester, N.Y., to make customized brass hardware for doors, cabinets, and windows from wax casts, a method invented by the Egyptians thousands of years ago.

Today the company, SA Baxter, has 27 full-time employees and a showroom in Manhattan that sells to designers such as Frank Delledonne and Robert Stern.

Wax-casting is time-consuming, and Baxter's products are therefore expensive, with knobs selling for $150 to $600 apiece.

SA Baxter lost money in 2008. Despite the collapse of high-end home building, though, Baxter says sales quadrupled last year, and he expects to be profitable in 2009.

Source: BusinessWeek