2000 Fantastic 50

Fantastic 50 - Manufacturing Winner
Small Private Companies on the Vanguard of Growth
Complete listing of the 2000 Fantastic 50

Mosaics for the rich and famous

By Sally Kirby Hartman
In 1991, Sara Baldwin was a single parent who needed a job. She had a new master’s degree in fine art from the University of Pennsylvania but lacked a way to support herself and her 1-year-old son, Michael. Her answer came when a friend mentioned that one of Baldwin’s tile mosaics — an art form she’d taught to herself — would make a nice kitchen backsplash. It was an intriguing idea for Baldwin, who was already fascinated with mosaics. "I wondered why no one made them in the United States."

Sara Baldwin, right, and husband,
Eyre, lead a 60-employee company
on the Eastern Shore.
Photo by Mark Rhodes

That was the genesis of New Ravenna, a tile mosaic company that Baldwin formed in Exmore on the Eastern Shore, where she grew up. The company’s revenues grew 72 percent over four years, the highest among manufacturers in the Fantastic 50.

New Ravenna sells its artwork around the country, mainly through a key distributor called Waterworks, an interior design company with 22 showrooms in places like Hollywood, Palm Beach, Fla., and New York City. New Ravenna’s clients are often wealthy and sometimes well-known. It has done work for actors Tom Hanks and James Earl Jones and for singer Vanessa Williams. With prices per square foot ranging from $25 to $500, the mosaics can be expensive. The price tag for a custom-designed shower for a client on Long Island, for example, totaled more than $200,000.

Baldwin, 34, started her business on the Eastern Shore for a simple reason — she was broke. "After graduation, I talked my parents into supporting me and my son for a year while I developed this idea," she says. They let her live rent-free in her grandmother’s house, helped care for her son and lent her $5,000 to start her company. She named it New Ravenna after Ravenna, Italy, which is renowned for its mosaics. To promote her business, "I put my baby on one hip and boxes of mosaics on the others and went to trade shows and to see tile distributors," Baldwin says. In her first year, she tallied $40,000 in revenue and was able to pay back her parents.

New Ravenna has done more than give Baldwin a creative way to support her family. It also provides more than 60 jobs in one of Virginia’s most economically depressed regions. At its location in a former shirt factory, it employs more than 60 people, and Baldwin hopes to expand to 75 employees this summer and double her revenues within two years. The company is launching a new line of mosaic-topped garden furniture it will distribute through furniture boutiques and custom designers.

These days Baldwin concentrates on mosaic design while raising her 10-year-old son and infant daughter, Grace, who was born in September. A professional manager oversees the business while Baldwin’s husband, Eyre, 38, is director of sales. "A lot of entrepreneurs have a hard time letting go" of the business side, she says. "But I’ve been ready to do that for a long time."

Baldwin and her husband are living a good life. The family lives on a 900-acre farm that has been in her husband’s family for 12 generations. And Baldwin enjoys the mix of creativity and travel that her company provides. "I have the best of all worlds," she says.