Prairie perseverance

By Lisa Casinger -- Home Accents Today, 2/1/2006

Designer

Barbara Cosgrove

Barbara Cosgrove always has been an artist. The description has followed the 56-year-old Oklahoma native since kindergarten. Her resume is full of degrees — undergraduates in ceramics, commercial art and fashion illustration from the University of Kansas and the Kansas City Art Institute and a master's in sculpture from San Jose State.

"Finding buyers is your life as an artist," Cosgrove said, a part of the business she doesn't relish. She calls herself "the world's worst salesperson" and she's not prone to tooting her own horn.

Cosgrove launched Barbara Cosgrove Lamps about 10 years ago in her Kansas City, Mo., garage after attending the High Point market with a friend and seeing all the creative possibilities. She soon realized "lamps were like little sculptures" and were something she could design and sell.

In the beginning, the line had more clay pieces, but as Cosgrove added metal designs, clay fell by the wayside. Today Barbara Cosgrove Lamps has six employees and the line includes about 100 to 150 lamps as well as some wall decor, decorative accessories and accent furniture.

Cosgrove's designs garner national attention. Her lamps have been used on Martha Stewart The Apprentice and on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. Her personal favorite, a mahogany wood twist with silver, goes through up and down selling cycles but it's a mainstay in the line.

"I love this lamp because my mother, my daughter and I can have it in our homes and it looks different in each one because of our shade choices," Cosgrove said. "It's the epitome of an elegant lamp."

"I draw; I'm a paper and pencil kind of gal," Cosgrove said. "I just work on it. A professor once said they're works of art not inspirations of art. Being a creative person means working hard. I was lucky enough to work with world-class ceramists who beat the idea into you that the ultimate compliment was someone taking your work home and living with it."

Sometimes after sketching a design Cosgrove cuts it out of cardboard or repurposes a previous design to create something new.

"There's no secret to design, you just keep after it," she said. "You wake up in the middle of the night and think 'I should have painted it green or it's too big.'"

The artist/lamp designer credits her art background for her line's appeal and said copying the trends or what others are doing leads to dead ends, though it's inevitable everyone moves into modern at the same time, for example, because we're all exposed to the same "design/media blasting." Cosgrove has avoided introductions because they were elsewhere on the market and has even taken designs out of her line for the same reason.

Cosgrove may be one of the last in the industry to go to China, but she did so six months ago to keep up with the increasingly competitive lamp market. Importing has its own limitations on the design process, but as a problem solver, Cosgrove is not deterred. Her core product line of designer lamps remains an important buy for smaller, design-oriented stores, but the recent addition of the BCL line, a more moderate price point without shade options, also is gaining in popularity.

Cosgrove echoes the challenges many vendors face — material prices are going up while consumers demand more for less. One cost-cutting solution she tries to avoid is taking a statement lamp and compromising it either by making it smaller or giving it a skinnier shade.

"We just take it one lamp at a time," Cosgrove said. "If it becomes too costly to make we move on; we make it and say here it is, we love it, we didn't compromise and this is the price."