Startup News

“People who are in pain are often afraid of making things worse, and that fear prevents them from really doing things on their own,” says Mary Beth Knight. The founder of Oakley-based Revolution Fitness and the newly launched Get Your Back on Track program, Knight was once “rescued” from a car-accident-induced back injury, and never forgot the favor.

After losing 65 pounds and developing her strength and flexibility, she became an aerobics and fitness instructor, opening her health center in 1999. One of her clients was John Tew, a local neurosurgeon who came to the gym for personal training.

After watching Mary Beth work with Revolution Fitness members suffering from low-back pain, Tew began referring his non-surgical patients to her. Soon, she was too busy to take new referrals. That's when she embarked on her second company, the Get Your Back on Track program.

Designed to bring Mary Beth’s expertise to people she can’t squeeze into her training schedule, the program’s kit includes a foam roller, two massage balls, a yoga strap and a yoga mat, as well as an instructional DVD. Knight developed the program under Tew’s tutelage, joining him to observe patient consultations. “I’ve really had a spectacular education in a very hands-on manner,” she says.

Knight’s program takes people through three levels of trigger point release, stretching and strengthening. She says releasing trigger points – small bundles of painfully knotted muscle fibers – are critical to a fixing painful backs. Her DVD provides 35- to 40-minute videos designed to make it easy for adherents to stay motivated and perform the exercises correctly.

While the program is designed to be temporary, Knight cautions her clients to exercise regularly, and continue to practice the exercises once a week.

By Robin Donovan

Contrary to what you may think, a landscape architect is not a landscaper. Ken O’Dea, who is the primary environmental designer and landscape architect for the newly minted Place Workshop, specializes in creating parks (yes, some landscaping is included), planned communities, wayfinding systems, academic and business campuses, recreational areas and gathering spaces. In other words, he designs different kinds of connections between built structures.

After 14 years of environmental design work for Vivian Llambi & Associates, Inc., O’Dea launched the Place Workshop to fulfill his dream of designing urban spaces that encourage visitors to stop, look and enjoy.

“Sometimes with projects, there’s an emphasis on LEED certification or green infrastructure, or there’s a very specific budget you need to hit," O’Dea says. "I also think landscape is, at times, more at the forefront than the design of an exterior space. I want to make sure all those things come together, so that the final product is a space designed to be a comfortable place for people to linger.”  

He weighs environmental, financial and aesthetic concerns, determined that no single aspect will tip the project’s scales. While his peers insist upon native species for greenery, O’Dea rejects such stipuations. “We can over-think these elements, and that can be a weak part of a design," O'Dea says. "If a plant is a beautiful addition to a space, then use it. This is really for the end user -- that’s where we came up with our name.”

With his penchant for urban parks and plazas like Fountain Square, O’Dea calls downtown’s Lytle Park “a hidden gem," and has his eye on the new Smale Riverfront Park.

The design pro also appreciates another local favorite. “This is kind of a cliché, but I think Findlay Market is fantastic," he says. "It’s a perfect example of a place a landscape architect or urban designer would design. It just really functions well.”  

By Robin Donovan

When James Fisher says his travel experience is rooted in road-based travel, he’s not talking about multi-day trips, but road trips spanning weeks and months. “My family used to organize huge road trips through Africa. We’d spend seven months in the back of a truck with a bunch of sweaty Australians, driving from Morocco to Cape Town, then fly back to England, build another truck and do it again,” he explains.  

This newly minted Cincinnatian was born in England, but recently relocated to Cincinnati launch Roadtrippers, a curated, travel-planning website. His co-founder and fiancée, Tatiana Parent, is a history buff and the brains behind the site’s content strategy.

Roadtrippers is a tablet-friendly website designed to be used first at a computer, where most travelers conduct the bulk of trip-planning these days. Fisher says a mobile version is in the works, so that travelers can plan trips at home, then download directions and points of interest for on-the-road reference.  

After logging in, the website has a map interface similar to MapQuest or Google maps. Once endpoints are selected, further menus list attractions by type and distance from the route. The difference between this website and apps like Foursquare, however, is that Roadtrippers' content is hand-selected and curated for specific audiences. If you want to find wineries suitable for motorcyclists or the best drive-in diners, you can. The site only lists venues designed to delight, rather than the comprehensive listings compiled elsewhere. “It’s just the awesome places,” Fisher says.

As former Lonely Planet aficionados, Fisher and Parent spent many long hours road tripping in the U.S., visiting friends and family. Faced with stacks of printouts, unwieldy guidebooks and impossible maps, the two grew frustrated during their search for one-of-a-kind hotspots and hideaways.  

Finally, “we actually just hired a programmer who started building this thing for us because we needed a better tool,” Fisher says. “We were frustrated with trying to navigate around on our own.”

Soon, they realized the tool they’d built for themselves could help other frazzled travelers, and they began looking for seed funding to launch the company. When they secured a spot at The Brandery, Over-the-Rhine’s startup engine, they moved to Cincinnati, which quickly became home.

“I’ve never seen the momentum of community development that I’ve seen here,” Fisher says. “The seed of the tech community is sprouting here, and I’d rather be part of something growing than go somewhere like New York or San Francisco where the rules have already been written. Here, we get to define our own path a bit more.”

Roadtrippers currently generates revenue through its hotel booking services, and recently expanded its team to five employees, including a marketer and two developers.

By Robin Donovan

“Something tells me that pouring high fructose corn syrup into someone who’s dying is not a good idea,” says Robin Gentry McGee, and it’s hard to disagree with her. Yet she says feeding chronically, even terminally ill people feeding-tube formulas high in sugars, oils and synthetic vitamins is a common practice.

When McGee’s own father suffered a traumatic brain injury and required tube feeding, she thought little of the recommended products, despite her training as a whole foods chef. One day, out of sheer boredom, she read the ingredients on a can of feeding-tube formula and discovered it was high in sugar, oils and chemicals. “I was frantic,” she says.

With the help of her father’s medical team, along with nutrition professionals, she poured over medical nutrition resources, eventually tailoring a recipe based on healing, whole foods for her father. He was able to stop taking all but one of his 17 medications after the dietary change.

“Getting the texture right was the hardest part because my dad was also on fluid restriction,” McGee says. “He was only allowed to have four cups of food a day. The reason those [commercial] formulas are on the market, I think, is because almost the only way you’re going to get calories is from fat and sugar."

Soon, she had a formula that worked.

Inspired to offer others the same product, McGee returned to school, studying holistic nutrition, and developed a line of organic, nutraceutical products she describes as “food as medicine.” Her feeding-tube formulary project, dubbed “Functional Formularies,” won a $25,000 loan from Bad Girl Ventures, and was funded by the Innov8 for Health Business Concept Expo, among others.

Today, McGee faces a number of hurdles: high shipping costs for the formula, the enormous expense of clinical trials (which will make it hard to ever take the product into mainstream medicine) and manufacturing headaches. Still, with her father’s memory in mind – he passed away three years after his injury – she feels that these are small challenges.  

McGee’s not trying to replace commercial formulas. Instead, she points to 150 emails in her inbox at any given time from families looking for better nutrition for their loved ones, or people interested in her food-as-medicine concepts and products.

After some final tweaks in the manufacturing process, such as ensuring proper consistency and texture, McGee will offer the formulary to patients and physicians willing to test it for 30 days, tracking the results through bloodwork. She continues to raise funding for an official product launch.

By Robin Donovan

"There’s a lot of people who, if I turned them away, would not have anywhere to take their dogs, and I would feel terrible turning them away," says Megan Gourlie, who runs Dogtown Cincinnati, a pet daycare and boarding facility in Mount Auburn. "I’m really close to my customers and for the most part know everybody by name."

The facility already has plans for expansion, and its employees have cared for as many as 90 dogs at once, with about one handler per every 25 to 35 dogs. This number varies based on how many rooms are in use and the time of day. Because the Dogtown is a 24-hour facility, the business offers both daytime and night-hour staff.

Gourlie’s pretty well-connected to her customer base.  After all, she was once a frustrated pet owner herself.

After rescuing a dog who, it turned out, "couldn’t be left alone with having a total breakdown," Gourlie struggled to find care for him during the day. She didn’t want to leave the Weimaraner puppy in a doggie daycare that used kennels, kept dogs indoors most of the day or would drain her wallet with extra fees for walks or administering medications. Eventually, she sat down and did some research.

It turned out that there were plenty of people looking for the same thing: a kennel-free, 24-hour facility where dogs would have plenty of time to roam freely, play and nap. When she opened Dogtown Cincinnati, second-shift workers finally had a place to leave their pets overnight in a "homelike environment," and Gourlie even worked out a way to introduce new dogs slowly to smaller packs so new dogs felt comfortable.

These days, pet owners can watch their dogs and cats (there’s a separate area for felines at the facility) online through 15 live webcams, as well as periodic photos posted on Facebook.

"We are the place that allows you to have a dog if you couldn’t have a dog before," Gourlie says. "A lot of people are actually getting dogs because we’re here. In college I could never have a dog because I didn’t have the time and resources. We cater to second shift. We love second shift people; we’ll do overnight; and we’re really good for business travelers who don’t want to kennel their dogs."

By Robin Donovan

Shoppers who file purposefully down store aisles may think they’re on a personal mission: bread, juice, tissues, bananas.  In fact, retailers design their spaces to remind patrons that while they only need one thing, it wouldn’t hurt to grab a few extras along the way.

So, visual merchandisers and store designers lay out grocery stores with essentials like produce and dairy along the perimeter; convenience stores line checkout lines with candy and gum; and clothing stores use mannequins to display the latest trends.

The problem is, after a store is laid out – particularly stores with multiple brands available – it can be hard to monitor product presentation. The bright pyramid of oranges that was so enticing last week all too quickly becomes a haphazard pile.

After more than two decades in the packaged goods industry, Phil Storage wanted a better way to help manufacturers, brokers and sales teams, and retailers monitor visual merchandising plans.

“Historically, they wouldn’t be able to visually see anything,” he explains. “Brokers would go into stores … and they would get no visual verification that anything had actually been in compliance [after they left]. They would wait four weeks, and they’d get a report from Nielsen.”

Storage’s company, StoreFlix, addresses this problem with a cloud-based, mobile-friendly app that works as well for retailers and designers as it does for brands themselves. Basically, brokers who visit stores or retailers themselves snap photos or videos of product displays on a smart phone or tablet, upload the photos and share them on team-based walls. Tagging allows photos to be sorted and categorized.

“They love being able to share successes, big ideas and best practices with their teams in a millisecond,” Storage says. “Historically they wouldn’t be able to share any successes at all until they had a sales meeting a month later.” 

In some cases, retail chains use StoreFlix to ensure compliance with company-wide visual display plans. In other cases, manufacturers check the app to make sure their products are on shelves.

“Whenever you have folks capturing information for a manufacturer, they’re sharing it amongst themselves, but they’re also sharing it with retailers,” Storage says. “We’ve solved a huge problem in this business, which is visual verification for compliance issues and monitoring.”

By Robin Donovan

When Jason Haines and Tommy Tayman were pulling all-nighters at Centre College, they figured it as a temporary, college-only experience. Little did they know that, years later, they’d be driving across the state, locking themselves in a shared office and cranking out code until the wee hours of the morning.

These days, the pair is looking for a little more than good grades. Their new company, boostchatter, is a social rewards program that allows businesses and other organizations to incentivize social activity on Facebook and Twitter.

“It gives businesses or organizations a way to reward customers for being active on social media – it could be commenting, liking stuff, checking stuff, tagging, retweeting," Haines says. "Any of the social actions you perform as a user, you can incentivize users for doing them."

For a small retail shop, that might mean free coffee, a t-shirt or a coupon. For awareness groups or nonprofits, it could be a trinket for some type of medical awareness or a chance at earning points to redeem for merchandise. Basically, the business or organization can set up its own rewards that make sense to its own users.

Boostchatter isn’t the first post-college project the two have collaborated on. In 2004, they partnered to form Optimle, a custom application and web development firm headquartered in Cincinnati.

So, when Haines packed his bags and drove down to Knoxville, where Tayman lives, at the end of last year (typically a slow time for web developers), it wasn’t unusual for them to spend 10 or 12 hours – or more – each day hashing out ideas for boostchatter. A private beta for the project is currently in the works.

By Robin Donovan

Although most moms will say the discomforts of pregnancy are well worth a happy, cooing baby after nine months, the physical toll of having a child doesn’t end when the baby is born. Breastfeeding can cause skin irritation, such as cracking and bleeding. When new moms decide to wean their babies, the pain of engorgement (which occurs when milk is not expressed), can be, quite literally, a pain.

While weaning her third child, Dr. Somi Javaid, a local obstetrician and gynecologist, knew there had to be a better way or prevent this discomfort. And on a walk around the soccer field with fellow mom Kim Howell, the pair realized they could combine Howell’s marketing prowess with Javaid’s medical know-how. Together, they launched Mamadoc.

“In the past, there was a a pill that would make a mother’s milk milk dry up,” Howell says, but this medication is no longer FDA approved. Physicians like Javaid typically recommend breast binding, sports bras and even cabbage leaves to ease discomfort, but these methods leave a lot to be desired.

Javaid began developing a lactation compression bra, which the pair named “Nox.” Along the way, the business partners fell in love with bamboo fabrics, whose antimicrobial and antifungal properties made them an ideal fabric for Mamadoc products.

Today, Mamadoc-branded products include the Nox compression bra, Belly UpIt (a back support band designed to ease pain during pregnancy), PregHose compression stockings and ice/heat packs designed for use with the Nox bra. A dual-purpose hospital gown and nursing garment, the Blossom Gown, is in the works. The jersey garment looks like a dress, but opens in the back, is designed without metal closures for operating room compatibility and has shoulder snaps for easy-access nursing.

So, if you’re a mom in need, Howell says Mamadoc products can be purchased locally at the Christ Hospital gift shop, Boutique 280 and Blue Cocoon, as well as online.

By Robin Donovan

Amanda McDonald has an unusual problem for an artist: she has too many interested buyers and not enough pieces of her work. Her newly launched company, Goose Alley Glass, harnesses her love for glass blowing, but lacks one important component of the craft: a standalone studio.

Currently, McDonald rents space from other studios by the hour, but her first order of business is to open her own studio.
“The initial start-up cost is pretty high, which is why a lot of glass artists travel,” she says, pointing out that she’ll need a furnace, which must run 24 hours a day, in order to work.

She maintains a temporary showroom at Findlay Market, but has no regular hours because, well, it’s hard to be at an offsite studio and in a shop at the same time. Still, she arranges tours and sells commissioned pieces on request.

As a painter, McDonald was drawn to the strong, bright colors created when sunlight pours through stained glass. In fact, it’s how she got into glassblowing. “Today, stained glass is made from mass-produced, flat-sheet glass, but originally, it was blown,” she explains. “As soon as I got interested in that, I started working in a gallery attached to a glass blowing studio, and the owner started teaching me to blow glass. I fell in love with it, and 10 years later, I’m still doing it.”

Her work is a combination of personal style and function. She wants people who come to her studio to have the same experience she did: seeing the glass blowing process alongside finished pieces. The challenge, she says, is creating glassware, jewelry, servingware, lighting and interior decorating items that people will choose instead of mass-produced glass. 

“For functional glass items, why wouldn’t you just get something off the shelf at Target?” she asks. “We work hard to provide unique, contemporary work that will have a style of its own.”

Working with one other artist, McDonald says her priority right now is keeping enough glass on the shelves to entice shoppers. Her dream? To create a space where “anyone will be able to walk away with a memory,” she says. She hopes to have her studio open by next spring.

By Robin Donovan

As a double major in business and business informatics at Northern Kentucky University, Katie Bunschoten isn’t a typical student. Along with raising her daughter and going to school part-time, she also runs KHBOffice, ltd., a company that helps businesses create more efficient and affordable accounting and data tracking processes.

Much of what Bunschoten does is education about Intuit’s accounting software, Quickbooks. This can mean anything from teaching a business how to use the software to helping a business owner integrate a CRM (customer relationship management software) with it.  

After freelancing in Quickbooks advising for several years, Bunschoten knew many local businesses had a need for affordable integration of accounting functions and operational software, such as plug-ins used to track sales, leads or customer support.

These days, she gets calls with requests ranging from, “I’ve had Quickbooks for a month just sitting on my desk,” to “I’ve been using this for a few months, but I’m not sure what to do with it at this point.”

“We want to be really good at bookkeeping, and we want to keep it affordable,” Bunschoten says. “A lot of people who use the software [Quickbooks] would be put off by a CPA’s high rates.” Accordingly, she says she often helps entrepreneurs understand how to be more strategic about using their most important resource: time.

Bunschoten is also quick to say that she’s not a replacement for a CPA. Instead, she says, “We try to be an avenue of communication between people and CPAs. We want to have a CPA in the project as well, but we don’t want them to spend their time on a lot of minutiae we could be taking care of.”

So, how does someone with a family, a job and a university course load manage her own time? “My three-year-old daughter, Abby, tells me when it’s time to shut down,” Bunschoten says. “Ice cream time at the end of the day is mandatory.”

By Robin Donovan

While the rest of us were shopping for chocolates, stuffed animals and red Mylar balloons for Valentine’s Day, Amy Spasoff grabbed a bag of conversation hearts. She wasn’t sure what they’d be good for, exactly, just that they seemed like the right thing to grab at that moment.

Spasoff’s newly launched photography studio, Amy Elisabeth Photography, showcases these little moments of inspiration. And if Spasoff’s not always sure why she’s picking up a vintage hat here or a never-to-be-eaten bag of candy there, it all finds a permanent home eventually.

In the case of the candy hearts, Spasoff poured them into a wine glass, crafting a close-up for a young model, whose portfolio – and that photo in particular – recently won her a coveted agency booking in New York.

“I love when a girl will smile on camera or laugh, so I really think that my specialty is getting a clean, beautiful, happy and fun photo -- the kind of photo that you look and makes you smile,” Spasoff says. She recently signed on as a photographer for a local talent agency, has worked with many young women just breaking into modeling.

Spasoff started photography as a hobbyist, but when a friend insisted on paying her to photograph an event, she realized snapping photos could be a full time job. When she was laid off from a writing position, she decided to pursue her passion full-time.

That meant some serious time behind the lens and in the classroom. Spasoff is currently a Bad Girls Ventures finalist, so in between bookings, she’s attending classes through BGV, learning to be a businessperson and a creative. The result? A lot of questions.

“I just completed my marketing plan and that’s in full effect. I’m also working on my business plan … I literally sit in these classes and I’m like the obnoxious kid sitting in the front of the class asking a million questions. I’m really just trying to take it all in,” she says.

By Robin Donovan

Emily Frank hasn’t been to culinary school or worked fancy restaurants. She hasn’t even worked in the restaurant business much. After moving to Boston and Chicago, she worked in the print industry for 15 years, slowly building up a catering business on the side. That side business evolved into a portion-controlled, fresh-to-order meal delivery service.

“That was when I really discovered that I loved cooking and was good at it,” Frank says. “I’m not trained by any means professionally, but it’s just something I picked up and enjoyed doing.”

Frank’s latest venture, C’est Cheese, is a labor of love that celebrates her close family (who inspired many menu items), her love of cooking and the budding Cincinnati food truck movement. C’est Cheese, which isn’t yet cruising the streets, does have a menu ready to go. That menu is pretty simple: grilled cheese in 20 varieties, tomato soup and a seasonal soup.

Frank especially recommends two sandwiches on the menu, including the Hollywood, which comes with grilled hot dogs, American cheese and pickled vegetables. Frank admits it “sounds so bizarre,” but has been a focus-group favorite. The Bad Girl (three cheeses, a drizzle of honey and homemade raspberry sauce on French bread) is another favorite, and honors Frank’s current status as a finalist at Bad Girl Ventures.  

Until the truck is ready, Frank is serving sandwiches for special events, parties, focus groups, office get-togethers and anything and everything else. Her only regret is that she didn’t come home sooner.

“It was a big change. I resisted it for a long time, but now I’m kicking myself. I have a 20-month-old nephew that was a catalyst for me coming back,” she says. “I knew that if I wanted to start my own business, I could afford to do that a little easier in Chicago or Boston where I was before, but it’s also important for me to play an active role in my community, and it was easier to do that in Cincinnati. After 15 years, I was ready to come home.”

By Robin Donovan

The striking difference between in-store (and even some online) registration systems and Tony Alexander’s latest company, SimpleRegistry, is that gift givers on the website aren’t actually buying a tangible gift.  After registrants create an online compendium of desired items, friends and family members are invited to donate funds toward all or part of each item.  

For one couple, the cost of an expensive SLR camera was divided into 10 chunks, each sponsored by a different friend or family member, which allowed the couple to purchase the camera themselves, using the money donated by their loved ones.

Women in their early-20s to mid-40s make up the bulk of SimpleRegistry users. The service can be used over and over for events from weddings and honeymoons to baby showers, anniversaries, parties and other celebrations.

Fees associated with the site generate profit, but can be varied based on individual need. For example, couples can choose between a 3.5 percent transaction fee deducted from cash gifts they receive (which covers the cost of accepting credit cards) or pass the fee along to the gift giver, so that a $100 gift costs $103.50. The site also offers a one-time, $35 charge designed to reward repeat customers.

“If someone signs up but never receives a gift, we don’t make any money at all,” Alexander says, pointing out that the company barely breaks even on credit card transaction fees.

Right now, Alexander says, registrants tend to be concentrated along the east and west coasts, where people tend to be most tech savvy. However, he emphasizes that SimpleRegistry is not an alternative registry system. “If you can go to Target and register, you can put the exact same things on your registry on SimpleRegistry.”  In other words, it’s for everyone.

By Robin Donovan

Among the many tasks plaguing families during funeral preparation is trying to create posters and photo-display boards, which often is time-consuming and damages precious photos of loved ones. Online services abound, but Katy Samuels and her brother, Scott, wanted to bring the process closer to families.

The siblings, along with a talented extended family, launched Memories of Loved Ones, affectionately dubbed “MoLo,” in late 2009.

They’ve received as few as 40 up to as nearly 400 photographs in preparing for funerals and celebrations, often graduation parties and the like. Turnaround times are quick; Katy says her team once created nine collages and a 40-minute DVD from 395 photos in less than 24 hours.

MoLo also has a very visible presence: a 35-foot, green and purple RV that houses their camera and scanning equipment, as well as seating and snacks for families who climb aboard with photos, trophies, stuffed animals, quilts and other memorabilia in tow.

Katy says the RV offers a handful of advantages, “When we go meet a family, they’re making a ton of decisions in a short amount of time. We don’t want people to feel like they have to pick up for us.” Families also don’t have to worry about photos being damaged or lost, as all the scanning is done before they leave.

Once inside, family members relax while Katy and the MoLo team get to work photographing and scanning each item. With three-dimensional things, such as medals or knitting, they typically photograph the item, and use image-manipulation software to create collages. For example, a favorite quilt may be photographed while draped over a blank poster board. In a final collage, the quilt will be digitally placed so that it “hangs” over a photo.

MoLo isn’t a service just for funerals, either, as Katy and Scott field requests for everything from graduation parties to nonprofit awareness events. They donate services regularly for anyone who dies in the line of duty, whether that be as a firefighter, police officer or military serviceperson.

A 60 to 90-minute scanning process usually evolves into much more than that; Katy says she’s even received standing ovations from families as she delivered collages and poster boards. Somehow, in between scanning, chatting, snacking and sharing, a bond forms.

“Most people will tell us it’s the best experience because they get to remember, tell stories and laugh. That’s the fun of going through pictures, and it helps you go through the grieving process,” Katy says. “We go from meeting a perfect stranger to feeling like we’re a part of the family.”

By Robin Donovan

There’s something inherently sad about uncorking a bottle of wine, only to realize it’s turned to vinegar. Maybe it’s the wasted money or the expectation of a pleasant post-workday buzz gone bad. Whatever it is, Eric Corti hates it.

As Corti points out, even if you drink cheap wine, it hurts to waste it. He’s not a big fan of vacuum-pump devices, either. “You put the stopper in the top, you pump the heck out of that thing almost until you can’t anymore, but I would set the bottle on the counter and think, ‘I just did that, but I still see a lot of air coming in contact with my wine, so I don’t really understand how that’s working or why that’s any better.’”

Starting with toy balloons, he began experimenting with another way to keep air away from wine.

The resulting product, dubbed “Air Cork,” comprises a hand-operated pump and inflatable balloon that fits inside wine bottles. An independent sommelier who reviewed the product found no residual flavors from the balloon and, in fact, said the product was more effective than corking alone at preserving wine.

Designed for affluent imbibers as well as those seeking a lower-priced product, Air Cork works equally well on all types of wine, according to Corti, who notes, “The goal is the same whether you have the $20 bottle or the $200 bottle. It’s not an expensive device; if you manage not to throw out two half bottles of $20 wine, you’re going to pay for it.”

So, where does a practically minded wine lover in Cincinnati buy a bottle or savor a glass? Corti and his wife frequent Piazza Discepoli in Glendale and West Chester’s Little Sonoma with friends.

By Robin Donovan