Artist Karen Rossi started her career in art at an emerging New England folk art gallery.  She sculpted Gabriel the Herald Angel, often portrayed on the mastheads of ships, antique signage, and weathervanes.  Her work caught the eye of several large Connecticut galleries, as well as restaurants, hospitals and corporations. Karen began to add broken crystals, charms and pieces of jewelry to her artwork. Inquiries for her charmed pieces skyrocketed, fueling her imagination and resulting in the development of more than 500 original characters…celebrating the seasons, holidays, professions, friends and family, children, hobbies and a host of other life-inspired themes.

After years of attending trade shows and marketing her original works, she developed a plan to license her designs.  She licensed her artwork to several manufacturing companies, eventually signing a contract with Silvestri®.  Within two years of the initial January 2000 release of 12 three-dimensional metal characters for that company, retail sales of Karen Rossi's Fanciful Flights™ by Silvestri® topped $30 million annually.