 
As Y2K approached, recent college graduate Jonathan Giannettino was faced with the same choice his father had to make two decades earlier: take over the family business from the previous generation, sell it or close up shop for good.
Ultimately, he made the same choice his father, Frank, made ”“ to stay on and take 62-year-old Curto”™s Inc. into the future.
“Curto”™s started in downtown Yonkers as a radio and TV repair shop, but after World War II, many GIs began moving to the suburbs, and there was a need to sell appliances to outfit these homes that were going up,” Jonathan said. “My grandfather then transitioned the business from repairs and service to sales.”
The appliance store was founded by Mario Curto, Jonathan”™s maternal grandfather, and Mario”™s brother Joe in Getty Square in 1948.
By the 1970s, Curto”™s became one of the largest appliance dealers in the tri-state area and moved to its current location at 1900 Central Park Ave. in 1982.
“As my grandfather and my uncle started to transition out of the business, there was a bit of a fumble with the succession from them to the second generation,” Jonathan said. “However, we have now completed the succession to the third generation of the Curto’s family that will take this business into future decades.”
Jonathan, a former dot-commer, leveraged everything he learned in the information technology field and applied it to Curto’s, “and BOOM, we had a hit by using the Web.”
Curtos.com launched in 2003. That summer, during a family vacation to Italy, Frank was “absolutely dumbfounded” to see online sales pouring in on his son”™s laptop.
“We were the first Westchester appliance dealer to establish a Web presence and we have leveraged this to not only extend our reach from southern Westchester into the northern parts of Westchester as well as the greater NYC metro area and even nationally,” Jonathan said. “It would be extremely expensive for a small business to hire a digital media strategist/company to create a valuable online presence. As such, Curto’s, as a small business, maintains this advantage over its competitors because I am able to bring this type of service to its small business structure at no cost. This is one of the main reasons that I decided to join Curto’s ”“ the unique opportunity to apply my digital media background working at Fortune 500 companies to grow a small business.”?The economy has changed consumers”™ spending habits, but Curto”™s is well-positioned to ride out the economic whitewater because of its diversified product lines and price points.
“The downturn has absolutely affected us, but fortunately we really didn’t feel the pinch until late in the game and quickly took decisive steps to deal with it, which has allowed us to continue to prosper,” Jonathan said. “We operate in a hypercompetitive market and against companies that are typically much larger than ourselves, but through a variety of business practices we’ve been able to be lighter, faster and smarter than our bloated competition, and this has allowed us to thrive.”?Jonathan has been approached by other business owners, who, seeing what he did with the Curto’s online brand, have offered to hire him as a consultant.Â
Although he is considering leveraging his experience and acting as a consultant for small-and mid-size businesses “who want to go beyond just slapping up a Web site and really make digital media grow their bottom lines,” Curto’s comes first.
Jonathan, who recently bought his first home in Yonkers, said Curto”™s is “fully committed to the city of Yonkers.”
“We are diehard Yonkers people,” he said.Â
