This not-quite-year-old resource looks like it’s been around for years. With a wide range of attractive, saleable merchandise in myriad materials and looks, a stylish marketing approach backed with clever and colorful creatives, and an experienced team who understand product development and partnering with key accounts thanks to years operating a successful private label business, Slant is an enterprise with a point of view positioned to evoke fun and function.

The company started earlier this year, an offshoot of Formation, a California-based private label supplier to merchants like Starbucks, Neiman Marcus, Bed Bath & Beyond, and Target. The 55-person operation – founded in 1997 by Mark Towery and Leslie Miller – designs, sources, and markets tableware (chiefly specialty drinkware) for a who’s who of large-scale merchants. The multimillion-dollar operation has carved a cushiony niche, amassing accolades and awards for its progressive marketing programs and immensely innovative merchandise. Sales have virtually doubled one year to the next.

But the Formation team has been increasingly driven to design around an ever-shrinking price tag. “Being creative and innovative has become a real challenge,” Miller accedes. “The market is driving our price point and therefore our product development. From a creative standpoint we have been feeling a bit unchallenged and we wanted to try something different and unique.”

Enter Slant.

The name says it all. Slant offers their point of view. Their take on the category, without pigeonholing preconditions like price. Miller et al have pooled and capitalized on disparate talents to create a new company merging traditional elegance and contemporary flair. “My focus has always been glassware, possibly because I’m passionate about drinking,” laughs the former sales rep and now director of business development at both Formation and Slant. “Over the last decade we became glassware specialists which is really nothing new for me since I grew up in a family where vintage glassware was a big part of our lifestyle. I collected glassware and my business partner Mark did too.”