Hillary Muscatello’s home is a staging ground for her creative endeavors. On any given day, you might find her fussing with a floral arrangement or working through a tablescape design. On the morning of our visit, she has risen early, with her three children, to bake apple cinnamon bread that she serves with hot apple cider in porcelain cups and saucers. Scattered across the dining room table are fabric swatches in various stages of transformation into scarves, an accessory option for her nylon-and-leather tote bags bearing the name of the company she founded, Tello & Rose.
“People have asked me what I want to focus on, but I like it all,” says the 32-year-old, dressed in an elegant caftan of her own design.
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Muscatello’s passion for beauty extends to every room of her well-appointed Wildwood home, but it’s her Instagram account @telloandrose, launched a year ago, that broadcasts her talents beyond the walls of her house. Interest in her work—from DIY projects to recipes and home renovation—is growing. “I’m not going to decorate my house for social media,” she says. “Everything I post is something that I’m doing around the house that day anyway, and I think that’s also why people have enjoyed it,” she says.
She calls on the social media and marketing savvy that she sharpened at Hasbro Games and TJX, where she worked while living on the East Coast, to deliver her products to the marketplace. “Those experiences are what really helped me get to where I am now with my bags and my caftans,” she says. [She launched a small-batch collection of caftans, in both white and navy, in late November.] The totes—stylish and practical, with three interior pockets and a washable lining—have sold in 14 states and on three continents. To draw national attention to her work, she partners with influencers in a variety of fields, gauging their connectivity by the engagement on their Instagram. Recently, Muscatello hired a sales rep to cover the Southern states and she’s expanding her local reach, too, teaching classes on wreath-making and floral design at Thies Farm and Kennedy Farms; she’s lined up two more seminars for later this winter.
“I love the interaction and people enjoying what I have to say,” she says.
Originally from New Jersey, Muscatello and her husband, David Muscatello, moved to St. Louis four years ago by way of Massachusetts and Wisconsin. Their children, though young, attend their mother’s classes and help with her projects. “I just don’t ever want my kids to feel like they’re in the way of my design work,” she says. Joanna Gaines, of HGTV’s Fixer Upper, is an inspiration in that way: “I love the family feel to her. She takes her kids everywhere! We strive to do the same thing.”
Lately, Muscatello says, she’s been thinking about “knowing when to push and when to just wait to let things happen.” For someone who “works 1,000 miles per hour,” listening to her customers is paramount. “If I push too hard, then I can’t hear what they’re telling me.”
