SUMMERTIME--AND THE SPENDING IS EASY : This Year, Summer Sizzlers Range From Frozen Yogurt to ‘Tankinis’

Each year, swimsuit designer Anne Cole combs the beaches of Southern France to see what’s trendy. Though she finds it “a bit tacky,” she checks out the scene in Honolulu, too. Closer to home, she scouts the shops on Melrose Boulevard to scope out new styles.

The designs and colors that Cole finds on her travels take shape as swimsuits worn by thousands of women on beaches from Miami to Malibu. Though it may seem extraordinary, her work is part of a huge effort by her employer, Cole of California, to capture a big slice of the $800-million women’s swimwear business.

The Los Angeles swimwear manufacturer isn’t the only company in search of what’s hot for summer. Companies that turn out such diverse products as barbecue grills, books, movies, yogurt and water slides go all out to win a piece of the summertime leisure dollar.

One toy company sent its designers to a water park in Florida to help them invent a back-yard water slide “with the right bumps, twists and turns,” according to one executive. A huge company that makes yogurt spent a year in the laboratory experimenting with formulas and flavors for a new frozen treat. Another company organizes focus groups to explore what Americans really want in a charcoal grill.

No one knows the size of the summertime market, but it is vast. Besides spending millions on bathing suits, Americans will spend $1 billion on frozen yogurt, $550 million on barbecue grills and $180 million on water and pool toys, for example. And many of those dollars will be spent in the three months between Memorial Day and Labor Day.

Here’s a look at what Americans are buying this summer.

Swimwear

On vacation at Wakiki Beach three years ago, dress designer Carol Wior grew tired of watching women constantly tug on their skimpy swimsuit bottoms to keep them in place and decided to do something about it.

She invented the Slimsuit, a one-piece suit with a girdle-tight liner that squeezes one-half to three inches off the waist. Now in its second year, Slimsuit sales are exploding. Wior says sales have already exceeded $20 million, and the Los Angeles designer is at work on a new line of rhinestone-studded swimsuits.

The success of the Slimsuit highlights a new trend in swimwear. Gone are skimpy swimsuits with with hip-high leg lines and low-cut arm holes. Now swimwear manufacturers are turning out swimsuits that trim waistlines and camouflage bulges. And women are buying them.

Jantzen has a two-piece “tankini” that comes with a “figure-helping” adjustable waistband so the bottoms can be worn around the hips or the tummy. Cole of California has a new suit that comes with a short, ruffled skirt designed to “soften the leg line,” says swimsuit designer Anne Cole.

How some women are covering themselves is surprising. Fashion-conscious Bullock’s shoppers are wrapping themselves in men’s thick terry bathrobes after a dip in the pool for that “luxurious Hollywood look,” says Monte Ventura, fashion director for Bullock’s. Another offbeat cover-up is men’s Oxford shirts.

No one is exactly sure why women seem to want to cover up. Catherine Hansen, a Jantzen swimwear designer, thinks that some older baby boomers may have outgrown their bikinis and are looking for suits that disguise bulges. Other women might want fuller suits to protect tender spots from harmful ultraviolet rays, she says.

Ventura thinks that women simply want a different look. “Perhaps the customer has 5 million two-piece (swimsuits) in her wardrobe,” he says.

Whatever the reason, the trend seems to be good for business. More than 40 million women’s swimsuits were purchased last year by women age 14 and up. This year, sales should increase by at least 5%.

Recreation

Imagine a giant water slide in your back yard. That’s what toy designers at Marchon Inc. had in mind when they created Crocodile Mile.

Nearly two years ago, toy designers for the Arlington, Ill., company traveled to water parks in Florida to check out water slides and wave pools. What they found in Florida inspired Crocodile Mile, a slick 25-foot long vinyl strip with a nine-inch deep pool at one end. A child slides on the wet vinyl and splashes into the pool.

Large merchants such as Toys R Us and Target Stores say Crocodile Mile is one of the summer’s hottest new toys. “We have very few left,” says Kim Maguire, a toy buyer for Target Stores. Sales were helped by the scorching June heat wave that baked most of the nation, he says.

The toy sold so quickly that Marchon has a pile of orders that it can’t fill until next year. “We anticipated strong demand, but nothing like this,” says Richard Mazursky, Marchon marketing and sales vice president.

The $30 water slide is among many new outdoor toys to flood the market this summer. Inspired by Hasbro’s Pogo Ball’s success last summer, a number of toy manufacturers have rediscovered the outdoors. Other toys on the summer hit parade are Coleco’s Jamball, a ball toss game, and Worlds of Wonder’s Skipstik, a $10 jump rope.

Water toys seem to be especially hot. Last year, sales of pool and water toys soared 70%, according to the Toy Manufacturers of America, in what was otherwise a lackluster year for toys.

This year, the nation’s parents will buy 1.6 million water slides for their children, according to Marchon. That compares to 1 million slides a year ago.

It wasn’t easy to develop Crocodile Mile. It took the company 10 months to come up with a special vinyl that could tolerate the sun’s rays, support an 80-pound child and become slippery when wet. Not only that, Marchon had to build a special machine to seal the plastic parts together.

Finding a name for the toy was a simpler matter. “The slide is long,” explains Mazursky. “And people seem to have a love affair with crocodiles.”

Movies

A carnival wishing machine suddenly transforms a 12-year-old boy into a 35-year-old man, who lands an important job at a toy company and falls in love with a tightly wound lady executive.

That’s the sort of light-hearted fantasy traditional summer movies are made of. In this case, the movie is “Big,” and it’s helping to make this a big summer for Twentieth Century Fox. The movie, starring Tom Hanks as the grown-up youngster, did $8.2 million in 1,100 theaters during its opening week a month ago. It has continued to draw large audiences.

For years, conventional wisdom in the film industry was that a summer movie was light, funny and geared to teen-agers on vacation.

“The rule of thumb was that summer was a time for comedy and the adult, Academy Award-type movies came out in the fall,” says a Disney spokeswoman.

That philosophy started to change slowly, with the film “An Officer and a Gentleman.” The 1982 movie about a street-wise enlisted man who tries to become a Navy officer was intended for an adult audience. It became a box-office success, even though it was a drama with a July opening.

Suddenly, “the industry discovered that the adult audience was there,” says Tom Scherak, president for domestic film distribution at Twentieth Century Fox. The studios, including Fox, experimented with what Scherak described as “counter-programing,” or opening one or two serious adult films in the summer.

The results of the new strategy were spotty. The “Pope of Greenwich Village,” the story of two small-time hustlers in New York’s Little Italy, opened in June, 1984, and didn’t do well. Then “Prizzi’s Honor,” a Fox film about a New York City gangster family, did well, despite its June, 1985, release.

Scherak says the lesson was clear: A good movie draws crowds anytime.

Though “Big” is easygoing, it wasn’t initially conceived as a summer film. In fact, executives at Fox weren’t certain how the film would do during any season because it followed several other so-called body exchange movies, including “Vice Versa” and “18 Again.”

But summer turned out to be a good season for “Big,” a gentle, adult comedy that appeals to teen-agers, too. “It’s a good time at the movies,” Scherak says. “It’s the sort of movie that will be a strong second (at the box office) all the time.”

Books

If Michaela Hamilton has her way, Stephen King’s novel “Misery,” will take its place alongside suntan lotion and snorkels on thousands of beach blankets this summer.

Hamilton, an editor with New York publisher Signet Books, says the thriller is just the sort of light fiction she looks for during the all-important summer season for paperback books.

So far, the book, a thriller about an injured author held captive by a psychotic fan, is hot. It has emerged as one of the summer’s best sellers since it hit the book stands a month ago, and Signet has printed a whopping 3 million paperbacks. An impressive 820,000 hard-bound copies of “Misery” have been sold in the past year.

Jim Milliot, editor of the Book Publishers Report, attributes “Misery” sales to the enormous popularity of its author. “But being out in the summer doesn’t hurt.”

Besides “Misery,” plenty of other paperbacks are vying for a place at pool side under the summer sun. This summer, Bantam Books intends to roll out nine new paperbacks, or three books each month, as part of a special summer promotion.

Bantam, based in New York, kicked off its summer sales season with “The Unloved,” a John Saul horror story about the misadventures of some children who explore a decaying old house. The book is targeted at teen-agers, who have more time to read now that history and mathematics texts have been put away for the summer.

The last book in the series is Shirley MacLaine’s “It’s All in the Playing,” a New Age quest for spirituality, published in hard cover last August.

Book publishers say successful summer books have several common elements. “It’s an entertaining piece of fiction, not too weighty, but light, fun and breezy. What people will read on vacation,” says Hamilton.

“Fun to read while lying in a hammock or under a beach umbrella,” says Stuart Applebaum, vice president of publicity for Bantam Books.

Finding books with those qualities are important to paperback book publishers, who ring up 40% of their annual sales during the three summer months when people have more leisure time to read. Right now, it looks like a lot of people will spend their vacations in “Misery.”

Food

When asked what’s hot for summer, Jerry Scosatto’s thoughts turned cold. “Frozen yogurt,” said the Vons Markets frozen food manager.

A popular summertime treat in Southern California, frozen yogurt has moved into the dairy cases next to ice cream, gelato and sorbet. Two big names in yogurt, Dannon and Yoplait, now have frozen yogurt desserts.

“It appeals to the customer looking for something a little different,” says Scosatto. “It is also low in calories, so it appeals to the customer who is concerned about weight.” Though the frozen yogurts have been available in Vons, the Pantry and Hughes supermarkets only a month or so, they seem to be catching on with yogurt lovers.

Dannon, a unit of the French dairy giant BSN Gervais-Danone, says it got into the frozen yogurt market after watching the rapid growth of frozen yogurt shops. Take Penguin’s, a chain that operates in the West and is based in Woodland Hills. It has expanded in three years to 130 yogurt shops from just three shops.

Howard Waxman, editor of the Ice Cream Reporter, says frozen yogurt sales started recovering from a deep slump about three years ago after several companies came up with new formulas that tasted not like yogurt but like ice cream. “No one wants frozen yogurt if it’s too tart or too tangy,” Waxman says. “They want it to taste like ice cream.”

“It has to taste like dessert,” says Heidi Miller, president of Heidi’s Frogen Yozurt. The Laguna Beach-based chain is dishing out such new flavors for summer as banana cream pie and white chocolate macadamia nut.

The supermarket versions of frozen yogurt are fruit flavored. Yoplait, which is made by food industry giant General Mills, sells its frozen yogurt in pints and on a stick. Dannon’s frozen yogurt, which took a year to develop and another year to test market, comes only on a stick.

Waxman says this summer will be big for frozen yogurt. When the year ends, sales should reach $1 billion, although supermarket sales are expected to account for just $50 million of that. Frozen yogurt sales should be especially good in Southern California, he says. “It’s the frozen yogurt capital of the United States.”

Outdoors

For back yard chefs, this is the ultimate: the ultra-deluxe one-touch-plus charcoal grill complete with tuck-away lid, dual purpose char-baskets and built-in thermometer.

The souped-up grill is the newest by Weber-Stephen Products Co., a big name in kettle grills. Over the last decade, the kettle grill has overtaken the traditional open brazier and the patio-size hibachi in popularity, as companies such as Weber-Stephen comes out with new variations of the classic steel dome grill.

Kettle grills now account for 37% of all charcoal grill sales, up from 14% in 1987, according to the Barbecue Industry Assn. That kind of growth is impressive, because the overall market for grills isn’t growing. Last year, back yard chefs bought 13.9 million grills, just 4% more than in 1986. Right now, 70% of all households have a grill.

Flat sales make the industry very competitive, and Weber-Stephen says it takes pains to find out what people want. The company says the one-touch-plus evolved from focus groups with potential customers, who said they wanted a grill that was easy to clean and store.

When the company introduced its gas grill two years ago, it deviated from its trademark pot-bellied design, introducing a square grill instead.

“Our research showed that people relate better to rectangular gas grills,” says Betty Hughes, consumer affairs director.

Weber-Stephen introduced the gas grill to capture a rapidly growing market. Gas grills now account for over 40% of all grill sales.

Very little of that growth is taking place in Southern California, however. On the West Coast, gas grills account for about three out of every 25 grills sold, says Carolyn Jacinto, patio buyer for Builders Emporium. “Sales are increasing, but not that rapidly,” she says.

Jacinto thinks that Southern California will remain charcoal grill territory.

“When you want to barbecue in Southern California, you go to the supermarket and get hamburger and charcoal,” she says. “Keeping a gas tank filled just isn’t in keeping with our spur-of-the-moment life style.”