Fashion 88 : Lauder Tries to Win West With California-Only Line
In an extraordinary marketing move, Estee Lauder Inc. has created a men’s toiletry line specifically for Californians. It is called New West.
“The New York cosmetic industry is too inbred,” said Leonard Lauder, president and chief executive officer of the firm founded by his mother, Estee. “There’s not enough new thinking and new blood. That’s why we’re branching out.”
In this case, “branching out” means thinking small by Lauder standards. Instead of making a product line to sell all over the world, as is usually the case with giant cosmetics firms, New West fragrance and toiletries will be available initially only in one state.
If the plan works, such regionalized thinking may become the biggest new trend in U.S. cosmetics marketing, insiders say. And, they add, California is the perfect place to begin.
Allan Mottus, New York-based consultant to the cosmetics industry, said California is the marketplace most responsive to new trends.
“Japanese firms test-market cars and VCRs there, then take them back to Tokyo. Now Lauder is doing the same thing with cosmetics. This kind of marketing will give Lauder a huge boost in the Pacific Basin.”
The Japanese market is extremely important to the American cosmetics industry. Max Factor, a California subsidiary of New York’s Revlon, is a dominant factor in Japan.
“People in Japan and Europe now look to California, not to New York, for trends,” said Allan Kurtzman, president of Max Factor. “Los Angeles is seen as the epitome of the New World.”
Lauder agreed: “New West has to be a success in California before it goes anywhere else. The Pacific Rim is the most important path of our business.”
Part of the Aramis men’s division of Estee Lauder, New West will be sold exclusively at Bullock’s in Southern California and Macy’s in the north until spring. It will then be launched in Japan. If it’s successful in these Pacific Rim markets, New West will be introduced finally in New York and other major U.S. cities, Lauder said.
Lauder, whose privately held company is estimated to be worth about $1.4 billion, said plans for New West began five years ago after he saw Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.” video, “the most impactful visual I’ve ever seen.”
Lauder, arguably the most powerful man in the $17-billion American cosmetics industry, said he assigned five high-level executives to develop a California product line “because we have seen many new and exciting things happening in California--and per capita, it’s the most important cosmetics market in the world.”
Lauder referred to Southern California as the eighth largest economy in the world.
More Than in Many Countries
“In fact, we do more business in Ventura, Los Angeles, San Diego and Orange counties combined than we do in many entire countries.”
Ira Howard Levy, senior vice president of corporate marketing and design, headed the team that developed New West. Born and raised in Beverly Hills but a longtime Manhattanite, Levy said: “The 21st Century is the century of the Pacific Rim--it’s absurd to be sitting in New York, thinking like New Yorkers.
“We used to go to Paris and Milan for fashion direction. Now we go to California first. We match eye shadows to the Naugahyde at Rebecca’s restaurant in Venice. We look at the way the colors are blocked out at Irvine Ranch Market. Everything is gray in New York. The West is about color. It’s idiosyncratically unique.”
To capture that uniqueness, Levy and his team spent months in California, picked the brains of local creative types such as artist Peter Shire, chef Wolfgang Puck and architect Frank Gehry, and finally hired a California advertising agency, Keye/Donna/Pearlstein, to design and direct the New West campaign.
“We became born-again New Westerners,” said Levy. When they were back in New York, he and his partners resorted to reading a mantra-like poem about California whenever they thought they were losing their grip on the West Coast state of mind.
With the help of Keye/Donna/Pearlstein, they summarized their new approach to product development in one statement: “East is East and West is something else entirely,” the tag line for New West advertising.
Capturing “something else entirely” for a television commercial meant carting models and production crews all over Southern California--from a tiny airport in Santa Paula to Leo Carrillo Beach, to Mojave desert dunes to the track at UCLA.
All are “quick cuts of the New West life style,” said Leonard Pearlstein, a principal of the West Los Angeles-based ad agency. These snippets of California are paced to an ultra-modern, electric-guitar version of “Home On the Range.”
Reaching for Drivers
Due to air in the fall, the commercial will be supported by billboards, bus stop advertisements and a minimum of magazine ads.
“Westerners spend so much time in their cars, so we wanted to reach them there,” said Daria Myers, executive director of marketing for corporate projects.
Even the products represent the Lauder team’s interpretation of what the Western man wants: Utah-mined rock crystal deodorant, sea-mist blue shaving mousse, moisturizing gel made from “glacial water” from Mount Hood, Ore., and two forms of “Skinscent” (cologne) for use at the “shock sites” (pulse points).
Packaged in sunny yellow and sea blue boxes and bottles, New West will be sold by male beauty advisers in white sweat-suit uniforms and by women in blue jumpsuits.
If Lauder’s regional concept works, it may mark a major change in the way cosmetics are marketed in the future. Products will be designed to appeal to a well-defined market and then will be sold there in extremely limited distribution.
This allows a huge corporation like Lauder to focus on small markets and take more chances with trends. Typically, the large, prestige-priced cosmetics companies are the last to produce trendy items, for fear that the trend will die before the stock is sold.
“New West was put together on a small initial investment,” Lauder said. “But at the same time, some of the best minds in our company were involved, and you can’t put a price on the human resources.”
