Frozen Asset : Redken Subsidiary Offers Hair Products With Glacier Water

There seems to be something about the grandeur of glaciers that makes entrepreneurs think big.

In the late 1970s, a Saudi Arabian prince proposed hauling glaciers and icebergs to drought-ravaged countries in the Middle East. Nothing happened with that idea. More recently a couple of companies have begun bottling and selling melted glacier water, touting the freshness and purity of the water to the Perrier generation. Another firm ships plastic bags of glacier ice cubes to Japan and makes vodka using glacier water.

And now Redken Laboratories, the big Canoga Park hair care products company, is bankrolling a fledgling company called Alaska Glacier Products that sells a line of shampoos and hair conditioners containing none other than Alaskan glacier water.

Alaska Glacier vice president Neil Wallach said, “Glacial water is the freshest water on the planet,” and so is ideal for shampoos and the like since it doesn’t junk up the hair with chemicals and minerals found in other water.

Skeptics could say the only thing fresh about glacier water in shampoos is the gimmick. But then John Sebastian, president of the Woodland Hills-based hair care company Sebastian International, says gimmicks are what make or break hair care companies. “Everyone is going to have what is called in the industry a ‘hook’ or a ‘handle’--something that’s going to make their products much more appealing than other products.”

In the fiercely competitive $4.5-billion a year hair care products industry, shampoo peddlers use anything they can to to distinguish themselves, as companies vie for customers who are as loyal to shampoos as they are to this year’s fashions.

Alaska Glacier’s new line of products, called Glacial Fresh, has been available in beauty supply shops since June and Wallach expects the company to break even or turn a small profit in the fiscal year that ends July 31, on sales of about $1.5 million.

But is being different enough to make it in the hair care business?

At Art Spector Beauty and Barber Supply in Sepulveda, there are dozens of exotic products available. “Everyone has a gimmick,” said co-owner Marilyn Spector, who isn’t carrying the Glacial Fresh line. “One has papaya from New Zealand. One has molecular or nucleic protein. There’s lots of new ones that come out and very few of them make it.”

Wendy Abramovitz, manager of Sunshine Beauty Supply in Canoga Park, is carrying Glacial Fresh, but says the new line hasn’t sold well yet. She keeps a close eye on this sort of thing and if a product doesn’t sell, she puts something else on the shelf. “I rotate, rotate, rotate,” she said. Some shampoos she sells contain concoctions such as “golden seal root,” “a botanically fortified polymeric acid balanced pH3 keratin enhancer” and a “Belgian formula.”

Sunshine was among the first of the 800 beauty supply stores that handle Glacial Fresh, but Abramovitz believes a new series of advertisements in People magazine will help boost sales. “Advertising is the key,” she said.

Alaska Glacier’s ad budget isn’t setting Madison Avenue on fire. So far it has spent about $50,000 on trade ads and $100,000 on consumer ads, Wallach said. That’s not much compared to the multimillion-dollar ad budgets of the large hair care companies.

But then Alaska Glacier is something of a marketing departure for Redken Laboratories, which has more than $120 million in annual sales, and is the largest manufacturer and distributor of hair care products sold in beauty salons.

Thus far, Redken has zealously cultivated its status as a supplier of upscale products sold only in hair salons. But Alaska Glacier will be sold only through beauty supply stores--another fast-growing segment of the hair care market that sells to the public and to professional hair stylists.

Marilyn Geller, a consultant specializing in cosmetics and toiletries at the market research firm Kline & Co. in Fairfield, N.J., says this could be a risky move for Redken. “If they’re not careful about merchandising the two lines separately, they run the danger of denigrating their history with the salon.” Redken’s name, though, doesn’t appear on the boxes of Glacier Fresh, and Alaska Glacier stresses that Redken’s other products are still marketed solely to salons.

There are now about 7,000 beauty supply shops in the United States and they sell anything from the cheap drugstore brands to the pricey salon products. At $4.99 for each nine-ounce bottle, the Glacial Fresh line is far from the most expensive of hair care products on the market, but it’s not bargain-basement either.

“In the overall scheme of things, it’s a relatively expensive product line,” Wallach said. But he hopes to cash in on the increasing focus on the environment, and maintained that the products will have strong appeal to consumers who eschew man-made chemicals.

Redken, which was taken private last year in a leveraged buyout by founder Paula Kent Meehan and her husband John E. Meehan, won’t divulge the size of its investment in Alaska Glacier. But the new company’s offices are located at Redken’s Canoga Park headquarters and its products are formulated and manufactured by Redken. And there’s more than just glacier water; the shampoo also contains juniper, heather, mistletoe and flaxseed to underscore the natural theme.

Alaska Glacier is the brainchild of Rick Thornton, an Anchorage hair care products distributor and glacier buff. About two years ago, Thornton, who describes himself as “a country boy from Alaska,” heard about Wetco, an Anchorage company that was selling two-pound bags of glacier ice cubes in Japan for $7. “That struck a chord in me,” he said.

Alaska’s glaciers are scattered over thousands of miles of pristine wilderness, and Thornton thought that if he could combine his hair care business with the appeal of the glaciers he’d have a unique product. “I wanted to have a story that no one else has,” he said.

After some research, Thornton, who is Alaska Glacier’s president, approached Redken with the idea. Wallach, a 28-year industry veteran of such firms as Clairol and Windmere, joined Alaska Glacier in August. The company’s only other full-time employee is business manager Jeanette Corum, who used to work for Redken.

Alaska Glacier’s water is harvested by Wetco, which sends workers out on boats to lasso huge hunks of ice that have broken off from the Eklutna Glacier, 30 miles north of Anchorage. The ice is melted and put in tanks, which are loaded onto a barge and shipped to Seattle, where the tanks are transferred to trucks for the long ride to Canoga Park.

If nothing else, Alaska Glacier is different. “This is the first time I’ve ever heard of a company with Alaska glacier water,” said Geller.

Although Wallach talks of his company’s sales growing to $5 million or more within five years, he still has a long way to travel till he gets to that plateau. Still, he’s convinced that glacier water will become a magic marketing ingredient.

“There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind you’ll see another product come out with glacier water,” he said. “If you look at the leaders in the market today, they’ve all been copycatted. I think there’s a certain wonderful posturing in being first.”