Firm Hopes to Clean Up With Kids’ Toiletries : Marketing: A Laguna Hills company is betting that parents willing to buy their children designer clothes and pricey toys will embrace upscale personal-care products for them as well.
When Dad splatters his face with Paco Rabanne and Mom dabs a wrist with Chanel, junior can now sport his own fragrant emblem of juvenile success--a cologne of his own.
In a world of designer baby clothes and pricey toys, a Laguna Hills company has embarked on a $15-million venture to nationally sell a line of upscale toiletries for children.
Kids William & Clarissa has developed 12 premium-priced products, among them a boy’s and girl’s cologne, lip balm and liquid soap. The firm claims that its products are hypoallergenic, use pesticide-free plant extracts, contain no animal products and are produced without testing on animals.
Currently being sent to major chain stores and advertised in major parenting magazines, Kids’ ivory-colored bottles and tubes are aimed not so much at children under the age of 12 as at their parents, who make buying decisions for them.
Kids President Mary J. George said that working parents today compensate for spending less time with their children by buying them more expensive things--from toys to clothes. But the company’s research showed that while parents are willing to pay more for superior children’s toiletries, the niche had been left virtually untouched at the mass-marketing level.
“What we found out from these affluent parents was that nobody has done anything in personal care,” she said.
George said the company set out to create an array of toiletries that would be priced higher than those offered by industry giants like Johnson & Johnson but lower than upscale adult personal-care goods, such as those sold by Neutrogena.
While the products are about to hit supermarket, drugstore and discount store shelves for the first time, the Kids label has appeared on similar types of toiletries on a limited basis in upscale department stores for two years.
The idea came from Bay Area entrepreneur William A. Meyer, a former president of Swenson’s International Ice Cream and president of Kate and Cheryl Inc., a children’s apparel company. He formed a company named after his two children, William and Clarissa.
About the same time, Irvine-based VLI Corp. was sold to American Home Products Corp. As a result of the merger, VLI--best-known as the maker of the Today contraceptive sponge--relocated its management and manufacturing to the East. VLI President George and three of her top executives decided to stay in Orange County and form their own company.
Meyer and the former VLI executives were linked together through a venture-capital investment fund, Montgomery Medical Ventures II-LP, in August, 1989. The new team fit together well: Meyer supplied the ideas; George and her colleagues the management; and Montgomery Medical the start-up funds.
In the months that followed, the group company reformulated products and packaging. It lined up national distributors and raised $5.7 million in an initial public offering. Marketing Director Elizabeth J. Borrowman said the only similarities between the new Kids products and the products that Meyer originally developed are the scent and the name.
As for the scent, the company describes it as smelling like “fresh, clean kids.” Actually, it’s kind of a lemon-lime aroma.
Borrowman said testing showed that parents demand better-quality products for their kids than they had themselves when they were children. “This is a serious product line, and the pitch is to the parents,” she said.
Company officials gauged the reactions of selected consumers who previewed the products and tried them out on their own children. Some changes were made as a result. For instance, George said, one moisturizing oil tested was found to be too greasy, leaving children’s skin feeling sticky. It was changed to a lighter formula.
Executives said they are already impressed with the results from the advertising campaign. A toll-free telephone number has drawn 300 calls a day, they said, from curious parents who have questions about the products or want to know where they can be bought.
Borrowman noted that there have been skin-care products for babies but few for older kids.
“When they reach the age of 3 or 4, they tell you ‘I’m not a baby anymore. I’m a big boy (or girl).’ They want to use adult products,” she said. “You bring them home a product of their own, and they are excited about that.”
