Cosmetics Maker Shades Bigger Rivals in Small Market
Susan Yee is at home in a store. She’s spent her whole career in retailing, and she loves to just be a consumer.
But Yee also finds that shopping as an Asian woman can be frustrating, especially at cosmetics counters. Even with the wide palette of foundations and eye shadows offered by the big manufacturers, she can’t find the shades that would highlight the yellow undertones of her complexion. Her five sisters and their friends have the same problem.
One day, about five years ago, “my sister and I were walking out of the store and said, ‘Why can’t we find something that works for us?’ ” Yee said.
Their answer was to start making and selling cosmetics themselves. The result is Zhen, a 2-year-old line of cosmetics aimed at Asian women.
Zhen, pronounced “jen,” is Chinese for genuine. Its makeup and skin care products are sold primarily through the company’s 12-page catalog. Two branches of Nordstrom near Seattle also sell the cosmetics.
Yee, who is 36 and the president of Zhen, knew it was possible to put a company together because of her 15 years in the retailing business, working for stores including Tannery West, Sunglass Hut and Icing, a women’s accessory retailer.
She believed her St. Francis, Minn.-based company, which is primarily family-owned, had a market that other companies weren’t serving.
“I don’t think anyone has targeted the Asian consumer. I had perfect demographics, and I didn’t think any of those companies tried to get my money,” Yee said in a recent interview, annoyance coming through in her voice.
“The Asian consumer has a lot of power that they don’t realize,” Yee said.
The numbers bear that out. The Census Bureau counted nearly 7.3 million Asians and Pacific Islanders in 1990 and projects that number at 12.1 million by 2000. Given such a large consumer base, “you would think there would be a better market out there,” Yee said.
But some industry watchers say the cosmetics industry is doing a better job than Yee believes.
“Their product lines have a full spectrum of shades,” Heather Hay, an analyst with Prudential Securities, said of cosmetic makers. “There’s been a big sea change in the industry in recent years because there’s been a real awareness of Asian and Hispanic and black consumers.”
While Zhen’s customers are mostly Asian, Yee says white women who have a sallow complexion and black women also buy from the company.
Yee’s business associates are among her fans. “She has a wonderful feel for the needs of her clientele,” said Lesley Yates-Stell, a cosmetics buyer at Nordstrom.
Yee knows the frustrations her customers have felt in the past. Asian shoppers tend to trust the sales people behind the makeup counters, she said, but then “they get home and they have all this stuff that never works.”
The big cosmetics companies have two big failings, according to Yee: They don’t supply Asian women with the right colors, particularly in foundations, and they don’t know how to work with Asian faces. “They don’t know what to do with your eye, because there’s no crease. . . . I’m never going to have crease in my eye, so what can I do to make my eyes look better?”
Yee says many Asian women have problems with their self-image, and says the advertising business is part of the problem.
“Have you ever seen an Asian woman on the front of a catalog?” she asked. Moreover, “even the Asian models they use are pretty generic and have Caucasian features.”
“I have a customer who wants to get surgery on her eyelids. I told her, Why do you want to do this? You are beautiful.”’
The typical Zhen customer is a working woman age 20 to 40 “who wants a quality product and may not feel comfortable in a drugstore environment or doesn’t feel like the quality is there,” Yee said.
The prices are moderate, comparable to those of such department store lines as Estee Lauder.
Zhen’s competition is the entire cosmetics industry, Yee says, but she isn’t worried that one of the giants will overwhelm her business.
“Within the Asian community, we’ve already made a name for ourselves. Someone will wake up, but we were here first and we understand the Asian consumer,” she said.
“I talk to so many customers who can’t believe there are cosmetics for Asians, who can’t believe they’re talking to another Asian,” she said.
Yee and her five sisters grew up in Columbus, Ohio, where their parents owned a restaurant. Susan and her sister Jane, who runs Zhen’s customer service operations, both worked in the family business.
Yee remembers “growing up and being very young and seeing Twiggy and thinking, ‘I wish I looked like that.’ ”
A conversation with Yee reveals a woman who is intense yet down to earth, serious yet able to laugh at herself and the ironies of life.
After high school Yee went into retailing. From Columbus she moved to Chicago, but then, when Tannery West promoted her, found herself transferred to Cleveland. “I waited all my life to get out of Columbus, and you’re moving me to Cleveland!” she laughed.
She also worked for Tannery West in Washington, and from there transferred to Redondo Beach, “which I just loved.”
Yee ended up in St. Francis, a Minneapolis suburb, because that was the home of the man who is now her husband. She misses the warmth of Southern California--”I still cringe” at the cold, she said.
Zhen was founded with financial help from Yee’s parents, and all the Yee sisters, including Susan, work the phones. The company has been successful enough that Jane Yee has also moved from Redondo Beach to St. Francis.
But as other entrepreneurs have learned, building a company often means long days--for Susan Yee as long as 14 hours. “Sometimes I think I’m crazy, but in general, I think that in my other working career, I worked just as many long hours for somebody else,” she said.
Alyn Shanon, a longtime friend who designs the Zhen catalog, calls Yee “a little whippersnapper--she knows what she wants, she’s very decisive, communicates very clearly has a million and one ideas constantly.”
“She’s fun to work with, fun to be with.”
Privately held, the company does not reveal sales or profit figures. But Yee says Zhen’s customers number in the thousands, thanks to word-of-mouth and print advertising. Zhen has ads in magazines targeting Asian women and the Yees have persuaded several magazines, including Seventeen, ‘Teen, and Marie Claire to write stories about their products.
