Special Deliveries
After years of distributing her aromatherapy line exclusively to retailers, Julia Meadows now relies mostly on mail order to sell her natural candles, oils and soaps.
“As a small business, I couldn’t cope with the shipping impositions big retailers put on us,” said Meadows, owner of Essential Aromatics in Ojai. “Every few months buyers would ask, ‘What’s new, what’s new, what’s new?’ And with smaller stores, our line is so broad that many of them couldn’t stay stocked. Mail order is just common sense.”
Like Essential Aromatics, hundreds of other small beauty companies have embraced mail order to distribute their cosmetics and skin-care products amid increasing competition for retail space. Along with clothing and home furnishings, beauty is one of the fast-growing segments of the catalog industry, which is enjoying strong sales as Americans embrace convenient shopping alternatives.
Southern California is a natural place for mail-order beauty firms to thrive.
“This is very fertile territory for starting this type of business because with the entertainment industry and so many makeup artists, there’s a market for it,” said Jack Kyser, chief economist with the Economic Development Corp. of Los Angeles County. “People here are risk takers, and they want to try the latest products.”
To the typical beauty entrepreneur, coming up with a concoction that makes the skin dewy or a hair potion that makes hair silky is the easy part. But how does a small company compete with powerhouse brands such as Estee Lauder or Clinique when it can’t secure space at leading stores?
Enter mail order. Americans spend $87 billion a year on products from about 8,000 catalogs, according to the Direct Marketing Assn. In the beauty category, about 732,000 households bought products last year, up more than 100,000 from the previous year, according to Abacus Marketing Information Services.
Beauty products are well suited to catalogs because the items are easy to ship and can be simply described and photographed. Because cutting-edge cosmetics also tend to be difficult to locate outside urban areas, mail order is a good way for small enterprises to reach customers nationwide.
But because of the glut of catalogs now on the market, companies must distinguish themselves by offering unique products, a snazzy brochure and well-trained customer service representatives. Attracting celebrity customers and getting a mention in a top women’s magazine also are key ways to set a start-up beauty business on fire.
That’s what happened with Meadows’ business, which has been featured in Vogue, In Style and Redbook and is favored by celebrities such as Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts and Gwyneth Paltrow.
After a long career as an architect, Meadows retreated to Ojai and started the aromatherapy business, not as a moneymaking venture but as a healing one.
Two weeks before her wedding in 1988, Meadows’ fiance was severely injured in a car accident and was told he would never walk again. But with the help of doctors and through holistic healing, including aromatherapy, he started walking.
“I got very fascinated and started doing aromatherapy consultations and treatments,” said Meadows, who first began selling her scented products to specialty stores.
Last year she sent out 10,000 copies of her first catalog. Now, mail order makes up about 60% of her $600,000 business.
“It’s been extremely good for me because consumers understand the process,” she said. “And it’s been much more rewarding dealing directly with customers than with stores. When you deal with stores, you’re at the whim of buyers, and a lot of them run into bad debt.”
The difficulties of running a mail-order business, Meadows said, are getting the catalog to the right consumers and staying ahead of competitors.
“You have to spend money and time on catalogs because people get a zillion of them and throw them away,” she said.
Philip Berkovitz, owner of Philip B, got involved in natural hair products while mixing specialty oil treatments for his high-powered clientele in the early 1990s.
“Every lady I would put it on would cry with joy, saying, ‘How did you make my hair so soft?’ ” said Berkovitz, who works at the salon at the Beverly Hills Hotel. “My clients would say, ‘You have to bottle this stuff.’ ”
Berkovitz did that, and before long, his products were written up in Vogue and picked up by Fred Segal, Barney’s New York and Neiman Marcus. The company, whose annual sales are now at $1 million, has relied on mail order to provide a stable base of business.
“It’s always been a steady income for us, something that we can count on,” Berkovitz said. “That’s what paid the bills and kept our phones on during rough times.”
The primary reason women buy cosmetics and skin-care products through catalogs is to save time.
“If you’re a woman, married with one or two children, and work, the amount of free time is really zero,” said Joseph Garland, spokesman for the Sweden’s FACE Stockholm, which sells its cosmetics by retail and mail order.
Targeting working women, Bliss Spa in New York City launched a mail-order catalog in 1996 called Bliss Out, which is known for its colorful layouts and witty product descriptions.
Bliss offers its own top-of-the-line products as well as those from other manufacturers. Its one-stop-shopping offerings have been a hit among women willing to shell out $50 for facial cream or $15 for soap.
In 1996, it sent out 30,000 catalogs; this summer it delivered 150,000. It also tripled the number of products it sends out by mail.
“Our philosophy is that people should have fun when they buy or apply products,” Bliss spokeswoman Mara Stern said. “We want people to be happy about the whole experience and not take it too seriously.”
