Cosmetics: Kiss and Sell
I have heard of your paintings too, well enough; God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another. --Hamlet, speaking to Ophelia
Only one other? Perhaps in Elizabethan times, when cosmetics were just becoming popular. But a 1978 American Ophelia can make herself a different face for each passing mood, each fantasized role, even each time of day. At the office, she can sport the fresh, "natural" look of the career woman, by using a dozen shades and tints, from eye liner to translucent lip gloss, all supposed to make her appear as if she were wearing no makeup at all. Then, in the evening, she can switch to smoky mauve eye shadow and dark red lipstick touched with midnight blue, calculated to give her a mysterious aura that will stand out under disco lights and smite her dancing partners with an advanced case of Saturday Night Fever.
To achieve these and other appearances, the modern woman can select from an array of contouring creams, blushes, enamels, colors and scents that would have staggered Ophelia or even her own mother, who got by with only basic lipstick and powder. A big cosmetics company today produces around 2,500 shades of nail polish, many with matching lipsticks, of course. Plus different perfumes, colognes, toilet waters and other fragrances to be worn at the supermarket, on the tennis court, when running--yes, when running--when dining, when saying goodnight to her Sweet Prince. Plus unnumbered shampoos, moisturizers, eye shadows, lip glosses, mascaras and, not least, cleansers to take the stuff off, all adding up to...
Well, to a turbulent industry that takes fish scales, seaweed, ambergris, flower oils, sulfides, acids and other sometimes unglamorous ingredients, mixes them in endlessly varied combinations, whips them with imaginative advertising and promotion, and winds up selling some $10 billion worth of hopes and dreams each year. It is a bruisingly competitive business that requires little capital to enter but plenty of moxie to survive in. An entrepreneur with creative flair can still rise fast, though that is getting harder all the time, and an established company can go downhill with blinding speed after the founding genius dies (Helena Rubinstein and Max Factor have been absorbed by conglomerates, and are in varying degrees of trouble now). Through all the turmoil, a few cosmetics firms have catered to the narcissistic tastes of the "me generation" skillfully enough to keep growing rapidly; and one, Revlon, Inc., has developed into a General Motors of beauty.
In its kaleidoscopically changing industry, Revlon stands out for at least two reasons. While most of its rivals concentrate on either class or mass markets, Revlon sells cosmetics, toiletries and fragrances in every price range through every type of retail outlet, from the most exclusive department stores and beauty salons to the most crowded discount houses (it is even test-selling a few products in supermarkets). Equally important, it has survived triumphantly the moment of maximum danger for a cosmetics company: the death of the founder. The test came four years ago with the terminal illness of Charles Revson, a free-spending, profane, tyrannical but occasionally lovable entrepreneur who had built Revlon largely on his own unfailing instinct for what women would regard as glamorous--deciding every design detail of every package and firing legions of aides and admen.
Possibly sensing that his company had grown too big to be run out of his hat, Revson in late 1974 recruited as his successor a man with a completely different personality: Michel Christian Bergerac. Tall, suave and mustached, he is a French-born Basque who looks and talks (in Gallic-flavored English) like the kind of smoothy who should be running a cosmetics empire. But he started out as an electric power salesman, trained as a manager in the ITT cauldron, and rose to head that conglomerate's European operations, a job that taught him about acquisitions, finance, and the making and marketing of just about anything. At Revlon, while continuing to broaden the product line and promoting some new merchandising ideas, Chairman Bergerac, now 46, talks a language that was long unfamiliar to the cosmetics trade. It is a lingo of inventory control, strict manufacturing standards and tight, detailed budgets. The payoff: sales and profits have multiplied about 2% times during his four years as boss, growing more than twice as fast as the industry average. This year Revlon will earn about $125 million on sales of $1.5 billion. It will become the first company ever to sell $1 billion worth of beauty products through retail stores.*
Presuming, that is, that Christmas sales go as well as Bergerac and other cosmetics executives have every reason to expect. About one-third of all their sales are rung up between Thanksgiving and Christmas, when men indulge their women and women indulge themselves. Tis the season when department-store cosmetics counters are jammed and the air redolent of thousands of mixed scents as women spray themselves with a bit of this and a touch of that. Men's eyes are often struck by the sight of a woman daubing lipstick onto her hand to get a better idea of the shade--and leaving five or six stripes of what looks like war paint.
This bustle has been matched in non-cosmetics areas of many stores in the early days of the Christmas season. Shoppers, or at least lookers, have thronged stores in Boston and Atlanta; in Dallas, weekend motorists have had to cruise endlessly before finding a vacant space in shopping-center parking lots. But retailers still do not have a feel for how much the public will buy in a season of inflation-pinched pocket books and recession fears. Though some detect a one-last-fling attitude on the part of customers, many merchants have been notably cautious in stocking up, largely because high interest rates make borrowing to carry a large inventory too much of a risk. Says Leonard Lauder, president of Estee Lauder Inc., Revlon's toughest rival in the high-priced end of the cosmetics business: "The thing I predict with absolute certainty for this Christmas is that the people who wait until Dec. 24 to do their shopping will find the shelves bare."
Whatever happens to other sales, retailers and manufacturers happily agree that cosmetics will boom. Perfumes, bath oils, makeup kits and the like are always among the most popular gifts. Besides, says Eve Levinson, vice president of the California-based Broadway chain of 47 department stores: "There is this tremendous interest in self-gratification and ego satisfaction, which heightens demand for luxury items such as designer fragrances." She refers to the trend among leading dress designers--Bill Blass, Anne Klein, Halston--to sign their names to perfumes formulated and sold by cosmetics houses.
Nor would a recession in 1979 be likely to hurt the industry much. Cosmetics sales traditionally continue rising during a mild economic downturn, and dip only slightly in a severe one. Some top-of-the-line items benefit from hard times: a man who wants to give a woman a stunning gift but decides that a $150 handbag, say, would leave his wallet too thin, may select a $50 bottle of perfume. In the low-priced field, remarks Bergerac, any woman can spend $2.25 for a lipstick that will brighten her mood as well as her appearance. Says he: "When things get rough, women tend to be a little depressed, and somewhere along the line it is nice to go get some cosmetics and feel good."
The whole industry revolves around making women feel good--which they rarely can unless they think they look attractive. True, sales of men's colognes, skin toners and other cosmetics have been rising fast and now account for a large but indeterminate fraction of the business. Men too have been captivated by the growing national preoccupation with youthful appearance and bodily fitness. Still, women buy about 95% of men's cosmetics as presents for husbands, boyfriends and fathers, many of whom also cheat by dabbing on some of the women's creams and foundation colorings with the bathroom door closed. In any event, almost all the business revolves directly around the female mind and body, subjects of endless diversity and fascination.
Demographic and social changes reward cosmetics firms that stay on top of them, and punish those that do not. As birth rates drop and the postwar babies reach their 30s, the population is aging. That presents a difficult problem, alas, for cosmetics makers, who know only too well that any appeal to women who are "mature" or "experienced" (or whatever other euphemism might be dreamed up for older women) would be the kiss of death. One response that Bergerac has made is to retarget Revlon's lowest-priced line, Natural Wonder, once aimed specifically at teenagers, to reach women aged 18 to 34--not by changing the products but by picturing slightly older females in the ads. Just over half of all American women now have jobs vs. less than a third in 1968, and that is a boon for the industry. Working women have both the need and the cash to buy cosmetics, and use 30% more of them than housewives do. But they cannot spend hours making up between breakfast and bus stop, so they demand cosmetics that can be put on quickly and easily, at least for office wear.
By far the most intriguing--and riskiest--changes are those that cosmetics makers try in order to fit their products to women's mental pictures of themselves. Theirs is a complicated and mysterious business in which product, packaging and advertising must work together to present a unified appeal to emotions that may be partly unconscious. Revlon has pushed this psychological approach as hard as anyone, as is best illustrated by a three-part tale that also is a commentary on American lifestyles.
By 1973, women quite obviously had become emancipated and ready to meet men as equals. In one response to that attitude, cosmetics companies rushed out the "natural look" cosmetics, notably light lip gloss, moisturizers and subtle blushers. But what kind of fragrance would fit the liberated aura? Revson, in his last burst of creative inspiration, directed the development of a blend of floral and herbal scents that the p.r. people (and many users) avow has a "clean, fresh" aroma. As something of a last testament, Revson named the product after himself: "Charlie." Marketing it was mostly left to Bergerac. He chose ads that show Model Shelley Hack, 27, sauntering through life with a jaunty, devil-may-care stride--past Big Ben or the Arc de Triomphe. The campaign sold--and how! Charlie became the world's top-selling fragrance and catapulted Revlon from the minor leagues to the big time in the scent market.
Alas, in the mercurial cosmetics business, almost all products have short half-lives, and Charlie sales have started to decline. But before they did, Bergerac and Revlon were ready with both an explanation and a new product. The trend to liberation, Bergerac believes, masked a deep, underlying yearning: "You hear that women want to 'do their own thing,' but there are still quite a lot of women around who are romantic, women who like a lot of nice fluffy or lacy things. There are a lot of ladies who like to be kissed in the moonlight, strange as that may sound." And how did he know that, since, it is the kind of feeling unlikely to be turned up by a solemn market survey? Bergerac replies, with a delighted chuckle: "In this business you guess a lot."
Three years ago, even before Charlie was approaching its peak, Revlon came up with Jontue, a mixture of floral scents that smells rather like gardenia and that, by common consent, is a bit "sexier" than Charlie's jasmine. The Jontue ads feature models who wear filmy white gowns amid swirling, silvery mists, and the copy proclaims that, thanks to Jontue, they are "Sensual . . . yet with a touch of innocence." Result: Jontue has rocketed to No. 2 in world fragrance sales, right behind Charlie.
In the more visible paint-and-powdery side of the business, the kings of cosmetics are now promoting a new, new smoky look that reflects a hunger for mystery and allure. In part it is a response to a severely practical consideration: the popularity of discos. Under their garish lights, notes Aileen Mehle, who writes a newspaper gossip column as Suzy and is a Revlon director, a woman wearing natural-look makeup will simply vanish into the glare. Solution: highlight the eyes and lips with dark shades that will catch male eyes. What kind of fragrance goes with that? Opium, perhaps. It is a heavy, spicy perfume put out by Yves St. Laurent for $100 an ounce; Revlon has a lighter-scented version for about $9.50.
This ensemble suggests to Bergerac and his aides an exotic look and aura reminiscent of Gene Tierney in the 1940s movie The Shanghai Gesture. So they have put together ads picturing Model Lauren Hutton, now 35 and long Revlon's high-glamour symbol, wearing a veiled hat to tout the Veiled Reds lipstick shade--the one touched with midnight blue--in Revlon's high-priced Ultima II line. For its dark lipsticks and smoky eye shadow, the company also subsidizes department store promotions featuring 1940s costumes and even ceiling fans to suggest old movies about the Far East. All that gets pretty far removed from discos; certainly Revlon's admen would not dream of suggesting that a woman go disco dancing in a veiled hat. But if disco lights dictate dark lips and eyes, and that suggests an exotic aura of which veils are a symbol--well, who gives a damn about logic?
Other cosmetics makers dismiss the Gene Tierney look as, literally, old hat, but they agree enthusiastically with Bergerac on the more general theme that romance and mystery are back in, supplementing if not replacing the natural look. Having established their independence, women can shift from daytime pants to dressy fashions at night, and choose makeup and fragrances to match. "As we move from the '70s into the '80s, there is a general shift from feminist to feminine," says Frederick Scott, vice president of Elizabeth Arden. Marilyn Miglin, owner of a cosmetics salon on Chicago's Gold Coast, agrees: "The trend now is switching back to pure glamour." Which does not necessarily mean that the natural look and the life-style it suggests are out: happily for cosmetics sales, both it and smoky mystery can live in peaceful coexistence. One adman puts the point pithily: "Nobody is giving up sex for jogging. People like to do both."
It is rather surprising that Revlon's Bergerac has been so successful in sensing such subtle shifts in women's psychology and the subliminal instincts that shape it. A multinational manager who probably would do as well selling steel ingots or instant pancakes, Bergerac was trained in the exacting school run by flinty Harold Geneen, the creator of ITT.
Born in the French resort town of Biarritz, the son of a chief of the local gas and electric company, Bergerac studied economics and political science at the Sorbonne and Cambridge. He came to the U.S. at 21, earned an M.B.A. from U.C.L.A., and for one six-month period worked as a ranch hand roping horses in Oregon. He joined Cannon Electric Co. of Los Angeles as a salesman, and in three years worked up to international vice president. Meanwhile, he became a U.S. citizen and married Norma Langstaff, a Los Angeles abstract painter who has had several art shows. In 1963, ITT acquired Cannon and shortly thereafter ordered Bergerac back to Europe to straighten out a small group of companies that were losing money.
Geneen was then building ITT into the world's biggest conglomerate; in Europe the firm's satellite companies sold life insurance and made food products, auto parts and construction materials, among many other things--including a few cosmetics. Bergerac helped negotiate about 100 acquisitions of companies for ITT. In 1971, at the age of 39, he was promoted to the job of running all ITT European operations from a base in Brussels. By encouraging still more acquisitions and spurring the companies' internal growth, he doubled European sales during the next three years to $5 billion. He was a prime candidate to follow Geneen as head of ITT when Revson, who realized he was dying of cancer, started a search for a successor who could bring the company professional management.
Revson knew the Bergerac name; Michel's older brother Jacques, a onetime movie actor and briefly the husband of Ginger Rogers, worked for Revlon (he heads its French operations). Michel and Revson had a meeting at the Palm restaurant in Manhattan, at which, another Revlon executive recalls, the clatter of dishes kept drowning out Revson's words, and Revson could scarcely fathom Bergerac's accent; neither understood much of what the other said. Bergerac remembers asking Revson at another meeting: "Why do you want somebody like me? I have been associated for a long time with basically technical products, so I know a fair amount about factories, marketing and technical engineering, but ..." Revson's reply: "I know all that, but you have one thing this company needs. You know how to make money."
Why did Bergerac leave ITT to head a much smaller, though still giant, company? One reason may have been the grind of ITT. Geneen drove his executives at a frenzied pace; in Brussels, Bergerac worked about 80 hours a week. Geneen also conducted marathon monthly meetings that sometimes lasted for four days, at which subordinates were expected to spout reams of figures on cue and might be publicly humiliated by the boss if they could not do it. Associates remember Bergerac as always smiling and calm in this pressure cooker, but they cannot imagine that he enjoyed it.
Bergerac will now work as late into the night as may be required at the Revlon headquarters in Manhattan's General Motors Building (known as General Odors because several cosmetics firms are perched there). But he believes that "if one gets completely immersed in work seven days a week, one loses his balance and that is not good." So he insists on leaving weekends free to take his wife and daughter Mary Jennifer, 20,* to the theater or to his 300-acre Fox Ridge Farm in upstate New York. There, Bergerac has surrounded himself with a menagerie: dogs, ducks, goats, guinea hens, sheep, steers.
The farm is not a commercial venture. Bergerac simply loves animals and delights in feeding lettuce to a goat named Dudley by hand. He sees no inconsistency in also being a big-game hunter who takes his family on an African safari almost every year; he considers Kenya the most beautiful place in the world. At Revlon, he has fixed up a sanctuary next to the lavish chairman's office: an African room decorated with an antelope-skin rug and a huge mural of Kenyan plains showing giraffe, zebra, water buffalo and other animals and that he can gaze at to rest his eyes from reading Revlon budgets. Though his company must stay attuned to the disco scene, Outdoorsman Bergerac has no taste for it himself. "You will never see me in Studio 54," he vows.
To induce Bergerac to switch companies, Revson offered him one of the lushest deals hi corporate history: a $1.5 million bonus just to sign, plus $325,000 a year guaranteed, plus some incentive payments geared to the growth of sales and profits. Last year Bergerac collected $794,000. The deal for a while caused the financial press to call Bergerac by the spectacularly inappropriate nickname of "Catfish," after Catfish Hunter, the pitcher whom the Yankees signed to another seven-figure contract at about the same time. Oddly, in Brussels, Bergerac presented himself as an American executive called Mike; back in the U.S. he is referred to as Michel, which seems more appropriate for a cosmetics king.
Bergerac, a man of broad intellectual interests--art, architecture, African geography and history --clearly is fascinated at running a business that is firmly based on psychology and fashion. He gossips delightedly about a competing company's "nose" (perfume tester) who, he insists, has hardly any sense of smell at all, and he is wryly amused by the copycat nature of the industry. Any new shade or fragrance that looks salable will almost instantly spur development of three or four nearly identical competing products. Says Bergerac: "Maybe that is one definition of creativity." He denies that Revlon stoops to any industrial espionage, though he believes competitors do and suspects that such shenanigans are inefficient anyway. More than once he has floated false rumors of what products Revlon would introduce next--and then sat back to laugh while rivals scrambled to reproduce those nonexistent products. Did he have any trouble adjusting from the hard-goods world of delivery schedules and manufacturing specifications to the selling of glamour and other intangibles based sometimes on plain old hunch? On the contrary. Says he: "It's like being reborn!"
The cosmetics industry, of course, is not all paint and puffery. It has a hard technical side, as Bergerac points out. For example, a fragrance may exude an alluring aroma when first sprayed on but then change or lose its scent altogether in an hour, unless manufacturers observe the strictest quality control. Product testing can be as grueling as in a factory making any other kind of goods. To be sure that makeup will withstand long wear, Revlon sometimes requires a woman to sit for hours in a room where the temperature is 90DEG F. and the humidity 100%; windshield wipers have to clear away the steam from the windows so that analysts can peer in.
There are special problems in creating makeup for black women, and the major cosmetics houses long neglected them. All skin "exfoliates"; minute pieces come loose and peel off, with the result that everybody gets a new coat of skin every 28 days or so. On white women the effect is often unnoticeable, but the exfoliation can make ashen spots show up on dark skin, unless it is covered with special emollients. The upper and lower lips of black women sometimes differ in color--slightly, but enough to require application of a special base to the relatively lighter lower lip if a lipstick is not to come out two different shades. To tap this market, Revlon three years ago brought out a line of Polished Ambers cosmetics--under the Revlon name rather than some specially invented one, as Bergerac proudly notes. He explains: "In doing it that way you do not discriminate. What we are saying is that black ladies are important enough for us to use our own name in appealing to them." (The courtly Bergerac still uses the word "ladies" quite as often as "women.")
The financial side of the business was often overlooked by the original entrepreneurial managers, who relied on high profit margins to cover up sloppiness. Under Charles Revson, Revlon ground out products in huge volumes, took long risks with new lines and often wound up getting piles of merchandise returned from stores. Many other cosmetics makers still do, but at Revlon, Bergerac has put in tight inventory controls and persuaded customers to pay bills more promptly. He figures that if the company were still being run the way it was when he arrived, it would have to borrow $350 million of additional capital to finance its operations and pay $35 million a year in interest. Saving that much, he says, permits Revlon to "take creative flyers" on some product lines that it otherwise would not introduce--Polished Ambers, for instance.
Some analysts and even company insiders wonder whether Revlon can maintain creativity in an atmosphere of tight control. Bergerac insists that it can. To him, creativity is not a matter of sitting around waiting for inspiration to strike, but of striving against deadlines to design products, packages and ads for carefully targeted markets.
Unlike Charles Revson, Bergerac does not devise new colors or designs; that is done by Cosmetic and Fragrance President Paul Woolard and executives grouped into seven "houses," which are practically minicompanies, each concentrating on a particular price range and type of customer. But Bergerac must approve all major changes, and he is an exacting judge with an eye for detail. The model in the Jontue ads is pictured leading a white horse; to Outdoorsman Bergerac the first horse that subordinates showed him looked like a sway-backed plow dragger. The boss bought his admen a book on horses and insisted that they study it to pick a more imposing beast. They chose an Arabian stallion that is now pictured in almost every Jontue ad and counter display--a hallmark of Bergerac's approach. He insists that a woman must find at the cosmetics counter the same symbol that may have caught her eye in an ad, so that she can instantly identify the product.
Bergerac has doubled Revlon's advertising budget, to some $135 million this year, and developed a merchandising program called Retail Partners, under which Revlon designs displays and provides promotional materials for stores to encourage them to put on splashy shows. One for Bordeaux lipstick, nail polish and other cosmetics took a whole floor of Manhattan's Bonwit Teller; Revlon supplied books on wine and even old wine barrels to show off. When a Revlon product is a hit, Bergerac quickly follows it with others under the same name. Charlie, for example, has spread since 1974 from a fragrance to a line of cosmetics and soap.
Most of all, Bergerac nags his managers to identify clearly the customer that a particular product is aimed at: her tastes, attitudes, psychology. When he arrived, the Borghese brand of cleansers, moisturizers and fragrances had no particular image beyond high price. Under Bergerac's constant questioning about "Who is the Borghese woman?" aides finally defined her as a person of sophisticated elegance--and, one gathers, refined eroticism. Ads for Borghese perfume ("The Perfume of the Night") feature an obviously nude woman, her head and shoulders bathed in a rosy glow, the rest of her body outlined in deep shadow. Bergerac's favorite ad, which shows a bare-breasted Borghese woman in silhouette, also ran in the Revlon annual report.
Borghese's name, of course, was also chosen (by Revson) to lend a note of elegance; one woman who uses the perfume was let down to discover that it came from Revlon. Says she: "I bought it because I thought it was Italian." Cosmetics names in general are picked to convey some image, but among the thousands of nail polish and lipstick shade names, the images get a bit fuzzy. In Revlon's line, the appeal of Passionata Pink or Pink Vivido might be clear enough. But Blase Apricot? Bergerac himself laughingly wonders, "What kind of psychological profile could you draw for the woman who buys Blase Apricot?"
Hype and hoopla apart, is there any difference between expensive and popular-priced cosmetics? Yes, there is some. High-priced eye shadow may contain fish scales for extra shine; prestige perfumes have more natural essential oils and fewer synthetic ones than cheaper scents. But Francis Le Cates Jr., a cosmetics analyst at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, estimates that on average only 80 of the cosmetics sales dollar goes to pay for ingredients. The extra cost of the better ones used in prestige products comes nowhere near accounting for the difference in selling price. The real difference is in fancier packaging, splashier promotion, and the fact that the swankier cosmetics are made in limited quantity for sale through prestige stores, which raises the manufacturing cost per unit.
High price is itself a selling point in cosmetics, a fact about which Bergerac is not the least apologetic. Asked if a $2.50 lipstick and a $6 lipstick are just the same product in a different case, he replies that the formulas are changed, but swiftly shoots back a question of his own. "Suppose they were the same and you knew it? Which would you buy for your wife if you wanted to impress her? If spending more makes you feel better, why not do it? How can you put a price on happiness?"
For investors, happiness is rising sales and profits, and Bergerac has certainly given them that. Sales jumped from $639 million in 1974, Revson's last year, to $1.1 billion in 1977. Profits rose even faster, from $54 million in 1974 to $98 million last year. That includes international operations; Revlon manufactures in 25 countries and sells in more than 100. Bergerac is negotiating with officials of the Soviet Ministry of Food Industry, which has jurisdiction over cosmetics, to work out a deal to sell Revlon products in the U.S.S.R. "The market is clearly enormous," he says. Foreign cosmetics are a big black-market item in the Soviet Union, because the stodgily run government factories do not turn out lipsticks and fragrances in the quantity and variety that women yearn to buy.
About a third of Revlon's sales come from its health-care business: drugs to control high blood pressure, antiacne soaps, diagnostic laboratories. Revson began diversifying into this field; Bergerac has pushed much further, mostly by acquisition. The products are related, he notes, and Revlon's pretax profit margins in health care (25.5%) are even higher than in beauty products (20.6%).
In the cosmetics industry, a gossipy and sometimes backbiting trade, the acquisitions have stirred talk that Bergerac intends to make Revlon another ITT. The president of one competing firm goes so far as to predict that in ten years Revlon will no longer be basically a cosmetics company but a conglomerate. Bergerac laughs off the idea, and his bubbling delight in the cosmetics business does make it seem farfetched. Some rivals and retailers also grumble that Revlon is cheapening its image by toying with the idea of selling in supermarkets. Bergerac replies that it is only testing that approach in Dallas, Denver, Phoenix and Seattle, and merely for products of the low-priced Natural Wonder line.
Successful as the company has been, the market is so mercurial that no cosmetics firm can ever really be safe; a bad mistake can be ruinous. A classic example is Max Factor's "Just Call Me Maxi" fragrance, introduced last year to compete with Charlie. It came about four years too late, as taste was at the point of switching back to romance and mystery, and bombed so badly that Factor plunged deep into the red; the debacle is widely believed to have cost President Sam Kalish, a Revlon alumnus, his job.
If Revlon does stumble, plenty of competitors are waiting to snatch away its customers. Estee Lauder, a family-owned company that stresses a theme of understated elegance in its promotions, concentrates entirely on prestige stores and outsells Revlon in them 3 to 1. In the popular-priced field, Avon still holds a lead, though Revlon has been catching up. In the rush to sign up big-name clothes designers to put their names on perfumes, other firms have been quite as aggressive as Revlon. Revlon bagged Bill Blass, but Norton Simon Inc., parent company of Max Factor, got Halston, and Helena Rubinstein took Anne Klein. Calvin Klein has built up a big business operating on his own.
In general the large companies probably will take an ever increasing share of the market, because they have the money for the extensive research, intensive promotion and building up of widespread distribution networks. The growth of cosmetics sales is expected to slow a bit, to perhaps 8% or 8.5% annually over the next few years, from 9% to 12.5% during 1976-77-78. One reason is that cosmetics companies are suffering from their own promotional success; many women now regard cosmetics as necessities to be bought all the time, rather than as luxury items to splurge on when incomes rise. That attitude helps to keep cosmetics sales from falling during a recession, but prevents them from rising as fast as sales of some other goods during a boom.
Still, the industry's hold on its customers is secure, and one has only to prowl the stores to find out why. At Bloomingdale's in Manhattan last week, a blue-jeaned young woman sat at the counter being made up by a saleswoman while her husband watched eagerly. She hesitated at first when the bill for her face makeup--eye shadow, foundation, mascara, liners, lip pencils--came to $42. But she gave in and paid when her husband murmured, "You really look great, honey." Then he turned to the salesgirl and asked, "Isn't she pretty?" No one who saw the light in his eyes would have to ask what the woman got for her $42.
* Avon beat Revlon into the billion-dollar club six years ago, but it sells only door to door. The remainder of Revlon's sales come from products as varied as Turns, blood plasma and contact lens cleaner.* Son Randolph, 23, attends Stanford.
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