Bay Village girls support Lakewood business

[DougHuntingdon]

Girl-powered sales
Lakewood's Bonne Bell sticking with its forever-young strategy
Sunday, August 13, 2006
Emily Hamlin
Plain Dealer Reporter
Cosmetics sales rise and fall more often than the popularity of blue eye shadow.

It's just part of the business, company officials say.

But business has been rough on some of the industry's A-listers this year, largely because of changes in the youth market.

Revlon has lost $145.3 million since January, Procter & Gamble yanked its underperforming Max Factor line from a variety of retailers, and the Bonne Bell Co. in June made companywide cuts, including its senior-citizen work program.

Analysts point to increased competition and less brand loyalty in the teen/tween market (girls 8-18), trends that have some companies scaling back teen lines and focusing on anti-aging products.

But instead of changing strategies, Lakewood-based Bonne Bell will soon launch a health and beauty line for teens and tweens, signaling that it remains committed to the market it has served for 79 years:

Girls.

Sweet success in a pint-size tube

Girls like 9-year-olds Claire Andrews and Liz Burns are the reason Bonne Bell has the No. 1-selling lip product in the country.

The Bay Village fourth-graders combined have 64 tubes of Lip Smackers, and they want more.

They trade them, sort them by size and color and line them up like dominoes. They even made up a special handshake with them.

Bonne Bell launched the flavored lip glosses in 1973, much to the delight of young girls (and the boys who kissed them) everywhere.

It started with just strawberry, but now flavors such as cookie dough and vanilla frosting come in liquid, glitter and tinted glosses, as well as big- and small- size balms.

Some have clips so you can attach them to key rings, and others snap together like puzzle pieces.

The dizzying array of choices brings giddy grins to the faces of Liz and Claire, who want to add at least 40 Smackers to their collection by next year.

The flavors aren't all hits - just the word "mocha" makes Liz wrinkle up her face in disgust - but that doesn't stop the pair from buying them.

"If the flavor sounds cool, we'll get it," Claire says, "and if it sounds gross, we'll at least try it."

Lip Smackers' flavors and affordable price (about $2) have made the product an icon among several generations of women, says Hilary Bell, Bonne Bell's executive vice president of strategic ideation.

"It's like a rite of passage into makeup," Bell says. "You remember when you got your first Lip Smacker. It's like a teddy bear you come back to when you're 20, 30 or 40 even. Just the smell of it takes you back."

More choices, less loyalty

Parma resident Gwynne Haslem remembers wearing Bonne Bell as a teen and having only a handful of other brands to choose from - Cover Girl, Maybelline, Avon . . .

Her 14-year-old daughter, Mariah, rolls her eyes.

"Mom, that was decades ago," she says.

Mariah has an incredible number of choices - beyond Cover Girl and Maybelline, there's M.A.C., Smashbox, Wild & Crazy, N.Y.C., Hard Candy, Urban Decay. The list goes on and on.

Bell traces the boom to the late 1990s, when pop-music princesses Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Mandy Moore and Jessica Simpson arrived on the scene.

Girls - armed with their allowances or their parents' credit cards - coveted those long lashes, pencil-lined eyes and glossy pink lips, and companies saw an opportunity to cash in.

This year, more than 800 new eye/face products, nearly 200 nail products and a whopping 1,000 lip products have come onto the market, said Tom Vierhile, director of ProductScan in Naples, Fla.

"It's like going to your local freeway and watching the cars go by," Vierhile said.

That's great for girls like Mariah, but tough on companies.

Privately owned Bonne Bell doesn't release its financial information but has indicated it's feeling the competition.

Retailers have chipped away at the company's display space over the last few years to squeeze in new brands, and this January stores took an even bigger chunk to make room for new lines from Revlon and L'Oreal.

Having all of those choices makes brand loyalty a thing of the past, said Irma Zandl, principal of the Zandl Group, a New York City-based consumer research group. "Unless a brand has a really particular point of view, one is very much like the next," Zandl said.

Mariah pays so little attention to names on the products she buys that when asked what brands she likes, she has to dump out her makeup bag to read the labels.

She buys products because she likes the colors or features, like an eye shadow that glides on like lipstick.

Price also matters - another reason Zandl says Bonne Bell, Maybelline and Cover Girl tend to get lost in the crowd.

Their middle price point means girls have cheaper alternatives and more expensive (i.e., stylish) ones, she said.

Some analysts attribute the middle market's sales drop to the popularity of designer brands, but Bell says that's not the case.

Girls gravitate toward expensive brands like M.A.C., she said, but most can't afford to fill their purses with the products.

"She'll have one designer lipstick that she'll pull out in front of her friends, but usually the rest of what she's got is a mix of us and the other brands," Bell said.

With so many players in the cosmetics industry, a company can't rely on only its name to attract teens, said Samantha Skey, senior vice president of strategic marketing at Alloy Marketing in New York City.

Skey said companies need to have celebrity spokespersons or to attach themselves to other big brands through licensing - part of what vaulted Bonne Bell into icon status and a key part of its strategy for staying there.

New products, same audience

Shortly after launching Lip Smackers, Bonne Bell teamed with Dr Pepper/Seven Up Inc. to create soft-drink-flavored glosses.

The Dr Pepper flavor quickly became a pop-culture craze and still rates as one of Smackers' best-selling flavors.

Bonne Bell has since added Kool-Aid, Jell-O, Starburst, Skittles and M&Ms glosses through licensing deals with Kraft Food Holdings Inc. and Mars Inc.

"Branching out one of those lines was just the natural next step," said Bob Evans, Bonne Bell's chief operating officer.

The company will launch Starburst-scented and regular Smackers-scented shower collections this fall.

Michele Brown, vice president of licensing for Mars, says the shampoos, conditioners and shower gels will fill a gap in the teen/tween market.

"You use Johnson & Johnson when you're a baby and L'Oreal when you're an adult, but there's no national brand for those in between," Brown said.

Bonne Bell has already proven that young girls respond to products geared toward them, she said, so the customer base is already there.

Most companies have just stumbled onto the tween market (ages 6-12), but Bonne Bell has been tapped in for years, said Robert Atkinson, spokesman for the clothing store Limited Too, which will carry the shower collections in October.

"Our customers recognize that brand name," Atkinson said. "It's popular with the girls and moms, too, because they know it's an age-appropriate line."

Hilary Bell said the new collections are just an extension of what Bonne Bell has been doing for decades - creating fun, affordable cosmetics for girls.

The market might ebb and flow, she said, but the company stands strong.

"We're like a two-story house in an earthquake," Bell said. "We might get bumped around a little bit, but when it's all over, we're still here."

To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:

ehamlin@plaind.com, 216-999-4152