Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, May 18, 1994 TAG: 9405180078
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: B8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ERIKA BOLSTAD STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
``This is my friend,'' Glisson said, holding up the case. ``This is `Red.'''
Glisson was at the Plantation Road cosmetics plant Tuesday to welcome 123 Elizabeth Arden sales representatives to the area for a sales conference and tour of the plant.
The company estimated 95 percent of its sales force never had been inside its largest manufacturing plant. Plant staff treated them to a grand tour, complete with a travel guide called ``Elizabeth Arden and Virginia: A Tradition of Beauty.''
Bringing them to the plant filled several purposes, said Arden Executive Vice President Paul Masturzo.
``As a field person you're pretty much by yourself,'' Masturzo said. ``It's rare to meet and visit people who put the product out there.
``For the people at the plant, they get to meet those who are the end receivers of what they work on every day. The sales staff gets to hear, touch, feel and see what is out there and what goes into the product.''
Seeing the way the plant works gives the salespeople a better understanding of the company and what they can do to sell more Elizabeth Arden products.
Salespeople can be very impatient, said Arden spokeswoman Susan Arnot Heaney. Seeing the plant and understanding the production side of the business allows them to be better at their jobs.
For Elizabeth Arden, one of the four largest-selling prestige cosmetic lines in the United States, planning and development of new products is carried out months in advance.
Elizabeth Arden is known as a company with loyal but older customers. Competitors, chiefly Estee Lauder and Clinique, have won sales from younger women.
So Elizabeth Arden is looking for customers such as Miss Virginia and women her age.
The best news for the company came in a report issued last month by Goldman, Sachs & Co., a Wall Street investment broker, which conducts a semiannual survey of cosmetics and fragrance buyers for major department stores and speciality retailers.
The survey found Elizabeth Arden has pushed Lancome out of the third-place position for best-selling makeup and treatment products. Estee Lauder ranked first and Clinique was second.
Goldman-Sachs attributed Elizabeth Arden's gain to the company's aggressive promotion of products such as the Ceramide capsules skin-care product.
The company's latest and most successful perfume, Sunflowers, is targeted at younger cosmetics buyers. The response surpassed all marketing forecasts, so workers at the Roanoke plant logged in overtime to meet demand for the new perfume.
For some products, such as lipstick, the higher demand wouldn't be a strain on the plant. Lipstick has 16-hour turnaround, meaning Arden workers in Roanoke can fill an order in that amount of time provided they have all of the ingredients.
Perfume, however, must be aged for almost two weeks, so it is harder for the plant to fill unexpected orders.
This fall, Elizabeth Arden will introduce two new perfumes. The Roanoke plant starts production in June for fragrances consumers will sniff in stores in late summer or early fall.
by CNB