Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 14, 1994 TAG: 9408130020
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: F1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: John Levin
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The company is in the midst of what the perfume industry calls a double launch. For the first time in recent history, Elizabeth Arden is introducing two new fragrance lines in a single season.
This month, the plant's fragrance division is working exclusively on Sun, Moon and Stars. It will devote all of September to manufacturing True Love.
For workers at the Plantation Road cosmetics complex, it is a two-month logistical feat, amassing oils, essences and water, blending them to match precise formulas developed by Arden laboratories in New York, and packaging them in flashy bottles and boxes designed to lure the attention of holiday shoppers this fall.
"It's a major engineering project, to take a new product from prototype to the assembly line," said Don Hergrueter, manager of the Roanoke plant. It's like baking a cake, he said. Then he changed his mind, deciding it's more like being an automaker at the start of a new model year.
Elizabeth Arden's Roanoke operations generally launch one new fragrance line each fall. It fits the production of 1-2 million units of a new line into its annual 17 million-unit capacity that includes ongoing production of Arden standbys: Red Door, White Shoulders, Sunflowers and Passion.
Roanoke is where Arden manufactures new products, Hergrueter said. That's because the company has engineers here who can fine-tune the manufacturing processes to make sure stoppers fit atop bottles as French designers intended.
But Arden, like others in the competitive cosmetics industry, is feeling the pressure to bring more new products to market.
"The life cycle of fragrances has grown shorter each year, and the number of new fragrances is increasing," said John Horvitz, whose Horvitz and Associates Inc. in New York is a cosmetics industry management consultant.
"Each fall, the perfume makers have to come out with something new not to lose their momentum," Horvitz said. "It's getting more like the fashion business, or really more like the movie business. You've got to have a hit every season."
In upscale department stores, counter space for cosmetics is the most desirable real estate, Horvitz said. It is so competitive that retailers allocate the best positions to the most exciting new products.
And although the U.S. perfume industry generates sales of $4.8 billion annually, the sum is divided among 800 fragrances. It is an industry where any scent that lasts more than five years is considered a classic.
But Elizabeth Arden has the reputation of introducing perfume with lasting power and spending enough on promotions and advertising to prod sales over the long haul, said Annette Green, executive director of the Fragrance Foundation, a New York trade association.
Sun, Moon and Stars, she said, is expected to be a dramatic, sophisticated fragrance aimed at 25- to 45-year-old working women who don't mind spending money on themselves. They can do just that, at the rate of $37 per 1.7 ounces.
Elizabeth Arden says Sun, Moon and Stars emits fresh sparkling fruit scents at first whiff, with warm, sensuous Oriental notes emerging later. It will be packaged in a midnight blue orb with a brushed gold stopper and symbols of the sun, moon and stars embossed in gold. It will sell under Arden's Karl Lagerfeld designer brand.
True Love will hit the stores this fall, but its promotional introduction won't come until just before Valentine's Day. Its floral odor is intended to evoke romantic thoughts in women 25 years and younger. Its elliptical bottles will contain blush-colored liquid and are capped by a stopper shaped like two interlocked wedding rings, one of pink gold, the other of yellow gold. A 1.7-ounce bottle will sell for $37.50, and ultimately Arden plans to make it in a variety of forms, from full-strength perfume to bath gels.
But in Roanoke, Hergrueter isn't thinking hearts and flowers.
"They're new products, meaning we've got just one or two weeks to work out all the bugs" give the perfume 14 to 21 days to cure and ship them to the stores.
That's because Christmas is coming and, in the cosmetics industry, it's later than you think.
by CNB