How The Perfect Mac Cosmetics Sales Rep Wears Their Makeup

Loyal customers are shedding tears over the sudden scarcity of Way Off-white cosmetics. (Beak O'Leary/The Washington Post)

The angry rumblings and confused lamentations are all over social media. They're coming from diehard customers of Manner Fair cosmetics, a brand founded in 1973 to cater to African American women at a time when major makeup companies essentially ignored them.

Where is the Bronze Loose Powder? Where'southward the Perfect Finish Souffle Makeup? What almost the Brown Sugar Foundation Stick?

Customers who rely on Mode Fair for verbal peel tone matches and perfectly flattering lipsticks take been unable to locate their favorite products — or whatever products at all. In stores and online, they're finding color selections so skimpy and stock so depleted there has been trivial for sales representatives to fifty-fifty sell. Fifty-fifty counter clerks accept been request: What'southward going on?

Fashion Fair's response has been, for many loyalists, deeply unsatisfying.

"Cheers for your patience as we rebuild our inventories."

"We admit that stock has been low in previous months; nonetheless, the replenishment procedure [is] underway!"

"Are they going out of business?" asks longtime client Allana Smith.

"No," says Linda Johnson Rice, chairman of Johnson Publishing Co., which owns the makeup line. "We're not going out of business organisation."

But Mode Fair is in upheaval — and customers have skilful reason to question its survival.

Breaking ground

Beauty products are not essentials. But in those niggling bottles and jars are fragments of a social contract, elixirs of reassurance, drops of pure pleasure — and in the case of Fashion Fair, a good bit of proud history.

The brand was launched by Johnson Publishing, the Chicago-based company established past John and Eunice Johnson in 1942. For decades, information technology dominated the blackness media market with Ebony and Jet magazines. It as well created Ebony Way Off-white — a traveling roadshow of designer frocks and entertainment that rolled cultural uplift, savvy marketing and fundraising into one dazzling stage extravaganza.

Eunice Johnson noticed that the African American models who twirled down her runways were mixing their own foundations because they had trouble finding makeup to match their complexion. She took those homemade concoctions to chemists, and a makeup line was built-in.

When the brand arrived at retail counters, with its fiddling pink compacts and pinkish lipstick tubes, it wasn't merely promoting beauty and glamour but also self-esteem and confidence, and information technology served equally a dynamic example study in the potential of black entrepreneurs and black consumers.

[Hip-hop was poised to conquer style. Why did information technology stop brusque?]

Fashion Fair addressed the beauty desires of black women long before Black Opal began touting skin care or MAC cosmetics rolled out its concentrated pigments and marketing campaigns that embraced everyone from the black girl-adjacent-door to drag queens. Fashion Fair came well before Estée Lauder and Clinique discovered the righteous potential in expanding their color palettes and diversifying their advertising.

It remains the only major department shop cosmetics brand catering specifically to black women. It is still fully endemic and operated past Johnson Publishing. And the name still resonates.

"As a child, my parents used to purchase Ebony and Jet. The models were stunning," recalls Allana Smith, who grew up in Brooklyn. "As a 16-twelvemonth-old kid, I think thinking, 'I want to look like that when I grow upward.' "

At present 41 and still living in Brooklyn, Smith has been using Fashion Fair products for 15 years. She receives regular compliments on her skin. People can't even tell she's wearing makeup, Smith says.

Then all she wants to know is this: Where can I become my Oil-Free Perfect Finish Cream-to-Pulverisation foundation in Moka Moka? Where?

She made the rounds of her local Macy'due south this yr and came up empty-handed. At Brooklyn'south Fulton Street store, she asked the sales staff to recommend some other Fashion Fair color — a virtually-lucifer to suffice until her shade was available. But they had nothing; they told Smith they hadn't had a delivery from Manner Fair in nearly a year.

"Our buyers and senior managers are on it," says Macy's spokesperson Elina Kazan. The department store has carried Fashion Fair for more than thirty years. "Nosotros've been in abiding advice with Fashion Off-white almost when we'll be in receipt of goods."

When might that be? "Nosotros are waiting," Kazan says, after a lengthy intermission. "As soon as we get it, we'll put information technology out at that place for customers."

A changing market

On a recent October morning, Fashion Fair's valuable real estate at the Metro Center Macy'southward was deserted. At that place were a few boxes of foundation on the glass shelves. A couple dozen packages of eye shadow were stored inside a glass-front case. Two makeup brushes were propped in a glass beaker on a lone display table — part of a special promotion that seemed more than of an afterthought. The shelves had a pre-snowstorm grocery store await of scarcity.

Interviews with visitor executives and industry observers suggest that Style Off-white has been squeezed between cultural shifts in the cosmetics market and business challenges specific to a stand up-alone brand.

These are expert times for the U.S. prestige beauty market place, which was worth $11.two billion in 2014 — a three percent bump from 2013, driven by sales of skin-care potions and lip colour, according to the NPD Group.

Simply Fashion Fair is a modest role player in an industry dominated past major corporations: Estée Lauder, L'Oréal, Procter & Chance, LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton. And unlike the others, information technology'south a subsidiary of a troubled media company. Ebony is losing advertisers; the impress edition of Jet closed in 2014. Johnson Publishing has put its historic photo archive up for auction; it has already sold its South Michigan Avenue headquarters.

Johnson Publishing principal executive Desiree Rogers, left, with chairman Linda Johnson Rice at the United Negro College Fund's 66th ceremony dinner in 2010. (Earl Gibson III/Associated Press)

"We're a modest company with upper-case letter constraints. It's not something we're thrilled about," says Desiree Rogers, chief executive of Johnson Publishing and a former social secretary in the early years of the Obama White House.

[Desiree Rogers may have improved Washington's expect. Washington may not have noticed.]

Fashion Off-white's product shortfall congenital up slowly, Rogers says. But it eventually triggered a self-perpetuating bike. Once customers realized products were scarce, they started buying in bulk whenever they could detect them, which drew downwardly stock even more.

Catching up "is not a quick process," Rogers says. "We've inundated our suppliers. We've inundated them with orders . . . [but] I tin't demand they shut down other projects and just practice mine."

Theoretically, these should exist advantageous times for Manner Fair. A recent survey of teenagers past the investment business firm Piper Jaffray & Co. found they favor pocket-size, independent cosmetics lines over large mega-brands.

Merely even if Way Fair had the uppercase to take reward of this trend, "they have to go where the consumer is going," says Stephanie Wissink, a Piper Jaffray managing manager. It was e'er a point of pride that Way Fair was a section store brand, rather than a drugstore one. Just today's younger customers gravitate to multi-make outlets, such as Sephora and Ulta, where they can experiment with a wide range of makeup without a beauty consultant making a hard sell. And Way Off-white doesn't distribute through Sephora or Ulta.

Meanwhile in a "minority majority" culture, Wissink says, black women no longer want or need a separate counter. A host of brands have broadened their color palette to cater to them; a once-ignored customer is now beingness wooed by many suitors.

Three years ago, Way Off-white began to reconsider its position in the market. Makeup artist Sam Fine — famous for working with models Iman and Tyra Banks— signed on equally creative director, and in January 2013, his showtime sheathing drove was touted to the beauty press. By the fall of that year, however, Fine had moved on to Encompass Girl.

In early 2014, Fashion Fair appear that Tia Dantzler, another makeup artist with a celebrated clientele, would take on the role of creative director.

That summertime, a group of dazzler bloggers and journalists were invited to Fashion Off-white's Chicago headquarters for an unveiling of new products and packaging. They were greeted by the brand's recently installed president, Amy Hilliard, as well as Rogers. Dantzler was there, too, providing makeovers for the guests.

They "discussed where the brand was going," recalls makeup creative person Courtney Waldon, who lives in Chicago. "I understood information technology as having a more than modern experience. Consumers my age think of it as something their mom or grandmom would wear."

Waldon, 34, is a fan of MAC and Nars. But she was won over past the silky texture and colors of Manner Fair'southward $25 foam-to-powder foundations.

Terez Baskin, a part-fourth dimension dazzler business writer, liked what she saw that day as well. Simply she besides noticed a trouble. "The colors were great. The pigments were good. But all of that has been done earlier," Baskin says. The leadership team was peculiarly excited most marketing a mascara for the kickoff fourth dimension. But they didn't have any samples to test. They didn't have the full range of foundation colors bachelor either.

"They were excited nigh all the newness," Baskin says. "They gave us a bunch of balloons, just zero to tie them to."

A short time later, customer frustration picked up steam on social media.

Moving forrard

Rogers says Way Off-white has been closing some outlets and remodeling others. The company is likewise redesigning its Web site, which has enjoyed a triple-digit increase in sales, Rogers says. "E-business concern is a big office of the future," she says, "especially for women replenishing what they already take."

Manner Fair has retired its signature pink packaging and replaced it with metallic statuary. A fresh advertising entrada with new "faces" volition launch in 2016 and Fashion Fair'due south social media has been dotted with images of actresses such equally Tika Sumpter, Raven-Symoné, Ciara and others who might appeal to a younger demographic.

Only meanwhile, the empty shelves are testing the patience of retailers such as Macy'due south, Dillard'south and Belk. Macy's worries that frustrations customers have with Manner Fair will plough into frustration with their stores. Shoppers believe they are watching a historic brand wither — despite the company's denials.

So they're looking elsewhere. Avon has a tempting cream-to-pulverisation makeup in deep tones and information technology'south only near $12.

Rogers says the Manner Fair transformation is almost 75 percent complete. "We know we have to do better, and we volition," she says. "Nosotros're not here to brand an excuse simply to thank [customers] for their business. The worst is over."

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/what-happened-to-fashion-fair-why-the-black-cosmetics-brand-is-so-hard-to-find/2015/10/27/17416cf0-72be-11e5-8d93-0af317ed58c9_story.html

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