Whose Brand Is It, Anyway?

Terri Williamson did a textbook job of launching Glow. Jennifer Lopez and her team did a textbook job of launching Glow by J.Lo. And then their worlds collided.

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There was one piece missing: the name. If Terri Williamson was going to build a great brand, she would need a great name. She'd thought about it constantly and looked high and low for inspiration. She wanted something simple, clean, expressive -- a perfect reflection of the products she'd be selling. She jotted down all kinds of possibilities, but none seemed quite right.

Then, one Sunday, she was standing outside her church, the famous Agape Church of Religious Science, renowned for its minister, the Reverend Michael Beckwith, and its 150-person choir, including members of Madonna's backup group and other celebrity singers. As she was getting ready to go inside, she ran into a friend, who commented on how happy she looked. "You have a glow about you," the friend said.

"I thought, 'Glow,' " Williamson recalls. "What a great name!"

The word was still running through her mind when Beckwith began his sermon. "He started to talk, and I swear that every other word out of his mouth was glow. I thought, 'This is a sign from God.'"

Williamson was ready for such a sign. A management consultant for eight years, ever since she'd gotten her M.B.A. from the University of Chicago, she had spent a lot of time around start-up companies and had found the entrepreneurial spirit contagious. Now she wanted to launch her own business, something involving scented bath and body products. She'd been fooling around with them since the age of five, when she'd made bath sachets out of Kleenex, Dixie cups, and perfume and given them to her mother and sister as Christmas presents. In high school and college, she'd excelled at chemistry, and she'd been experimenting with fragrances her entire adult life, constantly mixing up body lotions and bath potions in her kitchen.

As soon as she got home from church, Williamson began searching the Web to see if anybody else had claimed the word glow as a brand name for a cosmetics or fragrance business. To her delight, she found nothing. "At that moment, it all gelled," she recalls, thinking back to February 1999. "The name just absolutely crystallized everything for me. You know, you reach a point, when you're starting a business, that there is just no way you can't do it. I mean, everything in your body, everything in your mind tells you that you must go forward because you can already envision success."

The next day, Williamson started building her new brand, Glow.

About a year and half later, Andy Hilfiger was struck by a similar epiphany. A professional rock musician, he had been working with his older brother, Tommy, at Tommy Hilfiger Corp. since 1991. Among other things, he'd been in charge of promoting the brand by dressing rock and hip-hop stars in Tommy Hilfiger clothes. By most accounts, the company's takeoff had come in March 1994 when Andy went to Snoop Doggy Dogg's hotel and gave him a rugby shirt emblazoned with the Hilfiger logo to wear on Saturday Night Live that evening. In the year that followed Snoop's appearance, the company's sales climbed by almost $100 million, and Tommy Hilfiger Corp. became the model for businesses seeking to tap Gen-Y -- the 60 million or so kids born after 1978 who make up the largest and most affluent generation in American history.

Andy Hilfiger had played a key role. As vice president of publicity for Tommy Jeans, he had dressed Aaliyah, Britney Spears, the Fugees, Kid Rock, Sheryl Crow, Kate Hudson, The Who, the Rolling Stones, the Ramones, Cheap Trick, Metallica, TLC, and Destiny's Child, among others. While Levi Strauss faltered, Tommy Hilfiger became the denim of the new generation. On the street, they called it Tommy Hill, a phrase that turned up repeatedly in hip-hop lyrics: "Stick up kids with the Tommy Hill wear the mask," sang the Fugees.

The success of the strategy got Andy Hilfiger to thinking. Instead of getting a star to promote a product, he wondered, why not have the star launch the product? The more he thought about it, the more convinced he became that the time was ripe to start a sort of clearing-house for celebrities who wanted to build their own fashion companies. He felt ready to go out on his own, and his brother promised to help. In February 2001, Hilfiger and his partner, Joe Lamastra, launched MEFI (for Music Entertainment Fashion Inc.). The first celebrity they went after was Jennifer Lopez.

Hilfiger had known Lopez's manager, Benny Medina, for many years, and he was aware that Medina and Lopez were interested in doing a clothing line. It was, of course, a natural. An explosive success in music and film with broad crossover appeal, the then-30-year-old J.Lo would soon be starring in movies like The Wedding Planner and Maid in Manhattan, and getting $12 million a picture. Her first album had gone five times platinum, and her next two debuted at No. 1 on the pop charts. At the same time, she'd become a femme fatale of fashion, setting the standard for provocative dressing at the Grammy and the Academy Awards ceremonies. Hilfiger, Medina, and Lopez started talking, and in April 2001 announced the formation of Sweetface Fashion Co., LLC, a partnership between Lopez and MEFI.

Sweetface was to be the vehicle for creating -- or licensing others to create -- a full range of fashion products that would allow Lopez's Gen-Y fans to emulate her style. There would be sportswear, eyewear, swimwear, intimate wear, just about every kind of wear. What would tie everything together would be the brand: J.Lo by Jennifer Lopez. "It has huge potential," Kal Ruttenstein, Bloomingdale's senior vice president for fashion direction, gushed to Women's Wear Daily. "Jennifer Lopez has an image that is perfect for fashion right now." Other people had the same reaction. "Our phones rang off the hook," says Hilfiger.

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