Aside from cachet, the celebrities brought credibility and PR. Within a year of the company's founding, Glow's name began to surface regularly in publications such as Gourmet, InStyle, and The New York Times Magazine, often in connection with a celebrity's name. Whenever such an endorsement appeared, sales would jump. As word spread, retailers began calling to ask about carrying Glow products. The first to contact Williamson -- in January 2000 -- had been Gloss.com, a beauty website. A couple of months later, Bergdorf Goodman showed up, followed by a parade of high-end specialty retailers, more than a dozen altogether, in New York, Orlando, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, and other cities. Williamson divided her time between developing new products and setting up these retail partnerships, while Levy focused on the Glow shop in L.A. (Levy later pulled back from Glow to "pursue other opportunities," she says.)
Then, in 2001, the Ritz-Carlton deal came along, and Williamson seized on it. By partnering with Ritz-Carlton, she realized, she could expand awareness of the Glow brand in her target market, and the cost would be nothing but the time she spent helping Ritz get the bath experience right. For a company that could not afford advertising, such partnerships were ideal mechanisms for promoting the brand. Sometimes they even resulted in free advertising. Gloss.com, for example, used Glow in its own national ads. Subsequently, Reebok featured the company and its two founders in a six-month advertising campaign that was called "Women Defy."
Yet, as important as all that was, Williamson knew that the company's long-term success depended mainly on getting Glow into major department stores. The reason had to do with the economics of bootstrapping in the cosmetics industry. Like any other fashion business, a cosmetics company has to come up with new products continually, or its customer base will go elsewhere in search of the next cool thing. That poses a particular challenge for a small, young company that is rapidly increasing sales of its current products. Most of the cash flow from those sales goes into financing current-product growth (manufacturing, adding inventory, and so on). The capital for new-product development -- from $5,000 to $20,000 per product -- has to come from somewhere else.
OPENING NIGHT: Glow by J.Lo was introduced at a lavish party last June. Attendees included J.Lo; Andy Hilfiger, her business partner; Donald Trump; and Catherine Walsh, who was the driving force behind the fragrance.
That's where the department stores come in. It doesn't take much more time to do a deal with a department-store buyer than to do one with a specialty shop -- but the buyer can deliver up to 130 stores, while the specialty shop has only one. Williamson understood that if she could sign up a couple of national chains, she would have the cash flow she needed to develop new products. She'd been encouraged in the spring of 2001 when she was approached by a buyer at Nordstrom. That fall, the chain ran a test of Glow products in its Columbus, Ohio, store. Despite the struggling economy and 9/11, the test went well, and Nordstrom began a national rollout, beginning with four stores in the Midwest.
Williamson was feeling good about all that as she drove back to L.A. from that conference in Albuquerque in June 2002. It was somewhere in the middle of Arizona that she first heard about Glow by J.Lo. One of her retail partners, a woman who owned an upscale apothecary in Florida, called Williamson's cell phone: "Are you working with Jennifer Lopez?" the woman asked.
"No," Williamson said, taken aback.
"She's coming out with a product called Glow."
"What are you talking about?" Williamson asked. Jennifer Lopez? Glow? It didn't make any sense.
"It's in Us Weekly," the woman said. "There's a big article about her, and it says she's coming out with a Glow perfume."
At first, Williamson wasn't that concerned. It seemed farfetched that someone could take the Glow name. Even when Williamson got home and read the article, she remained dubious: "I called the attorney who'd done my trademarking and said, 'Is this infringement? Because it sure feels like it."
Williamson was certain that Lopez and her people knew about her company. After all, until recently, J.Lo's manager's office had been located just a block away from the Glow shop. His employees had frequently ordered gift baskets of Glow products for clients. Come to think of it, hadn't Lopez herself received a Glow gift basket from a movie director around the time of the 2001 Academy Awards ceremony? And what about Lopez's sister, Lynda? She had featured Glow products on her cable show about beauty and fashion -- a show that just happened to be called Glow. The E! cable channel had called about using the name, and Williamson had granted permission.
Still, she assumed that since the fragrance hadn't come out yet, there was time to head off J.Lo's people. "I thought we'd write a letter, and they'd stop using the name," she says. But Glow by J.Lo was much closer to market than Williamson realized.
