Whose Brand Is It, Anyway?

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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.

"Smell Me"

For all the hoopla and fireworks in the summer of 2002, there was great uncertainty about the prospects for Glow by J.Lo. Department store buyers, Women's Wear Daily was reporting, considered the fragrance "a wild card." The product was an eau de toilette -- a perfume that has been watered-down so that it can be sprayed -- aimed at 15- to 25-year-old girls. Could Jennifer Lopez really get them to lay down $38 for a small bottle of it?

Adding to the concern, the J.Lo clothing lines had not done nearly as well as expected. The first, introduced the previous October, had disappointed both customers and department-store buyers. Bloomingdale's Kal Ruttenstein, who had expressed such high hopes for the brand initially, wound up deciding not to carry it. "I was worried about quality and fit," he told The New York Times. Customers were less diplomatic. "I don't like it," 15-year-old Christina Torres -- a Puerto Rican girl from the Bronx, just like Jennifer Lopez -- told the Times, referring to a $24 T-shirt with a glittery J.Lo logo. "It looks cheap."

Moving to address the problems, Sweetface announced a major shakeup in June 2002, bringing in Denise Seegal as the new chief executive. An industry veteran with a sterling reputation, Seegal had previously been the founding president of DKNY and president of Liz Claiborne Inc., as well as an executive at Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren. In addition, Sweetface lured a top designer, Heather Thomson, away from Sean John, the highly successful clothing company of Lopez's former boyfriend, Sean "P. Diddy" Combs.

The new team went into action immediately, changing the positioning of the brand, adding new lines of clothing, upgrading the design, generally improving quality. Although the early reviews were encouraging, it would be fall before anyone could assess how effective the changes had been. One factor, Seegal and her colleagues believed, would be the success of the fragrance. If customers really liked it, they would be more inclined to take a second look at the clothing. But no one could predict how Glow by J.Lo would do. Never before had a one-year-old fashion business, a start-up really, launched a fragrance on the scale that was contemplated for Glow.

So the Sweetface people had a lot riding on Jennifer Lopez's new juice (as it's known in the trade), and so did Coty and Lancaster. Arguably, Lancaster's Catherine Walsh had the most at stake. If Jennifer Lopez was the face of Glow, Walsh was its driving force. An 11-year veteran of Estée Lauder, she had just joined Lancaster as a senior vice president when Sweetface contacted the company in the fall of 2001. Since she was in charge of American licensing, the query had been forwarded to her office in Paris -- where she jumped on it. "I had come in with the intention of looking for new opportunities for Lancaster," she says. "Jennifer Lopez was definitely on my list. She was getting bigger and bigger every day." Which posed a challenge: If Lancaster took the customary 18 months to bring the fragrance to market, a huge opportunity could slip away. "Okay, here's this woman," Walsh remembers thinking. "She's skyrocketing. She's a dancer, a singer, an actor, and now a fashion designer. She's a movement! So how do we ride that wave and launch when it's at its peak?"

Walsh thought the new fragrance should come out no later than the following September, in time for the 2002 holiday season. To do that, Lancaster would have to start shipping by early July, which meant the fragrance would have to be in production by May. Before production could begin, a glass manufacturer had to create the tooling that would be used to make the bottles, so the design of the bottle had to be pinned down. For that matter, the advertising campaign had to be shot, which couldn't happen until the parties had agreed upon the concept, the packaging, the colors, and the name -- to say nothing of the fragrance itself. Yet as late as December 2001, the two sides had barely begun discussing a licensing agreement. And once the lawyers got involved, Walsh knew it could be months before an agreement was signed.

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Bo Burlingham

Burlingham joined Inc. in 1983. An editor at large, he is the author of Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big. The book was a finalist for the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award in 2006. Burlingham is also the co-author with Norm Brodsky of The Knack; and the co-author with Jack Stack of The Great Game of Business and A Stake in the Outcome.

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