The two women also talked about the fragrance itself. Lopez, it turned out, was a bit of a "nose," as they say in the industry. She also had a clear idea of what she wanted -- she liked the smell of clean, soapy skin. Walsh asked her about other scents that appealed to her, and she mentioned vanilla and grapefruit. Walsh says she got enough out of the conversation to start the development process.
Although Walsh was pleasantly surprised that the meeting was so productive, she still felt a bit nervous when she left. Lopez clearly intended to be deeply involved in every aspect of the project. At first, Walsh wasn't sure whether that would help or hinder, but her anxiety soon dissipated. "The second meeting and the third meeting, it just got progressively better and faster," Walsh says. "That's mainly because she knows what she wants. She doesn't look back."
In the world of big-time perfume, producing a fragrance is much like coming up with an advertising campaign -- only using fragrance houses instead of advertising firms. The project leader contacts the houses, describes what he or she is looking for, and asks them to submit samples. A few samples are chosen and then refined until one emerges as the winner. In this case, Walsh told the houses that Jennifer Lopez was the celebrity behind the fragrance; that she loved the smell of freshly scrubbed skin; and that the target market would be young women from 15 to 25 -- an important consideration. To appeal to a 15-year-old, fragrances generally need a pleasing, unsophisticated, somewhat fruity or floral top note. That's followed by the "heart," which is the smell after the scent has been on the skin for 15 or 20 minutes, and then the dry down several hours later. Lopez wanted the dry down of her fragrance to smell fresh, clean, and a little soapy -- like her skin just after a shower.
In the end, it was Lopez's call. Walsh would collect the samples, narrow them down, and fly to wherever Lopez happened to be. Lopez would try the fragrances and talk about what she did or didn't like. Afterward, Walsh would fly back to Paris, where she would work with the fragrance houses to make adjustments. Then she'd report back to Lopez, who'd respond and decide.
They followed the same routine with other aspects of the project. Walsh, for example, came up with the idea of having a J.Lo pendant around the bottle -- a little something extra for her fans. Lopez thought there should be rhinestones in the letters. Done. Indeed, they were able to agree quickly on almost everything -- the scent, the bottle, the colors, the box. The only sticking point was the name. "It was one of the more difficult parts of the project," Walsh says, "because it wasn't an immediate love."
The naming discussion had begun in January 2002. Walsh had flown to Frankfurt, Germany, with a list of possible names, none of which included the word glow. Once again, says Walsh, the meeting took place in a hotel room. In addition to Lopez, Rosen, and Medina, some staff members from Jennifer Lopez Entertainment in Los Angeles were there. The group began to brainstorm, and at some point someone threw out the name Glow. Someone else suggested Glow by J.Lo. Then several people said, "Oh, that's perfect."
But it was only one of many names that came out of the session, several of which were also appealing. The debate continued as the trademark searches were being done. "We went back and forth on the name a lot," says Walsh. Eventually, the lawyers reported back that Glow could be used but that it was highly unlikely that Lopez could ever trademark the name or keep others from using it. According to Walsh, the lawyers strongly recommended that Glow be attached to J.Lo, because Glow by J.Lo -- they said -- was a protectable trademark.
So the issue was settled just in time to shoot the advertising campaign in the third week of February. Meanwhile, the juice was being mixed and shipped to Lancaster's manufacturing facility in Monaco. Point-of-purchase materials such as posters and shopping bags were being produced. Boxes were being turned out by the thousands, each covered with a special coating meant to be "sensual like her skin," as the ads later said. By May, filled bottles were rolling off the production line, with the J.Lo pendant applied to each by hand.
WORD OF MOUTH: Williamson did no advertising, relying instead on the likes of Reese Witherspoon, Sharon Osbourne, Michael Bay, Pamela Anderson, and Kid Rock to spread the word.
Throughout the spring and into the summer, the operation gained momentum, rolling toward its September deadline. It was a mammoth and expensive enterprise. Before Lancaster had a signed contract, it had invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in Glow by J.Lo -- most of it spent on shooting the ads and creating the tooling to make the bottles. By the time the fragrance was introduced to the press on June 27, total expenditures on advertising and development alone came to more than $2 million. The first shipments to stores went out the following day. And then, in early July, the letter from Terri Williamson's lawyer arrived -- and caused considerable alarm.
"Gee, Did They Do Their Homework?"
Williamson was still thinking the matter could be resolved quickly and amicably when her trademark lawyer wrote to Lopez's trademark lawyer on July 3, asserting that there was already a Glow in existence and that its owner didn't want someone else using the name. On July 31, Williamson received a reply in the form of a stack of material documenting the large number of trademarked beauty products that had the word glow in their names -- Amber Glow, Ultra Glow, Fresh Glow, and so on. The message was clear: Lopez and Coty had every intention of proceeding with Glow by J.Lo.
