APRIL 2007: COMMERCE AS CULTURE. As Luxury retailers and brands increasingly rely on the arts to move merchandise, one leading New York store sets a creative example, Pia Catton writes.
In the luxury marketplace, the effort to sell high-end merchandise by enhancing its closeness to the arts is now as common as gift-wrapping. Whether by placing works of art in the store or sponsoring performances, retailers are giving a new sheen to consumerism: Shopping is now part gallery-going, part philanthropy, and part education - by which point, the small matter of the purchase price seems ever so small, really.
The Fifth Avenue department store Henri Bendel offers a case study in how a retailer can create and mine the intersection of art, fashion, and commerce. The store’s executives have embarked on a series of projects that integrate these fields – and one of the more creative plans begins today.
This week, Henri Bendel, with curatorial help from Whitewall magazine, is devoting its atrium and window displays to Nars, the color cosmetics brand founded in 1994 by makeup artist Francois Nars. Since 1997, Mr. Nars has shot his own photography for the brand’s advertising campaigns, and to commemorate 10 years of his work, the store is hosting a retrospective. Fifteen photographs – selected by Mr. Nars – will be presented on temporary gallery walls that greet the customer upon entering the store. Giant cubes with images will hang from the upper stories and video images will be projected on the walls.
For Henri Bendel director of marketing, Teril Turner, projects such as this meet a specific goal. “We are challenging ourselves to delight our customers. Whenever she walks in the store, there’s something unexpected,” she said. “The junction between arts, fashion, and culture is an exciting place to be right now.”
Ms. Turner’s previous projects have mainly revolved around fashion. Last month, her artistic team built a boxing ring in the atrium, then filled it with mannequins – plus a live ballet dancer, who posed gracefully, dressed in clothes from the spring collections. Earlier this year, the store commissioned the Grammy-winning filmmaker Mary Wharton to shoot a behind–the scenes documentary about the founders of AKA, a clothing brand launched by three women who had been editors at Elle magazine. The film was shown in the windows of Henri Bendel for two weeks in March.
Now the emphasis has shifted to a cosmetics brand – and a highly artistic one at that. Nars is known for colors with strong pigments and wild use of them. Prices range from $31 for a dual eyeshadow compact to $75 for a goat hair powder brush.
“As opposed to other brands that concentrate on how to make women prettier, Nars is more interested in artistic expression,” the vice president of global marketing for Nars, Alec Batis, said. “We get people who say, ‘That’s so not wearable.’”
The Nars girl doesn’t mind. “There is a distinct customer for Nars. They are more fashionable types, and they’re not afraid of change,” Mr. Batis said.
Vogue magazine’s beauty director, Sarah Brown, identifies the brand with a strong palette: “When you think of Nars you think of really striking color combinations and a sophisticated sense of color theory.”
That fashion-forward sensibility was largely established by the founder himself, a French born makeup artist who came to New York in 1984 and became a celebrity makeup artist of his day. His work appeared on the cover of Vogue multiple times, and he collaborated with designers like Karl Lagerfeld, Marc Jacobs, Anna Sui, and Versace.
After developing an interest in photography, he started shooting the Nars advertising campaigns in 1997. Though he sold the company to Shiseido in 2000 and now lives on his own island in Tahiti, Mr. Nars remains the company’s creative director. He continues to shoot the advertisements, which have included models such as Naomi Campbell and Linda Evangelista wearing examples of his adventurous style.
“When you see a Nars visual, you know it’s a Nars visual,” Mr. Batis said. “Whereas for other brands, it’s about making the lashes long and the limps plump. What his pictures communicate is: Trust your imagination.”
The idea of selling mascara (which runs $22 at the Nars counter) by emphasizing artistry is not going to give Maybelline’s classic Great Lash (about $5) a run for its money. But it does set the brand apart from that of other lines in the category know as “prestige,” which includes cosmetics sold in department stores, as opposed to drugstores. According to The NPD Group, a market research company, the prestige segment generated $8.2 billion in sales last year; the size of the total American beauty market is estimated at $42 billion in sales.
The prestige market is dominated by mega-brands such as Lancome and Clinique, but it also includes the color cosmetics of fashion brands such as Chanel and Calvin Klein, which recently relaunched its collection. In addition, the category regularly sees new lines by professional makeup artists – a career step that is increasingly common. Take your pick: There’s Bobbi Brown, Laura Mercier, Scott Barnes, Napolean Perdis, Mally Roncal, Trish McEvoy.
With new brands being added to the roster all the time, new ways of selling cosmetics have cropped up, too. The beauty-only chain of stores Sephora launched in 1998 and has grown to more than 500 stores. Makeup artists can present their debut collections on QVC to spread the word to a mass audience, then take the product to specialty department stores. Online retailers, such as eluxury.com, draw fashion-forward shoppers in to the cosmetics arena by frequently introducing new brands.
Nars, sold at 450 doors (an industry term that includes multiple branches of the same store) in America, joined the Henri Bendel offerings in 2005, a time when the retailer’s beauty department was outgrowing its digs. Renovation allowed the 17 cosmetic brands to remain on the first floor while the 32 fragrances and 43 skin-care and cosmetic accessory lines were moved to separate quarters on the second floor.
With all that in the marketplace, it takes a clear message to pierce through to the consumer. The unusual positioning of Nars – an artistic brand that emphasizes style rather than performance – inspired the Bendel team to engage shoppers with the brand’s history of arresting photography. With 10 years as a handy anniversary peg, the players came up with the idea of a weeklong in-store exhibition and kickoff party to celebrate Mr. Nars’s work. And, as with much in the fashion industry, there is a philanthropic angle: Bendel’s has the exclusive on a greatest-hits lipstick palette ($75) and will send 50% of the net proceeds to amfAR, a charity long associated with Nars.
The result for the shopper is that she experiences the creativity of the Nars brand in a gallery setting. The striking color combinations become something more than pots of eyeshadow; they’re part of a temporary painting on the blank canvas of the face, captured in photography. In that artistic context, the brand makes the consumer feel separated from – and ahead of – the make-me-pretty pack.
“The idea of projects like this exhibition is to encourage the client to look at beauty in a new way,’ Ms. Turner said, adding that this is the way forward. “The concept we created with Nars is where we’re going.”
If you thought shopping was overwhelming already, hold onto your credit cards.
