Cosmetics: Kiss and Sell

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his own unfailing instinct for what women would regard as glamorous—deciding every design detail of every package and firing legions of aides and admen.

Possibly sensing that his company had grown too big to be run out of his hat, Revson in late 1974 recruited as his successor a man with a completely different personality: Michel Christian Bergerac. Tall, suave and mustached, he is a French-born Basque who looks and talks (in Gallic-flavored English) like the kind of smoothy who should be running a cosmetics empire. But he started out as an electric power salesman, trained as a manager in the ITT cauldron, and rose to head that conglomerate's European operations, a job that taught him about acquisitions, finance, and the making and marketing of just about anything. At Revlon, while continuing to broaden the product line and promoting some new merchandising ideas, Chairman Bergerac, now 46, talks a language that was long unfamiliar to the cosmetics trade. It is a lingo of inventory control, strict manufacturing standards and tight, detailed budgets. The payoff: sales and profits have multiplied about 2% times during his four years as boss, growing more than twice as fast as the industry average. This year Revlon will earn about $125 million on sales of $1.5 billion. It will become the first company ever to sell $1 billion worth of beauty products through retail stores.*

Presuming, that is, that Christmas sales go as well as Bergerac and other cosmetics executives have every reason to expect. About one-third of all their sales are rung up between Thanksgiving and Christmas, when men indulge their women and women indulge themselves. Tis the season when department-store cosmetics counters are jammed and the air redolent of thousands of mixed scents as women spray themselves with a bit of this and a touch of that. Men's eyes are often struck by the sight of a woman daubing lipstick onto her hand to get a better idea of the shade—and leaving five or six stripes of what looks like war paint.

This bustle has been matched in non-cosmetics areas of many stores in the early days of the Christmas season. Shoppers, or at least lookers, have thronged stores in Boston and Atlanta; in Dallas, weekend motorists have had to cruise endlessly before finding a vacant space in shopping-center parking lots. But retailers still do not have a feel for how much the public will buy in a season of inflation-pinched pocket books and recession fears. Though some detect a one-last-fling attitude on the part of customers, many merchants have been notably cautious in stocking up, largely because high interest rates make borrowing to carry a large inventory too much of a risk. Says Leonard Lauder, president of Estée Lauder Inc., Revlon's toughest rival in the high-priced end of the cosmetics business: "The thing I predict with absolute certainty for this Christmas is that the people who wait until Dec. 24 to do their shopping will find the shelves bare."

Whatever happens to other sales, retailers and manufacturers happily agree that cosmetics will boom. Perfumes, bath oils, makeup kits and the like are always among the most popular gifts. Besides, says Eve Levinson, vice president of the California-based Broadway chain of 47 department stores: "There is this tremendous interest in self-gratification and ego satisfaction, which heightens demand for