Q: How have things changed since your products started showing up in the hands of pregnant stars like Britney Spears and Jennifer Garner?
A: Celebrities bring some validity to the product. People want to buy what the celebrities buy. It’s a unique phenomenon, and right now it’s very en vogue to be pregnant. The celebrities make it so the retailers need to carry it.
Q: What celebrity were you personally most excited to see pictured with Bella Mama?
A: The one I’m most excited about hasn’t been photographed with it yet, but Melania Trump – Donald Trump’s wife. Her assistant called me and wanted the Belly Butter. Donald Trump is really hot right now, and Melania is beautiful. That’s more the kind of customer base I would like to see demanding the products.
Q: How do you go about getting your products into the hands of the right people?
A: A lot of it is luck. Britney Spears went into one of my retailers and bought it. Nobody asked her to buy it. Nobody sent it to her. The retailer, Larry Kimmel, is a very good promoter. He called the Scottsdale (Ariz.) paper and told them Britney Spears was there. That got on the wire, and Us Weekly called me and said they were going to photograph the belly oil Britney bought. She bought hundreds of dollars’ worth of merchandise, and the only thing they picked up on was the belly oil. That all snowballed, and we were on “Entertainment Tonight.”
Q: What about the times when it’s not luck?
A: It’s all connections. My PR firm has phenomenal connections. It is important to gift all the celebrities. When they get pregnant, we send them our line. Unless their publicists get back to us and say they actually received the product and like the product, you can’t use their names.
Q: When a new magazine comes out and Bella Mama is featured, do sales …
A: Spike? Yes. An unbelievable amount. A lot of those are Internet sales, but I have definitely landed retail accounts and gotten response from customers who wouldn’t otherwise respond to me.
Q: The spotlight can be fleeting. What are you doing to maintain the company’s momentum?
A: You have to reinvent things as much as possible. All consumer goods do that. Think of Coke. They come up with vanilla Coke and lemon Coke, and it stays for six months and then it’s gone. What they’re doing is trying to create some excitement for their brand. What we do is something very similar. I just came out with a Just Hatched gift set. We got phenomenal response. We are also in development for another skin-care product.
Q: What made you decide to buy the Bella Mama line?
A: I was giving a baby shower for one of my closest friends. She had been using the products. It became a discussion among all these women. Another woman knew the woman who owned the company, and she was trying to sell it. That evening after everyone left, I sat down at the computer and researched it. I was immediately intrigued.
Q: Since you bought the line in January, what have been your main objectives?
A: We had to relaunch the entire line. One of the things I didn’t grasp was that the line had been dormant for 10 months. I freshened up the packaging and logo. It needed to be more hip. We spent several months trying to figure out how we were going to do it, and we relaunched in May.
Q: Before you bought the company, you were involved in the restaurant industry with Boulder Concepts Restaurant Group and later as a consultant. Why did you decide to switch?
A: I wanted to learn something else. I’d been in the hospitality industry my entire career. I was in sales and promotions in the Northwest. In Chicago, I worked for a hotel chain, and here I worked for restaurants. It’s a really young person’s industry. I don’t want to work 80 hours a week unless it’s my money I’m making. I really just had an epiphany.
Q: Do you find that people don’t always think of the beauty business – and particularly the pregnancy beauty business – as seriously as they would other businesses?
A: Well, yeah. Most of the buyers are women, which is a huge benefit. We have presented to a few men in the past, but it’s a much easier process when you’re dealing with a woman. There is a huge hesitation to be deep in the category, so absolutely that is our biggest issue.
Edited for space and clarity from an interview by staff writer Kristi Arellano.
