Vain was merely Seattle’s most happening hair salon a year ago. Now, founder and president Victoria Thomas Gentry has a sprouting consumer and business-to-business direct response arm for her hair products that promise dirtier-looking, hipper, do-it-yourself ‘dos.
More remarkable for Dirty Boy and Dirty Girl styling stuff and 2nd Day Hair shampoo, along with eight others in the line that would seem to appeal exclusively to the punk rock set, is that they’ve been picked up by mainstream DM. Nordstrom’s features the Vain line through an 800 number for ordering beauty products.
Not just for teenage punks, Gentry estimates the majority of her customers are men and women in their 20s and 30s who “hate the fluffy look. They want their hair to look stiff and matted.”
A notice in Jane magazine last March expedited the company’s consumer growth, says Gentry, by drawing customers to the Web site (www.vain. com), where they can purchase items like Peppermint Strip shampoo (to make hair “smell good and look dirty”). The publicity made it possible to bolster the e-mail list of local salon regulars and attendees of Vain-sponsored nightclub events with people who ordered from across the nation. Now 1,000 people receive a brief e-mail from Vain every couple of months, highlighting product attributes and updates and mentioning upcoming events.
The B-to-B arm has been harder to grow. Salons were suspicious. Traditionally, salons honor contracts with distributorships, which hold them to a promise to buy hair products from distributors and not to resell the products to any other business. Gentry has sidestepped that convention by establishing herself as a distributor as well as a manufacturer of Vain products, which enables her to sell direct to salons and boutiques.
She researched many of the salons and boutiques “with the most long-standing reputations for helping to set the trends in their areas of the country [and that] appreciate our punk-rock aesthetic,” by calling alternative publications and posing as a potential advertiser. Then, she’d contact the businesses that advertised there, building her B-to-B list call-by-call.
But she still had to win them over. A self-styled media siren, Gentry offered to call the local newspaper, touting her story and products as a way to get publicity for the local business.
The plan works, but it’s painstaking. Gentry’s B-to-B file numbers 500 to 600 names to whom she faxes a three-page piece every three months. The best customers hear from her once a month. The fax reads like a newsletter that includes special sales and offers, and it usually features an original Vain-inspired cartoon.
A catalog is due in the spring.
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