I'm a celebrity... let me in!
Anna-Maria Solowij
March 2009
In the beauty business, there’s a clever new version of the fame game that guarantees all the benefits of the celebrity affiliation without any need to blow the marketing budget on a famous face to front the brand. This alternative method involves engaging a high-profile celebrity investor – let’s call them a ‘’celestor’’ – who is prepared to spend time and/or money (and maybe even leverage the contents of their address book) in order to garner credibility and kudos for a company. It’s a way for the brand to engage with a famous person on a more meaningful level. At a time when consumers are increasingly wise to the machinations of the celebrity circus, it would seem to make sense to link up with someone who will add more to the bottom line than just a one-dimensional image.
It’s not all to the benefit of the brand – with the celestor business model both sides stand to gain. The beauty company gets privileged access to a world it would otherwise remain outside of while the celestor has a potentially longer-term outlet for their fame because without careful management, a celebrity has an even shorter career than a footballer or ballet dancer.
However, working with a celestor does require a more open-minded, less formal approach to doing business. If you can accept the board meetings will never be the same again because Bono is likely to call up and distract one of the shareholders (his wife, Ali Hewson is a major stakeholder in the beauty brand Nude), or that your big media opportunity may be hijacked by Dustin Hoffman (who joined a group of British editors for a tea hosted by his wife Lisa Hoffman when she presented her latest products to press), then all will be well. This because the advantages of a celebrity squiring your brand are far greater than just being able to wheel out a pretty face for your launch.
The Los Angeles movie producer/director Brett Ratner, who owns a stake in the Australian natural beauty company Jurlique, admits that he isn’t a typical investor: ‘’I keep the products in my bathroom and when friends come around (Salma Hayek, Mariah Carey, Kate Bosworth etc) and they like them, I make sure they get what they want, although I once caught Salma Hayek buying the stuff in a store. ‘’ Ratner, who says he’s never previously publicised his interest in Jurlique, is nevertheless only too aware of the value of his involvement. ‘’ What I do is ‘word of mouth’ – and I know an awful lot of influential people, ‘’ he claims.
Proof of the success of Ratner’s technique is his recent coup: getting Jurlique stocked at Colette, the famously fussy, internationally influential Parisian boutique, by leveraging his association with influential celebrities. ‘’I’d work out with (actors) Emmanuelle Seigneur and Charlotte Gainsbourg and they loved the products, we just took it from there, ‘’ he says, although Ratner is the first to admit he’s just a ‘’director’’.
But how does a company find its perfect celestor? The role of the celebrity agent – to marry a star with the right brand – doesn’t quite apply here. Some of the most credible parings have resulted by chance. Such was the case with the ethical beauty label Nude, whose founder Bryan Meehan (he sold Fresh and Wild Organic Foods to Whole Foods) first got in touch with Ali Hewson about something else when she was working on an ethical clothing line. ‘’She couldn’t secure the name Nude for clothing, so that became Edun, while we recognised that Nude would work well for cosmetics. And because of my involvement in Fresh and Wild she knew that I’d make this work.’’ Meehan describes Hewson’s role as non-overt: We’re an informal company; there are no job descriptions: I’m eco-entrepeneur, Ali’s muse and the investor, Christy (former supermodel Turlington) is the product tester. However, it gives me huge confidence to have Ali get on a plane to come to a meeting with a big US retailer to represent the brand. She’s a part of the fabric of Nude.’’
Anna-Marie Solowij is a contributing editor at Vogue