Lines by Madonna and other celebs pop up in stores

ANNE D’INNOCENZIO,AP Retail Writer

This hol­i­day sea­son you’re likely to spot singer Jen­nifer Lopez in Kohl’s. You could get a peek at pop music icon Madonna in Macy’s. You might even catch a glimpse of real­ity TV star Kim Kar­dashian in Sears.

Well, not literally.

These celebri­ties likely won’t be mak­ing guest appear­ances in the aisles of your favorite depart­ment stores. But clothes, shoes and even ties that bear their names will.

It is part of a big push by stores to cash in on celebri­ties’ money-making names. The move can be savvy. After all, who wouldn’t want to don the styl­ish duds of a super­star? It can also be risky. The stars, fig­u­ra­tively, have to be aligned for celebrity lines to become a hit with shop­pers. That can mean hav­ing the right celebrity pair up with the right store at the right time with the right amount of involve­ment in the design of the line.

“If it’s sim­ply to mon­e­tize your moment in the sun, it is not going to work in the long term,” says Ivanka Trump, the daugh­ter of real estate mogul Don­ald Trump who is an exec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent for his Trump Orga­ni­za­tion and appeared on his “Appren­tice” real­ity TV show.

Trump, 31, has a line of $150 hand­bags and $125 pumps at Lord & Tay­lor and other depart­ment stores. “You have to be involved in every aspect of the prod­uct line,” she says.

Celebs have long dab­bled in design. But with the growth of TV shows and web­sites that fol­low every­thing celebri­ties say, wear and do, inter­est in their cloth­ing lines has increased in recent years. Indeed, rev­enue in North Amer­ica from celebrity cloth­ing lines, exclud­ing mer­chan­dise linked to ath­letes, rose 6 per­cent last year to $7.58 bil­lion, accord­ing to The Licens­ing Let­ter, an indus­try trade pub­li­ca­tion. That’s on top of a nearly 5 per­cent increase in 2010.

Major depart­ment stores, fac­ing grow­ing com­pe­ti­tion from trendy fash­ion chains such as H&M, Mango and Zara, have jumped on the trend. They’re hop­ing to reap ben­e­fits from the lines dur­ing the hol­i­day shop­ping sea­son in Novem­ber through Decem­ber, a time when stores can make up to 40 per­cent of their annual rev­enue. Big stores now get as much as a quar­ter of their sales from celebrity brands, which is up from under 10 per­cent five years ago, accord­ing to mar­ket research firm NPD Group.

As inter­est from stores and shop­pers grows, so does the list of celebs with their own lines. Madonna, 54, has a new Truth or Dare line of per­fume, over-the-knee lace-up boots and other shoes at sev­eral depart­ment stores. Nicole Richie, 31, for­mer real­ity TV star and daugh­ter of singer and song­writer Lionel Richie, ear­lier this year rolled out an epony­mous cloth­ing line of $86.50 flo­ral maxi skirts and $49.50 lace tops on QVC home shop­ping network.

And singer Jen­nifer Hudson’s new fash­ion col­lec­tion was launched on QVC this fall. Her line includes $96.50 hooded jack­ets, $53 blouses and one of her favorite wardrobe sta­ples —$50 leg­gings. Hud­son, a spokes­woman for Weight Watch­ers weight-loss pro­gram, says her goal is to appeal to women of all sizes.

“Every piece is a part of me,” says Hud­son, 31, who recently slimmed down from a size 16 to a 6. “And it came from some­thing that I have worn or would wear.”

THE PIONEERS

Jaclyn Smith, who starred in the pop­u­lar 1970s series “Charlie’s Angels,” pio­neered the celebrity brand busi­ness in 1985 with a line of cloth­ing and acces­sories at Kmart.

For more than a quar­ter of a cen­tury, the line that car­ries every­thing from $79 striped trench coats and $49 faux fur trimmed vests to $299.99 arti­fi­cial Christ­mas trees and $179 din­ing sets, has become a sta­ple at the dis­counter. In fact, the prod­ucts’ suc­cess has risen even though Smith, 67, has long been out of the spot­light. Kmart offi­cials declined to give sales fig­ures, but retail con­sul­tant Burt Flickinger esti­mates that the col­lec­tion rings up about $250 mil­lion in annual rev­enue, which is con­sid­ered healthy.

“She’s a beloved Amer­i­can icon,” says Flickinger, adding that the mer­chan­dise in the line has remained pop­u­lar because they’re “time­less, in good taste and have quality.”

Kathy Ire­land, 49, a for­mer Sports­wear Illus­trated swim­suit model, also turned her celebrity brand into a mon­ey­maker. Since 1993, she has built a $2 bil­lion global retail busi­ness, accord­ing to fash­ion trade pub­li­ca­tion Women’s Wear Daily. Her line includes more than 15,000 items from cur­tains to wed­ding dresses that are sold in more than 50,000 small chains.

Ire­land attrib­utes her suc­cess to her method­i­cal approach to expan­sion. In fact, her first foray into the busi­ness was socks. She wanted to see how some­thing sim­ple would sell before she rolled out swimwear, active wear and other items a year later in 1994.

“If women would embrace some­thing as basic as a pair of socks, that would tell us we were on to some­thing,” says Ire­land, who sketches looks for her line for a design team to refine.

More recently, singer Jes­sica Simp­son, 32, has built her brand into a billion-dollar brand in the past seven years. She now sells more than 29 prod­ucts from shoes, clothes and per­fume to purses and lug­gage in depart­ment stores such as Macy’s. For the win­ter hol­i­days, items include $89 plat­form bright blue plat­form pumps and $128 strap­less belted lace dresses.

Her for­mula for suc­cess has been hav­ing a relat­able per­son­al­ity: Even as her singing career has wavered, brand­ing experts say Simp­son has been able to con­nect with her young fans because she’s vocal about every­day issues like her strug­gles with weight gain.

Peggy Merck, the pub­li­cist for the brand, also says she’s very involved in designs for the line, which reflect her casual but sexy style. Her col­lec­tion, which ranges from size 2 to 16, fea­tures lots of cow­boy boots, vin­tage jeans and wedge shoes. Simp­son is “hands on,” Merck says.

Simpson’s busi­ness savvy has inspired other celebs. “I admire Jes­sica Simp­son a lot because she has branded her line to become a huge suc­cess,” wrote “Jer­sey Shore” real­ity TV show star Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi in an email to The Asso­ci­ated Press.

Polizzi last year started sell­ing per­fume and nail pol­ish, among other items at HSN home shop­ping net­work and to beauty chain Per­fu­ma­nia. This fall, she expanded her col­lec­tion to include jew­elry. She also plans to add head­phones and acces­sories next year.

“I bring in my ideas on what type of bot­tle shape I’d like, to dif­fer­ent designs of ani­mal print or cloth­ing designs to my favorite smells from soaps, lotions (and) hair sprays,” Polizzi wrote.

BEYOND THE NAME

Attach­ing a star’s name to a tee shirt or ear­rings does not guar­an­tee suc­cess. Gen­er­ally, how well a line does varies greatly, and depends on a num­ber of fac­tors, includ­ing the star’s pop­u­lar­ity and involve­ment in the design, the qual­ity of the mer­chan­dise and the mar­ket­ing of the brand.

There are all sorts of ways celebrity lines are started. But in many sce­nar­ios, the idea of start­ing a col­lec­tion comes from the celebrity, who shops the con­cept around to man­u­fac­tur­ers and stores. How the deals are struc­tured varies widely.

The lines can be a gam­ble for stores. For one, their suc­cess often is closely tied to one per­son whose pop­u­lar­ity can fade quickly among finicky fans. And while shop­pers may grab celebrity brands when the lines debut, they may not return if they don’t like what they see after that.

“The celebrity name draws the fan base to the prod­uct but at the end of the day, the prod­uct has to stand on itself,” says Michael Stone, pres­i­dent of The Beanstalk Group, a global brand licens­ing agency. “It has to be well priced and well designed.”

Indeed, indus­try experts say for every celebrity brand that is a hit, five oth­ers flop. Any­one remem­ber hip hop star and actor L.L. Cool J’s casual cloth­ing line with Sears? It lasted less than a year after its launch in 2008. One rea­son was that the col­lec­tion of hooded sweat­shirts and jeans failed to catch the eyes of Amer­i­cans at a time when the coun­try was in a deep recession.

It’s also key that the clothes reflect the per­son­al­ity of the celebrity because many con­sumers will want to emu­late their style. For exam­ple, Lopez, 43, shut­tered her Sweet­face cloth­ing col­lec­tion in 2009, six years after launch­ing it at sev­eral depart­ment stores, in part because shop­pers didn’t believe that the line matched her glam style. The col­lec­tion, which included sweat pants instead of the fit­ted dresses Lopez is known for sport­ing, was seen as too casual.

But Lopez learned from that line. Last year, she launched an exclu­sive col­lec­tion for Kohl’s, which offers $99.99 plat­form wedge boots and $60 ani­mal print faux-wrap dresses under her name. The col­lec­tion is far­ing well, accord­ing to Kohl’s, although the chain declined to give sales figures.

“Every look in this col­lec­tion … is some­thing that peo­ple know I would wear,” reads a state­ment by Lopez on Kohl’s website.

It’s also impor­tant that a celebrity doesn’t say or do things that could reflect poorly on a store’s image. Ear­lier this month, an angry cus­tomer started an online cam­paign call­ing for Macy’s to dump Don­ald Trump’s line of $65 power ties and $65 dress shirts after the bil­lion­aire ver­bally attacked Pres­i­dent Barack Obama on social media after he won re-election.

Angelo Caru­sone, 30, has col­lected about 673,000 sig­na­tures on peti­tion web­site signon.org. Caru­sone, once a loyal Macy’s shop­per, says he won’t shop there again until the retailer sev­ers ties with Trump. “Macy’s is build­ing a brand on Trump’s consequence-free bul­ly­ing,” he says.

But Macy’s has stood by the bil­lion­aire, and the uproar has since died down. “Macy’s mar­ket­ing and mer­chan­dise offer­ings are not rep­re­sen­ta­tive of any polit­i­cal posi­tion,” says Jim Sluzewski, a spokesman for the chain.

Odd pair­ings also can be a con­cern. Indeed, Sears, a strug­gling retailer that is best known for sell­ing appli­ances, raised eye­brows when it announced that it would carry clothes under the “Kar­dashian” name. The col­lec­tion, which was launched last year, is named after “Keep­ing Up With the Kar­dashi­ans” realty TV stars Kim, Khloe and Kourt­ney Kardashian.

The fash­ions embrace the indi­vid­ual looks of the sis­ters — Kim’s glam­orous style, Kourtney’s Bohemian chic look and Khloe’s rocker influ­ence. There are $99 leop­ard print maxi dresses, $24 snake­skin print ear­rings and $40 metal­lic striped tops.

When think­ing about Sears as a pos­si­ble part­ner, Khloe says she at first thought of the retailer as a place just to buy “wash­ers and dry­ers.” But then, she says she and her sis­ters real­ized that Sears would enable them to achieve their goal of sell­ing afford­able clothes nationwide.

“We felt it was a good fit,” she says. “It’s like if you date a few peo­ple and then you want to marry that person.”

Ron Boire, Sears’ mer­chan­dis­ing chief, declined to give sales fig­ures, but says the line is doing well and gives the chain’s cloth­ing depart­ment a “younger, more pro­gres­sive feel.”

To cel­e­brate the one-year anniver­sary of the col­lec­tion, the Kar­dashian sis­ters showed up at a Sears store in the Bronx bor­ough of New York City on a recent Fri­day. More than 2,000 shriek­ing teens and young women came to get a glimpse of them.

Among them was Jenessa Cav­allo, 23, a legal assis­tant. Until the Kar­dashian line was launched, she had never shopped at Sears. Now, she says that she keeps going back, spend­ing more than $500 on Kar­dashian designs, includ­ing a faux fox fur coat, leather jacket and nail polish.

“I feel like I’m Kim,” Cav­allo says.

Posted by AP News on Nov 27 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.