Skin care expert, business entrepreneur and the man behind Elizabeth Arden PRO, Joe Lewis explains the art of finding your perfect (brand) mate.
He’s the man responsible for launching AHAs into the skin care market, the brains behind Prevage, and now, for his latest venture, leading skin care expert and business entrepreneur, Joe Lewis has launched the Elizabeth Arden PRO range.
But bringing a department store brand into the professional salon market has not been without its hurdles.
Here, Lewis explains the importance of strategic partnerships, re-branding and facing your critics, head on…
1. Why did you decide to partner with a pre-existing brand?
“Elizabeth Arden’s relationship and collaboration with me has deep roots that started with Prevage in 2005. In July 2013, Elizabeth Arden established an equity position and investment in USC because they believe in our skincare treatment philosophy. Going forward, we are collaborating as partners with a shared vision to develop and commercialise meaningful technologies for the professional market. Elizabeth Arden brings 100 years of legendary brand equity to the partnership, something that will inure to brand success in the market place.”
2. Elizabeth Arden has always been a department store brand, how are you going about re-branding the PRO range to separate it from being seen as a retail brand?
“We are launching new innovative, patented and patent-pending technologies based on a clear skin care strategy. Elizabeth Arden PRO is not available in department stores, it is dispensed only through authorszed skin therapists trained to create a treatment regimen to maximize and accelerate client results to provide the best clinical outcome.”
3. What misconceptions about the range have you encountered so far?
“We have made all communications and materials very clear that this is a professional only skin care brand, as the brand name itself alludes to. There is a clear delineation of technologies and ingredient concentrations from that found in department stores. However, that said, the Elizabeth Arden products sold in department stores are also excellent products with sound scientific technologies.
4. How are you tackling these misconceptions?
“We are launching the brand with three ground-breaking, published JDD articles to support our ingredients and skin care strategy and this is something that you might expect to be coming from a major pharmaceutical company, not from Elizabeth Arden. We have been working behind the scenes for years preparing for this launch into professional skincare and we are bringing new cutting-edge ingredient innovations that will revolutionise this industry, the same way we revolutionised it by launching AHAs in the 80s.”