Where To Purchase Fashion Fair Makeup

Loyal customers are shedding tears over the sudden scarcity of Manner Fair cosmetics. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)

The angry rumblings and confused lamentations are all over social media. They're coming from diehard customers of Fashion Fair cosmetics, a make founded in 1973 to cater to African American women at a time when major makeup companies essentially ignored them.

Where is the Bronze Loose Pulverization? Where's the Perfect Terminate Souffle Makeup? What about the Brown Sugar Foundation Stick?

Customers who rely on Fashion Fair for exact peel tone matches and perfectly flattering lipsticks take been unable to locate their favorite products — or any products at all. In stores and online, they're finding color selections and then skimpy and stock and then depleted there has been trivial for sales representatives to fifty-fifty sell. Even counter clerks have been asking: What's going on?

Fashion Fair's response has been, for many loyalists, securely unsatisfying.

"Give thanks you for your patience as we rebuild our inventories."

"We admit that stock has been low in previous months; however, the replenishment process [is] underway!"

"Are they going out of business organisation?" asks longtime customer Allana Smith.

"No," says Linda Johnson Rice, chairman of Johnson Publishing Co., which owns the makeup line. "We're not going out of business."

Merely Fashion Fair is in upheaval — and customers take practiced reason to question its survival.

Breaking ground

Beauty products are not essentials. But in those little bottles and jars are fragments of a social contract, elixirs of reassurance, drops of pure pleasure — and in the example of Way Off-white, a adept flake of proud history.

The brand was launched past Johnson Publishing, the Chicago-based company established by John and Eunice Johnson in 1942. For decades, it dominated the black media market with Ebony and Jet magazines. It too created Ebony Style Fair — a traveling roadshow of designer frocks and entertainment that rolled cultural uplift, savvy marketing and fundraising into one dazzling stage extravaganza.

Eunice Johnson noticed that the African American models who twirled down her runways were mixing their own foundations because they had trouble finding makeup to lucifer their complexion. She took those homemade concoctions to chemists, and a makeup line was born.

When the brand arrived at retail counters, with its picayune pink compacts and pink lipstick tubes, it wasn't just promoting beauty and glamour but also self-esteem and confidence, and it served as a dynamic case study in the potential of blackness entrepreneurs and black consumers.

[Hip-hop was poised to conquer fashion. Why did it cease short?]

Manner Fair addressed the dazzler desires of blackness women long earlier Black Opal began touting pare care or MAC cosmetics rolled out its concentrated pigments and marketing campaigns that embraced everyone from the blackness girl-side by side-door to drag queens. Style Fair came well before Estée Lauder and Clinique discovered the righteous potential in expanding their color palettes and diversifying their advertising.

It remains the only major department shop cosmetics make catering specifically to blackness women. Information technology is nevertheless fully owned and operated by Johnson Publishing. And the name withal resonates.

"As a child, my parents used to purchase Ebony and Jet. The models were stunning," recalls Allana Smith, who grew upward in Brooklyn. "Every bit a 16-twelvemonth-old kid, I remember thinking, 'I want to look similar that when I abound up.' "

At present 41 and still living in Brooklyn, Smith has been using Style Fair products for 15 years. She receives regular compliments on her skin. People can't fifty-fifty tell she'southward wearing makeup, Smith says.

So all she wants to know is this: Where can I get my Oil-Free Perfect Finish Cream-to-Powder foundation in Moka Moka? Where?

She made the rounds of her local Macy'south this twelvemonth and came upwards empty-handed. At Brooklyn'due south Fulton Street shop, she asked the sales staff to recommend another Style Off-white color — a well-nigh-match to suffice until her shade was available. Only they had nothing; they told Smith they hadn't had a delivery from Fashion Fair in nearly a year.

"Our buyers and senior managers are on it," says Macy'southward spokesperson Elina Kazan. The department store has carried Manner Fair for more than 30 years. "We've been in abiding communication with Fashion Fair about when we'll be in receipt of goods."

When might that be? "Nosotros are waiting," Kazan says, after a lengthy pause. "As presently equally we get it, we'll put it out there for customers."

A changing market

On a recent Oct morning, Manner Fair's valuable real estate at the Metro Eye Macy's was deserted. There were a few boxes of foundation on the glass shelves. A couple dozen packages of eye shadow were stored within a glass-front end case. Ii makeup brushes were propped in a drinking glass beaker on a lonely display table — office of a special promotion that seemed more of an afterthought. The shelves had a pre-snowstorm grocery shop expect of scarcity.

Interviews with company executives and industry observers propose that Fashion Fair has been squeezed between cultural shifts in the cosmetics market and business challenges specific to a stand-lone make.

These are good times for the U.Due south. prestige beauty marketplace, which was worth $xi.two billion in 2014 — a 3 percent bump from 2013, driven by sales of pare-intendance potions and lip color, according to the NPD Group.

Only Fashion Off-white is a modest histrion in an industry dominated by major corporations: Estée Lauder, Fifty'Oréal, Procter & Chance, LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton. And different the others, it'due south a subsidiary of a troubled media company. Ebony is losing advertisers; the print edition of Jet closed in 2014. Johnson Publishing has put its historic photograph archive upward for auction; information technology has already sold its S Michigan Avenue headquarters.

Johnson Publishing chief executive Desiree Rogers, left, with chairman Linda Johnson Rice at the United Negro College Fund'south 66th anniversary dinner in 2010. (Earl Gibson III/Associated Press)

"Nosotros're a small visitor with capital constraints. It's not something nosotros're thrilled about," says Desiree Rogers, chief executive of Johnson Publishing and a one-time social secretarial assistant in the early years of the Obama White Business firm.

[Desiree Rogers may have improved Washington'due south look. Washington may not accept noticed.]

Mode Fair'south product shortfall built up slowly, Rogers says. But it eventually triggered a cocky-perpetuating cycle. Once customers realized products were scarce, they started ownership in bulk whenever they could detect them, which drew down stock fifty-fifty more than.

Catching up "is not a quick process," Rogers says. "Nosotros've inundated our suppliers. We've inundated them with orders . . . [just] I can't demand they shut downwards other projects and only do mine."

Theoretically, these should be advantageous times for Fashion Fair. A recent survey of teenagers by the investment business firm Piper Jaffray & Co. found they favor pocket-size, contained cosmetics lines over large mega-brands.

Merely fifty-fifty if Style Fair had the capital to take reward of this trend, "they accept to go where the consumer is going," says Stephanie Wissink, a Piper Jaffray managing director. Information technology was always a point of pride that Fashion Fair was a department store brand, rather than a drugstore one. But today's younger customers gravitate to multi-brand outlets, such equally Sephora and Ulta, where they tin experiment with a wide range of makeup without a beauty consultant making a hard sell. And Fashion Fair doesn't distribute through Sephora or Ulta.

Meanwhile in a "minority majority" culture, Wissink says, black women no longer want or need a separate counter. A host of brands have broadened their color palette to cater to them; a once-ignored customer is now being wooed by many suitors.

Three years ago, Manner Fair began to reconsider its position in the market. Makeup creative person Sam Fine — famous for working with models Iman and Tyra Banks— signed on as creative director, and in Jan 2013, his start capsule drove was touted to the beauty press. By the fall of that year, still, Fine had moved on to Comprehend Girl.

In early on 2014, Style Fair announced that Tia Dantzler, another makeup artist with a celebrated clientele, would have on the role of creative managing director.

That summer, a group of dazzler bloggers and journalists were invited to Fashion Fair's Chicago headquarters for an unveiling of new products and packaging. They were greeted by the brand's recently installed president, Amy Hilliard, as well as Rogers. Dantzler was there, too, providing makeovers for the guests.

They "discussed where the brand was going," recalls makeup creative person Courtney Waldon, who lives in Chicago. "I understood information technology as having a more modern feel. Consumers my historic period recollect of information technology as something their mom or grandmom would habiliment."

Waldon, 34, is a fan of MAC and Nars. But she was won over by the silky texture and colors of Fashion Fair'south $25 foam-to-powder foundations.

Terez Baskin, a part-time beauty business writer, liked what she saw that 24-hour interval as well. But she likewise noticed a problem. "The colors were great. The pigments were expert. But all of that has been done earlier," Baskin says. The leadership team was particularly excited about marketing a mascara for the offset fourth dimension. But they didn't accept any samples to test. They didn't have the full range of foundation colors available either.

"They were excited virtually all the newness," Baskin says. "They gave u.s. a agglomeration of balloons, but nothing to tie them to."

A short time after, customer frustration picked up steam on social media.

Moving frontward

Rogers says Fashion Off-white has been closing some outlets and remodeling others. The company is also redesigning its Web site, which has enjoyed a triple-digit increase in sales, Rogers says. "Due east-business is a big part of the hereafter," she says, "especially for women replenishing what they already have."

Fashion Fair has retired its signature pink packaging and replaced information technology with metallic bronze. A fresh ad entrada with new "faces" volition launch in 2016 and Fashion Fair'south social media has been dotted with images of actresses such every bit Tika Sumpter, Raven-Symoné, Ciara and others who might appeal to a younger demographic.

Only meanwhile, the empty shelves are testing the patience of retailers such as Macy'due south, Dillard's and Belk. Macy's worries that frustrations customers have with Style Off-white volition plough into frustration with their stores. Shoppers believe they are watching a celebrated brand wither — despite the visitor's denials.

And then they're looking elsewhere. Avon has a tempting cream-to-powder makeup in deep tones and information technology'south simply about $12.

Rogers says the Fashion Off-white transformation is about 75 per centum complete. "We know we have to practise better, and we will," she says. "We're not here to make an alibi simply to thank [customers] for their business. The worst is over."

Where To Purchase Fashion Fair Makeup,

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/what-happened-to-fashion-fair-why-the-black-cosmetics-brand-is-so-hard-to-find/2015/10/27/17416cf0-72be-11e5-8d93-0af317ed58c9_story.html

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