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Expanding a Brand – But Carefully: Anthony’s Key Move

Anthony Sosnick was a real estate developer, so what did he know about men’s skin-care products? Well, he is a guy, and he enjoyed looking and smelling good – and Anthony realized that it was really difficult for him to find a complete line of high-quality skin-care products that he could use.

He also sensed a business opportunity. “The men’s skin-care business was growing twice as fast as women’s, but there were only a lot of little brands,” Anthony remembers. “I saw the chance to build a global brand and do something on a really big scale here. It was just my personal ambition to think big.”

And so he did. Anthony sank much of his own financial resources into launching the upscale Anthony Logistics for Men line in 2000. After writing a 150-page business plan, thoroughly researching the market around the world, hiring a top-notch staff, and producing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of inventory, Anthony went live with 26 different products in four different lines.

An early score with Sephora cosmetics stores launched Anthony for Men to retail success, and sales have grown at the rate of about 20% a year for the last few years, to $35 million for 2005. “I knew I was going to be successful with this,” Anthony says. “I just didn’t know how successful.”

The main reason Anthony is so confident of strong double-digit growth for the next few years is that he has found a way to expand his markets by launching a second brand that is simpler and less expensive than his first: Anthony Sport for Men. “It’s like having both Ralph Lauren and Polo brands,” he says.

Before going ahead with his Key Move, Anthony made two crucial preliminary steps. First, he laid a strong foundation for his company’s handling of brands with Anthony Logistics for Men. Second, he made sure that Anthony Sport for Men would truly bring in extra business and wouldn’t cannibalize the Logistics brand.

Anthony was intent on making Logistics a robust brand, so he made sure that every aspect of the product line, its distribution and its marketing reflected a consistent attitude.

Package design was one area of emphasis. “We thought it out well – we didn’t just design a package that looked cool,” Anthony says. “Everything that went into the Logistics packages had a strategy behind it.” The line’s shaving-cream tubes, for example, are bigger and chunkier than competitors’ to give a man a more satisfying feel in his hand.

The product names are direct, like “Everyday Shampoo.” The copy on the packaging is simple and straightforward. “Men don’t want things that are complicated,” Anthony says, “but they want to feel smart about their decisions. So we wrote copy that explains things so that a guy can pick up the product, read it, understand it and confidently say it’s the right thing for them.”

Anthony also has infused the brand with a sense of humor. Each package gives men both an objective for the product and a strategy for using it, he explains. “Hair so rich it’ll pay for dinner,” says the Everyday Shampoo packaging, as an objective for using the product. The way Anthony for Men gives customers that kind of hair, the package further explains, is with a combination of key ingredients such as coconut oil, which “moisturizes and cleans.”

The company also supported its brand from the start by emphasizing strong relationships with retailers and their staffs, so that their enthusiasm for Anthony Logistics for Men would carry over to customers. Anthony for Men provides thorough training programs for store personnel.

And when it comes to consumers, Anthony tries to make the brand inescapable. “We made two million samples last year and gave them all away,” Anthony says. “And we’ve way offset the cost of the samples because practically every time we give one out, we’ve made a new customer.”

But Anthony decided early on that Logistics for Men would require an encore brand. Department stores wanted exclusive accounts with Anthony for the Logistics brand, limiting the company’s overall retail potential. Logistics for Men products carry high price points, averaging $18 to $19, and consumers were starting to tell Anthony that they’d appreciate a budget version.

And at a total that had grown to 60 items, the complete line of Logistics for Men products was too complex for some men to bother with.

So, Sport consists of just 16 skin-care items, whose average price is only about $15. “Some guys who are just used to using Gillette say, ‘I don’t have the funds to go out and purchase all this Logistics stuff,’” Anthony says. “Or they’re simple guys and don’t need a whole lot. So Sport is more edited and simple, and the price point is where they want to spend.”

Anthony’s gambit already has succeeded wildly. All the May Co. department-store chains – including Macy’s, Marshall Field’s, Lord & Taylor and Foley’s -- now carry Anthony Sport for Men, while other chains such as Nordstrom carry Logistics. And Douglas , a European chain of 150 stores, also has picked up Sport.

Anthony is confident that he can practically make a cookie-cutter strategy out of his approach to adding brands. “I hope to have a half-dozen brands over the next few years,” he says, “without going public.”