Altered images: Illamasqua

When The Drum meets Propaganda boss Julian Kynaston he is in a relaxed mood despite being just weeks away from a new product launch that will catapult him and his agency onto the glamorous cosmetics stage. And interestingly, it’s the theatrical stages of 1920s Berlin, to which the Illamasqua brand, and product, owes much to, but more of that later.

So, how does a man go from being a no-nonsense, straight talking Yorkshire agency boss to being the creator of a cosmetics brand that is being tipped as the hottest thing since MAC started shaking things up some years ago? Career HighPerhaps not surprisingly, the genesis of this launch can be traced back to Kynaston’s experiences of creating the ghd brand, as he explains: “With ghd we took a product in a hugely commoditised sector and we turned that into an emotional brand. It is an underestimation to say we had enjoyed that process. It was a career high, that once tasted was very difficult to come down from. Creating a brand has so many different aspects and feelings to it, one of which is almost like parental ownership. We liked that feeling very much and when we moved away from ghd I think most people expected us to simply re-appear with what would have been one of the competing products to ghd.”

But for Kynaston a business built on trying to undo the good work Propaganda had done for ghd was not the way forward. And so, alongside former ghd director Gary Douglas and Nick Brown of FMG Support, a client of Propaganda, they began looking for a sector that was lacking an emotional brand into which they could make their mark.

He says: “We monitored seven different sectors, ranging from jewellery to perfume and into the mix went make-up. We were shocked that the make-up market appeared to have no real emotional brands, similar to the ghd market before ghd. We could not believe it as all of us were aware of superbrands in that sector and there was a lot of loyalty, but that loyalty was not at a brand level it was at a hero product level. You would see girls who were loyal to a particular lipstick from say Chanel, certainly Yves Saint Laurent’s Touche Eclat had incredible product loyalty.”

During their research Propaganda emptied over 1,200 make-up bags and they found little evidence of dominance of any one brand. Typically there were 14 different brands in the average make-up bag. From here on, Kynaston’s goal became to ensure that the make-up bag of the future consisted of 50% of their brand, in their target market, with the other brands sharing the remaining half.

To get to this point Kynaston and his fellow shareholders have invested some £2.8m in the brand, but from the outset the team wanted to build the business on solid principals and, as we all know, principles often cost money. The global IP work alone cost around £100,000 and £650,000 was invested in tooling to ensure the packaging was as good as it could be.

Kynaston says: “One of the first things we decided was that we wanted a name that we could own on a global platform. As we all know most words that already exist are long gone so we realised quickly that we were going to have to make a word up. The name came from me doodling on a pad and I’d promised never to reveal the thoughts that lead to me coming up with the word, but it’s safe to say there was a bit of inspiration from a certain Vampire movie. The interesting thing is that as soon as I had written Illamasqua down on paper it seemed to have an instant equity. The amount of people who have seen the word and asked if it is from the Far East or asked what it means is incredible. It has an equity to it and we are proud of the word and it has resonated with the trade.” ProfessionalSo, they had the brand proposition and the brand name, all Kynaston needed now was a high quality product that would live up to the ‘professional’ hype. He was also determined that the brand would be built on truth and authenticity as opposed to many brands that are built on myths and ultimately disappoint the consumer.

“The truth of this brand is that in 1920s Berlin the theatres basically turned professional. In a very short space of time they went from actors designing and delivering every aspect of their own performance to someone saying ‘we can make money from this, we want to professionalise this’. The actor was told to act, a lighting guy was hired to do lighting and down the line a make-up artist was sent out and told by the director ‘I want the green on the stage to look as vivid from the back of the theatre as the front so get me a professional make-up artist who can do that and while you’re at it bring me professional make-up’.”

“At the time Arnold Langer was a young chemist and he was part of the whole realisation of professional make-up. His business went onto be Kryolan and it went on to become the world leader in professional make-up supplied to the TV and film industries. As we spoke to professionals within make-up all of them actually had a strong emotional fit with this brand. So we had the simple idea of bringing a product that we could work and develop with Kryolan’s heritage and expertise to the consumer market.”

After a conversation with the boss of Kryolan, the Berlin-based company agreed to work with the Illamasqua team to develop professional make-up for the high street.

So, the brand and the products were sorted, and of a quality that Kynaston felt would outperform competitors, but he knew he needed an extra spark to make the brand really different. That extra spark came in the form of an art team that Kynaston pulled together consisting of Dave Vanian of The Damned and German artist Anja Huwe and headed up by groundbreaking make-up artist Alex Box as head of art.

Securing the support of Box was a real coup as Kynaston explains: “It didn’t take me long to discover that Alex was incredibly well respected and I knew other companies were talking to her, but when she heard what we wanted to do with this brand she just wanted to come and work with us, which was a real coup.”

The next stage was ensuring that Illamasqua made a loud enough splash and that the right distribution deals could be struck to get the products to the market. To achieve this Kynaston appointed Carl Atkinson from L’Oreal in October 2007, initially as Commercial Director and now as Managing Director, and Atkinson came through in spades securing the best launch deal in the cosmetics arena.

Atkinson says: “There are only three places to launch a brand like Illamasqua - Harrods, Harvey Nichols or Selfridges. Selfridges is the number one beauty door in the world by turnover and so that seemed like a pretty good starting point.

“The space we were offered in Selfridges was incredible and absolutely unprecedented for a new brand. The support from the management team has also been great with CEO Paul Kelly being involved along the way.”

Illamasqua will remain exclusive to Selfridges until the New Year and then the roll out plan will kick into action, when the brand will be going into two new doors –Debenhams, House of Fraser & Fenwick - every month until July. Strategy“It is a straightforward strategy,” explains Atkinson, “we want to take space in the biggest stores with the biggest turnovers in the biggest towns and cities across the UK. We have been negotiating hard with the retailers for space in their stores. That work is done now, so we are now talking about specifics of floor space, and about what week or month we launch in each store.”

A £300,000 press advertising campaign will also run throughout November and early December with 15 insertions in titles such as Vogue, Dazed & Confused, ID, Grazia and Elle, although Kynaston is keen that Illamasqua becomes a viral brand, a brand that grows through conversation and by recruiting brand ambassadors who quite literally love to talk about the brand.

The Illamasqua team in London now numbers around 30, with 18 people recently being appointed to work in-store. Former ghd account director at Propaganda Kate Massarella has relocated to London to become Marketing & Product Director of Illamasqua, but Kynaston says the creative is 100% driven from Propaganda’s offices just outside Leeds.

So, what of the future? Atkinson says: “In terms of the distribution we would like 20 doors within 18 months time. As a team we will be market share obsessed - in any door in which we trade we will be looking for a top five slot, which means about 7-8% of market share in each door. We would be happy if we were top five and challenging for top three within 18 months.”

“We have nothing in our current business plan to show us going overseas, but we have already had some enquiries from the US. We will explore options and assess the impact. We have an awful lot to get right here first, inevitably we will do something overseas, but we have to get this right first”.

This is by no means the first time Leeds has shown itself as a leader. The city was the first to get a Harvey Nichols store outside of London and it looks like Illamasqua is going to do the city’s cool credentials even more good over the next year.