We found a diner and went back to Ethan’s low budget motel room. Not a great time; not a great time. Why wouldn’t he have a thing going on the side with some baseball groupie slut? Great sex and decent conversation did little to convince me otherwise. I went to a few games and sure enough several trashy types waited for him near the locker rooms.
I nagged for details. Ethan bristled. I demanded honesty. He accused me of spying and harassing. Discussion dissolved as if we were back on the movie set. F bombs flew. I shouted about sluts and white trash, convinced he hung onto me because I was his meal ticket. I left the next morning while he slept. Back in St. Louis I threw myself into making my work a career. I heard from him two weeks later. Then one June evening I returned from Saks to Ethan sitting on our porch. We agreed to go on, two dreamers barely out of high school, tripping over the baggage we dragged with us. Our damaged souls needed each other, but to make it as a couple we had to figure out who we were as individuals.
Ethan flew back to Arizona, the best location for a promising professional pitcher. I threw myself into analysing the politics of the beauty world. We pounced on our career possibilities with nothing to lose.
As a rough-edged outsider I needed store people to support me and the fragrance brands employing me. I connected the industry dots and devised a strategy to be my own interpretation of beauty queen. Raw talent, street smarts and innate perception kept me employed, but even I realised my professional and character flaws drew the wrong kind of attention.
My department memos, the bedrock of business communication, rambled in strings of run-on sentences and phonetic spelling. Vickie’s parting gifts founded my business library. I studied her gifts and added frequently. My jump from print ads to the fragrance industry paid off. I was a natural at selling and delivering results.
I also knew my brash, sandpaper nature isolated me.
Fragrance counter cohorts were as standoffish as my high school classmates. It kept me an outsider but I’d be damned if I’d let my flaws keep me from my goal of New York City executive. I revved up my competitive instincts.
Estee Lauder and Giorgio Beverly Hills jolted the industry. Their now-standard concept of GWP, Gift With Purchase, created buzz like I’d never seen. In prestige stores throughout the U.S. RED – Giorgio Beverly Hills took over the entire entrance of the cosmetic department. Suddenly customers from coast to coast entered on a red carpet running along five to ten glass display cases jam packed with the cleverly staged single brand Red. Red banners hung from the ceiling, Red posters displayed the related items. It became impossible to wander through the store without some sort of brand encounter. The goal? Spritz, spray or sample, et voila! Purchase.
To alert the press and engage the consumer, New York and Los Angeles, plus smaller regional markets, held launch parties and spared no expense to ensure camaraderie. Every sales person was to feel like a key part of the movement. Suddenly fragrance companies scrambled, hell bent to climb on the band wagon. As much as scent, brand recognition depended on one perfect package of colour, logo, font style, even musical theme. Fragrances launched with massive budgets soon produced fifty percent higher sales. In a pre-GWP year thirty to fifty new products might be introduced. By the time I was fully involved, over two hundred were launched.
National and international brands loaded the local sales force with bonuses, incentives, product, and most importantly, reassurance. Our one-on-one customer efforts were the key to success. Like a beauty industry version of Studio 54, buyers, and top executives mingled with local store managers and sales personnel. Daytime work segued into after-hours play; discretion segued into rumours that became the stuff of legends. My street smarts and outsider status served me well as I plunged into Public Relations 101: Look, Listen, partake, and stay above the fray.
I had dozens of glory days soap opera antics to share with Alexandra and Maria but only university post office boxes for their addresses. Over Chinese take-out in my empty apartment, I penned a detailed letter to Alexandra at Vanderbilt, and a short note to Maria at Duke. Alexandra replied with a postcard. I never heard from Maria.
I also wrote to Ethan:
I swear, I’m panning nuggets in this beauty and fragrance gold rush. From what I can tell everyone who wants in makes it. I love you! This band wagon could be my ride to success, and our chance for a good life together.
Below my signature I drew a sketch of a naked couple in flagrante delicto nestled against what he knew to be ‘The Cave’, our Brucknerfield rocks. He called me.
Meanwhile my elbows-on-the-counter co-workers dissected our competition daily. I listened, often half inside an open display case, sliding my artfully stacked cologne bottles closer to the glass front. “He’s bland and boring, the last person I’d pick for success.”
“You haven’t seen him in action. He knows who counts and studies every player’s modus operandi. He’s a political machine.”
What was it to be political? How could I get that skill? What the hell was modus operandi? I was a diamond in the rough, according to the few colleagues willing to look past my ‘very abrasive traits’. No news there, but I didn’t know what I didn’t know. Thanks to my teen comportment classes with Alexandra I could make eye contact and shake hands with the best of them, probably even walk a runway with a book on my head. Table manners, vocabulary, business communication? Not so much.
My blunt, frank style was my biggest flaw. Coarse, crass, crude and uncouth were whispered in my presence. My standoffish routine kept me from seeking mentors when I needed them the most. Selling and self-promotion were my strong suits. I claimed I could do it all to anyone who’d listen and then set out to prove it. Genevieve and I had routinely fixed up our mother for her ‘evenings out’ so I added makeovers, facials, even hair styling to my portfolio. Like a good mimic I picked up tricks of the trade fast. Per usual my resume/sell sheet included fifty percent fabrication. I sensed what I learned to be true. If I could sell and execute with big results, no one gave a damn what was on it.
Freelancing for small, unknown brands honed my aggressive style: No breaks. Remain in front of the counter, circle the floor to spot a potential customer before anyone else. I was often the first point of contact at the entrance to the fragrance department. I dominated consumer traffic. My ignorance proved to be an advantage. Every brand I represented was an equal opportunity to make a sale.
No surprise. Within six months my results-oriented approach widened the gulf. Sales people were known to exaggerate their numbers yet I delivered high sales with no real experience. I’d have told them I didn’t spend my day leaning against a Dillard’s glass counter full of merchandise. I didn’t bitch about slow sales. I didn’t kill time in the Galleria Mall stock room whining about the person (that would be me) selling too much. No one asked how I did it. Instead saleswomen working for other brands petitioned the store manager to kick me out. “Emma Paige grabs all the customers,” they said. “We don’t have a chance to make our goals.”
“All I know about perfume is your panties on my bedpost,” Ethan said when I ranted about them.
“I’m serious!”
“Common sense, Emma. Whiny ass co-workers ganging up on you means you’ve got more power than you think. Power’s like influence. If they’re jealous and complaining, sure as hell the big shots are watching you and liking what they see.”
“You’re a genius.”
“I’m a rookie in a locker room always watching the scouts and coaches for who they’re watching. If you get hauled up in front of your boss, give him all you’ve got. Show him your stats. Make it your job to show him why they’re jealous.”
I did. I had the support of the brands employing me. My first attempt at business politics involved discussing the complaint with the manager, showing him three months of my documented sales results and proving my contribution of recent retail volume. “The thing is, I love what I do and I’m damn good at my job,” I concluded, remembering steady eye contact. “I’m proof anyone and everyone can get results like mine. Why, shit… Sorry. Why, heck, they just need to use their time properly. Use it for customer contact. For selling.”
My manager dismissed the complaint, asked for consideration of others and reminded us top priority was positive customer service. Word about the resolution spread. Jealous sales people black balled me resulting in loss of some of my brands. I had not been reprimanded but false accusations left that out.
I zigged, then zagged around obstacles and found freelance opportunities with luxury European brands barely known to American customers. They’d done their demographic homework and sought aggressive promotion to place their fragrance in American hands. I was a perfect fit. On a good day I introduced a thousand samples to wandering Midwestern shoppers, producing more than five hundred 1980s dollars. Not bad for unpronounceable fragrances.
I, who often slaughtered the English language, was now required to translate French and Italian to women (and men shopping with them in mind), clueless about the romantic message printed on the packaging. To demonstrate my action-oriented approach to the naysayers, I hustled on the floor. I offered free gift wrapping and kept a log of every customer, from personal contact information to birthdates. I memorised their names and complimented a new hairstyle or outfit to build customer relationships. They sought me out.
My reputation improved. Intuition knocked me on the head. In any anchor store, from Saks to Famous Barr, my freelance success partially depended on the employees behind the fragrance counters. They worked forty hours a week, day in and day out. I thought of Saks, that kind Christmas employee, and the one so willing to figure out the campus delivery. Counter (primarily) women made lower hourly rates than I, but could easily boost their salaries as much as forty-five percent with commissions. It was in my best interest to win them over.
I applied my clientele approach to employees and tried to penetrate their unwritten code. Many kept me at arm’s length, reluctant to become entangled with me. So be it! I picked the underestimated, marginalised underdogs new to the beauty world. Common sense told me to empower those who supported my ideas. The sales force advocating my dismissal remained but those who dubbed me the people’s salesperson, had my back. I was one of them. I learned the definition of egalitarian, my management style, born from selling Mrs Birnbaum’s Avon products in The Beehive.
My international employers paid no taxes and could afford additional cash bonuses to independent contractors like me for exceeding the daily goals. My hourly rate increased and they sent me to the best malls throughout the Midwest. I discovered the more I travelled the less I obsessed over whether Ethan was ignoring or enjoying temptation. When he returned, we holed up and lived like the married couple we tried to be.
He had a pitch to perfect; I concentrated on mastering the progression of advancement in the fragrance industry.
Chapter Four
From St. Louis anchor stores up to the Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Columbus triangle plus north to Chicago, I honed my Midwest reputation. As green as I was, I knew selling required more than moving products. Staff at every level were my most important marketing tool. When I wanted to know what was wrong with my brand, my answer lay in the stores.
I practiced my air of confidence on sales people as though I’d been born into a different family, as though I fit, as though everything came easily. Within months I had a small army.
Fine tuning my image took as much effort as my business skills. By the mid-eighties Donna Karan and her DKNY label had burst on the scene and I wanted to be a part of all product categories: purses, shoes, hosiery, jewellery. Her designer clothes were above my budget but her work kick started my obsession with expensive designer ready-to-wear. I checked her price tags with flashbacks to my pre-barcode childhood when I stood in dressing rooms watching my mother switch garment price tags to make her choices suddenly affordable.
I asked to travel to Chicago where newcomer Moschino planned to launch its fragrance. Their progressive national ad featured a masculine woman in a gold push-up bra. She held a decorated bottle of the perfume, straw inserted as if she were about to sip. Franco Moschino cut his design teeth as a sketcher for Versace, but his critical take on design and the fashion industry created the kind of innovative, edgy work I loved.
I left my hotel and entered Marshall Field’s decked out in blazer, blouse and pencil skirt. The Moschino-scented beauty department hummed with stylish reps spritzing in mid-calf skirts. Big-hair, padded shoulder beauty advisors hovered at their edgy display.
As I chatted with the employees and complimented their displays, my total unhipness hit me full force. An attractive guy sizing up my outfit didn’t help. I needed the women’s department pronto.
