Fashion free game makeover online

After masterminding the Web pyrotechnics that made Victoria's made Victoria's Secret a hot retail brand, Rezek is doling out the razzle-dazzle to his other chains, notably Lane Bryant.

America can't quite figure out how it wants its women to look. Today more than ever, U.S. women (and men) are struggling with obesity and are willing to do just about anything to lose weight. Hollywood, meanwhile, continues to flaunt its bare-boned female celebs like some sort of identity-crisis calling card. So, in this schizophrenic arena known as body image, who is the worthy role model: Jennifer Aniston or Oprah?

It may be a frustrating time for many women, but it's fertile cultural ground if you're a marketer looking to put a new face, to say nothing of body, on plus-size fashions, Which is exactly what Ed Razek, president and CMO for The Limited and Intimate Brands, Columbus, Ohio, intends to do with rebounding women's apparel brand Lane Bryant.

In his slot at the helm of a $10 billion retail empire, Razek pioneers the brand strategies for some of the biggest names in the business: Express, Structure, Lerner New York, The Limited, Henri Bendel and Victoria's Secret. It's Victoria's Secret, of course, that boasts all the success and sex appeal. Earnings have grown steadily at an average rate of 20% since the company went public in 1995, and Razek has elevated what was once primarily a catalog business into a high-fashion lingerie brand.

Building on that accomplishment, other Intimate Brands companies are molding a fashion sensibility of their own. "Lane Bryant is following in Ed's model for Victoria's Secret, watching his success," said brand manager Chris Hansen.

Specifically, Lane Bryant is trying to shed an image of dowdy apologetic, plus-size women, having worked with spokespeople like Camryn Manheim and Kathy Najimy. Following in their footsteps, Queen Latifah is the focus of a fall/holiday 2000 marketing campaign with outdoor and print ads running in titles including Mode, Vogue, InStyle, Vibe and Jane.

These latest ads go beyond the no-apologies mantra and venture into the realm of sex appeal. New York fashion and beauty photographer Walter Chin, whose style is typically clean and colorful, was hired to shoot the campaign. Chin is also known for giving women an athletic-looking appearance, which could be a key selling point for Lane Bryant. The campaign's central image is a Latifah looking hip and sexy in her rust-colored faux leather pants, with an alluring expression that may have something to do with the scantily-clad male model lounging beside her. It's a cozy scene, with other models similarly preoccupied, and the ad's only copy is the prominently displayed Lane Bryant logo.

Hansen, speaking at a recent Lane Bryant fashion show at the Four Seasons Hotel in New York, said that using Latifah to promote a charismatic image "looked like the right business answer" in an effort to contemporize the brand. "It was clear that the [plus-sized consumer] was waiting to be treated like a regular woman ," she said.

Lane Bryant intends to make the fashion show an annual event, and is talking with Latifah about sponsoring her nationwide tour with House of Blues in 2001. The daytime-TV diva is also the spokesperson for Lane Bryant's voter registration initiative, which launched in July in conjunction with election.com. Her image appears on the Lane Bryant site with a voting link, along with the tag, "Latifah wants you to vote."

For middle-of-the-road retailers Lane Bryant and Lerner, the contribution of fashion photographers like Chin and Peter Lindberg are key to a repositioning at the higher end. Lerner has hired the New York-based Lindberg to shoot images as part of a $17 million revamp at 79 of its 585 stores, under the stewardship of marketing director Philip Monahan. The makeover includes a name change to New York & Co., as well as updates in design and inventory in test markets New York, Chicago and Philadelphia.

Lindberg's sophisticated, alluring, black-and-white photography is exactly the kind of marquee Razek is looking for. Which, he said, he owes in large part to the success of Victoria's Secret." It would have been unthinkable for a photographer like Peter Lindberg, who is arguably one of the most famous fashion photographers alive in the world, to work on a brand like that," he said. "In order to attract those kind of resources, we had to have like-minded resources internally people they respected and wanted to work with. I think we've done that across the brands. There isn't a photographer, art director or model today we couldn't work with. That wouldn't have been the case five years ago."

Razek, who got his start in the business working as an advertising copywriter, attends most of the in-house-produced TV shoots and consults with the photographers, stylists and models. "Years ago, 1 was taught by my first art director that [creative] isn't creative unless it sells, and I believe that," he said. "It's one thing to have a brand position. It's another to take the position and make it real and flesh it out, then do it in a way that's interesting and creative and dynamic and motivates customers to buy."

With that goal in mind, Razek said, "I'll go through [a commercial] frame by frame if I have to. I'll work with the editor if I have to. I always look for clear communication and I don't want the customer to have to make a leap of faith that they have no interest in taking, just because I can't figure out how to communicate it. It is my responsibility to figure that out."

With an annual budget in excess of $250 million, the largest in the fashion industry and more than 200 staffers, Razek admits he can't do everything. "You can't work on nine or 10 brands at one time and do them justice," he said. "So you have to have good marketing directors in place in every one of the divisions and, hopefully, good creative directors, good art directors and good production people. They're essentially functioning as mini-agencies, doing the brand work internally for the businesses."

But clearly he has figured out the right message for Victoria's Secret. "He's done an extraordinary job branding Victoria's Secret," said retail consultant Wendy Liebmann of WSL Strategic Retail, N.Y. "He's taken it from what was viewed as a sexy catalog business not far removed from Frederick's of Hollywood, and made it into a sexy lifestyle brand for men and women. They've turned what once was a fairly sleepy category into a fashion business."

It was no accidental feat. Last year, supermodels Heidi Klum, Laetitia Casta and Adriana Lima proudly displayed Victoria's Secret stretch cotton lingerie in a black-and-white print campaign shot by Max Vadukul. This year, Russian beauty Daniela Pestova starred in a new commercial for the Body Flex bra. Six Victoria's Secret models also appeared in the fall '99 TV campaign, "Desire," for which Razek himself wrote the copy.

The Desire spots show extreme black-and-white closeups of the models, as each answers the question, "What is desire?" Said Razek: "I played with the idea for six or eight months. I had to get my head around, first, what do we name it and then, what's important, the product attributes, the aspiration, and then how to tell the story. At the end of the day with the name 'Desire,' it finally got to what is 'desire,' and what did it mean to these individual six women? And because I knew them so well, I was able to write those 30-second spots exactly to them."

This year, he has also upped the brand's Hollywood connection. Building on product placement from celebrities like Sarah Jessica Parker, who appeared in lingerie on a recent episode of HBO's Sex in the City, Victoria's Secret mailed "Oscar survival kits" to notable celebs who the donned the company's seamless Body Bare bras at the 2000 Oscar awards ceremonies. That came on the heels, literally of a Swimsuit Media tour in which models appeared in leather swimsuits on ABC'S The View. Meanwhile, local news programs were providing coverage for Victoria's Secret free fittings and clinics held at stores in malls across the country.

So when did all this activity begin to, as industry spokesperson Karen Bromley put it, "take the lingerie out of the closet"? The watershed event was a 30-second TV spot that aired during the 1999 Super Bowl, causing a million viewers to immediately log on to the Victoria's Secret Web site. According to Nancy Kramer, president of Columbus-based Resource Marketing, Razek was the ad's catalyst. "When I took the idea for the commercial to Ed, we didn't have a lot of time to make it happen," Kramer recalled. "He could have killed it, but he had the chutzpah and energy and passion to make it all happen. He's youthful, vivacious, energetic, and has enough energy to power a small city."