Emanuel Perdis

Emanuel Perdis is the managing director of Australian cosmetics label Napoleon Perdis and the brother of Napoleon himself. The business, which has turnover of more than $80 million, has an extensive footprint in Australia and the US.

Today we are talking to Emanuel about building a business in the US, staying ahead of fashion trends and encouraging female entrepreneurship.

Emanuel, we probably have an appreciation of how big the business is in Australia but it’s quite an international business, isn’t it?

There are over 500 staff both nationally and internationally and that doesn’t include the department store staff and doesn’t include the stockist staff that mobilise the sellers. So it’s got three to four different channels, being department stores, such as David Jones, and then we’ve got our own concept stores which we are about to hit 60 soon and looking at growing that even further to 85, even 90.

And then we’re looking at around 670 independent stockists ranging from pharmacies, beauty salons, hair salons and that’s just basically Australia. Then you’ve got 230 Target stores selling the NP diffusion line and 2,500 Target stores in the US selling the diffusion line. It’s quite huge.

Tells us a bit about how the business got started and how you particularly got involved. We’re familiar with your brother Napoleon but there’s a real family story behind this business.

There is. We started together from the outset. We basically started off building a small ad agency consultancy and as we were getting more and more into make-up we realised the potential that existed in Australia for a boutique make-up line and we built that from scratch. So from the very first day, before the very first day, we’ve been at it together.

How does that relationship work? Are you the real business head and Napoleon concentrates on the glamorous side of the business?

The relationship is very complementary. What you said is close to the truth but not exactly, because Napoleon also has entrepreneurial flair and his incredible business mind. He’s not just the fluffy creative stuff or make-up or product development. From the outset he won most of the contracts to retailers and he drives the business as a CEO every day. He sows the seeds, we toil the land. I’m back in operations, sales and I make it tick. I find a way to make it work while he goes and explores new terrain and conquers new territory.

Now you talked about your big presence in the US, how hard has it been to crack that market? It is the most competitive in the world with some very strong cosmetics brands, so what’s been the strategy to get in there and build so successfully?

The fact is to speak in the present tense – we’re still “cracking it”. As a market itself, because it’s so enormous and so complex and so fragmented, it is incredibly difficult.

The most difficult thing would have to be that Americans generally as a market are very xenophobic and they’re quite conservative – they need to feel that you’ve adopted them and their culture and you become one of them before they can really uptake your product and take it to that next level. So that’s been one of the hardest things in terms of culturally understanding the market. It’s a very complex and multi-layered market from local to federal to state and then you have racial barriers, you have social class. So we’ve made some amazing inroads to date and we’ve made some backward steps but we’ve always gotten back up and got back on the horse again.

Given the conditions of the economy over there, how’s that affected the business?

It hasn’t really affected it structurally. It’s growing and it’s strong. All it is, is that in terms of each contact point within in the distribution footprint, it undermines the yield that you get from each contact point.

Take that stockist out in the suburbs doing beauty therapy and doing makeovers. Where as she would normally buy $500 of make-up from you a month, you know the economy has hampered her to where she buys $200 a month. So the yields per contact point in your distribution footprint has been undermined. That’s been the most dramatic increase and problem.

Australia’s lucky in a situation in that the exchange rate has been very favourable so our Australian dollar and the strength of the Australian operation has been able to help the American market so that’s been very, very advantageous and offsetting quite a few of the problems.

Make-up and cosmetics is quite a glamorous industry. How does that change the way the business operates? Is it hard to stay in front of those fashions and trends?

Hard in the sense of difficult? No. Hard in terms of diligence? Yes. It’s more diligence than difficulty in the sense that in a glamorous industry there has to be uncompromisingly consistent attention to detail. Especially visual detail that the customer sees and experiences from the point of she enters the shop to the point where she takes home and unpacks the product. So that is the most difficult aspect of a glamorous industry or a glamorous product or profession.