Design Interview: Jane Schub
Susan Ramus M & S Fulfillment
By Marie Redding, Senior EditorSuccessful beauty brands have great business minds behind them. But do great business minds have beauty success in front of them?
In the case of Susan Ramus, M & S Fulfillment's cofounder, she has a long list of beauty brand successes behind her, with more on the way.
A former investment banker, Ramus has brought not only a creative eye to the brands she's helped grow, but also good business sense. She has helped specialty skincare brands N.V. Perricone M.D. Cosmeceuticals and Dr. Brandt, providing packaging and labeling design, inventory control, operations management, and formulation ideas.
Ramus designed all packaging and labeling for Dr. Brandt's line, which combines natural ingredients and advanced technology.Ramus first started in the beauty products industry when she advised an investment banking client interested in marketing spa products. "After working in his lab, I gave him some suggestions on commercial viability." she says. "I then started dreaming up new formulas and got hooked." She helped this client develop spa products using marine ingredients and invented the use of "spa mini bars" in hotels. She then designed her own spa products for the amenities market called BioSentiels, and helped another firm, Westward Look Resort, create its line.
Through some of these projects, Susan saw the challenges that start-up brands face. "Custom packaging can be expensive, and stock components often require minimum orders. Pricing is especially important for the little guy--so you have to get creative." Ramus decided to apply her business acumen to package and label design, among other things. When she started sourcing components for her early spa projects, she looked for resourceful and innovative partners. One way to get the best price, she says, is to ask suppliers to "tack your orders to the end of other, larger orders to take advantage of economies of scale." Another is to find responsive suppliers, like Sonic Packaging Industries, she says. "Sonic's Doug Rofheart has a source for whatever I need. He finds unusual things, like applicators and samples."
Selecting packaging components requires careful study, she says. "You can't rush your product to market. You have got to test every packaging component for compatibility with your products." She has even frozen and thawed packages during testing.
Ramus says her biggest success was working with Dr. Perricone, whose products reduce inflammation in the skin's epithelial layer after exposure to sun and other irritants. Nada Lantz-Krasnow of Lantz-a-Lot Inc., a retail management firm for prestige brands, collaborated with Dr. Perricone on his retail marketing strategy and introduced Ramus to him in 1999. Serving as director of operations, Ramus helped the line expand from $34 million in product sales in 1999 to $50 million in 2002. She also helped design cartons for the brand's Olive Oil line.
Ramus and Lantz-Krasnow then helped Dr. Brandt develop new packaging and a new strategy for his line. Lantz-Krasnow says the original line "didn't portray what Dr. Brandt was all about," so Ramus worked with chemists to update formulations. She then designed and sourced all packaging and labeling, and Lantz-Krasnow relaunched the line at Sephora, Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, and Bergdorf Goodman.
Ramus' latest projects include running the skincare fulfillment center she and her fiancé, Maurice Jacob, opened in 2001 in West Palm Beach, FL. "M & S is unmatched for service, accuracy, and speed," says Kathleen McNeill, category merchandise manager, skincare, for Sephora. Ramus is also excited about her new skincare line in clinical trials. Infusion Biotechnologies LLC's Infusion line permeates the skin and stops inflammation before it occurs. Sophisticated labeling will be key. "We want to give consumers clinical data on the ingredients and the delivery system." Ramus plans to market the line with a detailed booklet to do just that.