NEW REVLON PRODUCT TO TARGET FOOD STORES

JAMES TENSER

SAN FRANCISCO -- Revlon will introduce a value-priced brand of tone-on-tone hair coloring next month that it says is engineered to help retailers, especially supermarkets, strengthen their profits in the $1 billion-per-year category.

Called Shadings, the line of 15 colors will be shipped to food, drug and mass outlets in late September, said Ray Wojcik, senior vice president for trade marketing at Revlon, New York.

"What we are attempting to do is to get retailers' -- and particularly food retailers' -- attention around this category," he said. "Currently, supermarkets make no statement of any significance in hair coloring."

Wojcik outlined Revlon's plans for the Shadings introduction in a talk he delivered to the Trade Marketing Today conference here last month. The conference was sponsored by The Marketing Institute, New York. He elaborated on the company's plans in an interview with Brand Marketing.

"What we were attempting to do to start off 1994 was to ask retailers for a seat at the table for category management in the hair color business," he said, adding that Revlon is now actively working with accounts in preparation for the rollout.

He showed conference attendees category-analysis data that indicate hair color sales grew at a 13% rate during calendar year 1993, which places it among the fastest-expanding segments within HBC.

"The category is going to gross over $5 billion in the next five

years," he told the audience. "The reason why, as you all know, is demographics."

The new brand, Shadings, is a tone-on-tone product, which means it has a "semi-permanent" duration of six weeks. It is intended to blend with natural hair color, remove gray, and add shine and conditioning.

Such coloring products especially appeal to baby boomers who "want to stay young-looking," he said.

Compared with more common "permanent" hair coloring, which generate 66% of the category volume and 52% of profits, semi-permanent colorings offer better margin and return on inventory investment potential, he said.

Added Wojcik: "As we look at hair color for the food class of trade, we see that, unlike total HBC where they do 34% of the business, they only do 17% of the business. So we see a significant opportunity gap that they have with this category."

By comparison, mass merchants control 28% of the hair coloring business and drug stores 55%, he told Brand Marketing.