How to Remake Your Company Like Johnson Products

Husband and wife team Eric Brown and Renee Cottrell-Brown seek to make history and profits in ethnic haircare.

Last year, they became the new owners of Johnson Products Company, the manufacturer of haircare products Afro Sheen, Ultra Sheen, and Gentle Treatment when the Procter & Gamble unit was acquired by RCJP Acquisition Inc., a partnership formed by the Browns and private equity firms Rustic Canyon/Fontis Partners LP and St. Cloud Capital. The transaction was valued at more than $30 million.

What made that deal significant was JPC’s rich history. Founded by entrepreneur and one of BLACK ENTERPISE’s 40 Most Powerful African Americans in Business, George Johnson, the Chicago-based company grew to become a mainstay among the BE 100s for roughly 20 years as well as the first black-owned company with shares traded on the American Stock Exchange.

In fact, JPC supported a number of black institutions, including syndicated television show, Soul Train. By 1993, JPC, after years of internal management turmoil, was sold to IVAX Corp in a deal valued at $67 million, making it the first BE 100s haircare manufacturer bought by a majority-owned company. P&G acquired JPC in 2003.

Today, the company, which is now based in Dallas and grossed $23 million in revenues for fiscal 2009, is once again minority-owned. Brown and Cottrell-Brown serve as CEO and executive vice president, respectively.

The ethnic haircare veterans both held senior management positions at Pro-Line International Inc., a subsidiary of Alberto-Culver and another former BE 100s company. In fact, Cottrell-Brown is the daughter of Pro-Line founder Comer Cottrell, who is also listed among BLACK ENTERPRISE’s 40 Most Powerful Blacks in Business. Gabrielle Greene, an African American financier and partner of RC/Fontis Partners, is JPC’s chairman.

In an exclusive interview with Editor-In-Chief Derek T. Dingle, the Browns detailed their strategy to remake JPC for today’s consumers.

BLACK ENTERPRISE:  Share with me the ownership structure of JPC.

Eric Brown: The majority of the company is under minority ownership. There’s a Hispanic investor out of Los Angles, RC/Fontis.  Between RC/Fontis and ourselves, we represent about 60%. Renee and I have about 20% and the ability, over time, to take on as many shares as we like.  At some point in time, hopefully, we will be able to come back to you and say, “We’re 100% African American-owned.”

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BE: What is your growth strategy that’s going to distinguish JPC in the ethnic haircare market?

Brown: Our vision is very simply to be the number one ethnic haircare manufacturer in the world of ethnic beauty care products.  We’re not going to limit ourselves just to hair.  But right now, that’s the area that we operate in.

Now what is going to get us there?  We look at innovation a lot differently than just products and formulas that go into those bottles and jars that we sell.  We look at innovation in terms of process.  We look at innovation in terms of how we communicate to our consumer.

BE: In terms of communication with the consumer, how has it changed from the way JPC used to reach them, whether it was through Soul Train or other marketing strategies?

Brown: We’re evolving in a sense that I think a lot of companies have gotten away from that.  Multinational companies like P&G, in general, like to do things as broad as possible.  They’ll spend a million dollars on a commercial and hopefully catch everybody in that net.

When Johnson was being built, it was almost a consumer-at-a-time approach where it was involved with setting up things at churches and parks. I think the reason everybody knows Johnson is because they got involved with people and their lifestyle. We want to have an emotional involvement and responsibility with our consumer and the community that our consumer lives in.

We did a model search, and you don’t know how many times I’ve had people come up to me and say, “I remember Johnson Products because of some scholarship that they did.”  Or, “I remember Johnson Products because they had a beauty school.”

Cottrell-Brown: I don’t believe that one medium can deliver the message.  I truly believe that it takes a well-rounded marketing mix.  You need the PR piece to touch the community.  You need to be in radio.  You need to be outdoors.  Today, I just think [technology is] great because with social media you really can engage the consumer and live with them day in and day out with Facebook and Twitter.

BE:  Share your strategies in digital media and social networks.  How have you connected with the consumers?

Cottrell-Brown: We just mentioned the model search; that is a legacy promotion.  It was basically communicated in the past to the consumer via print.  For the first time, we used Facebook.

Once

we had them involved in the contest, we began to communicate back to them.  We actually started a little sorority of these different models.  We had over 1,200 girls and we were talking to them all the time.  Guess what?  On Facebook, they started talking to each other.

So, it really created the awareness of what we were doing [and] the awareness of the brand.  They became these little ambassadors for us. We had over 40,000 registered unique voters [and] 250,000 hits over that 90-day period.  So it was pretty incredible.

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BE: What are some other consumer outreach efforts?

Cottrell-Brown: Our first initiative was a giving promotion.  We actually raised proceeds by collaborating with a retailer such as Sally Beauty Supply.  We leveraged our General Treatment brand as a form of brand recognition to raise awareness for domestic abuse. What brand name better speaks to domestic abuse than General Treatment?

We committed about $50,000. On the Southside of Chicago, we basically gutted a kitchen and put in a salon inside. We call it the General Treatment Beauty Center.  We actually hooked up with some of the beauty schools there in the market place.

BE:  Do you have a special focus for male consumers? How has research helped you approach that market?

Cottrell-Brown: When we conducted focus groups, we took in a name we thought was hip. We chose Urbane because [it] means handsome, sophisticated.  We took it into the focus group and those guys were like, “They must think we can’t spell.  This must be Ebonics.”  Because they thought it was Urban.

They saw Ultra Sheen [and] they were like, “That’s for me.  Now, I get that.  That’s what we want.”  So, that’s how we came up with the new brand Ultra Sheen Men.  It came right out of their mouths, something they could resonate with.  We’re looking forward to getting that in the marketplace in the next month.

BE: What’s your approach to the international market?

Brown: We take a little bit of a different approach when we talk about international because it is more about hair texture than skin color.  So our marketing approach and out-of-the-box tactics take on a little bit of a different light.

Hair texture allows you to speak to a much broader audience. Certainly, when you’re talking about West Africa, there are people who look like us.  When we talk about places like Latin America or the Caribbean, you get a much broader range of hair texture as well as skin color.

But we know that people of African descent require certain products to be able to maintain their hair. We think we can really make some significant gain because we have relatively very little international distribution.

BE:  So what will JPC look like in the next five years?

Brown: Five years from now, I’d like to be sitting across from this table and have you, “Eric, did you ever envision that you’d be talking about an IPO [initial public offering]?”  Wouldn’t that be great to be able to say that Johnson Products, which was one of the first publicly-held African American companies, would be public again?