Know Your Customer

I run a program at work, where we identify ‘the best’ and then endeavour to do everything we can to take them on as clients. We consider ourselves, the best, we want to work with the best and help them continue to be the best. It’s a fantastic piece of mandated corporate elitism.

Recently, a name was added to the list that made me snort with derision. Napoleon Perdis. “Best of what?”, I sneered, “shit make up?”. There was some rebuttal about their $100m turnover, and innovations or some vague financial stuff. I think I may have rolled my eyes in response. Two months later my comment was vindicated as the company announced their voluntary administration.

The public (read: media) commentary has me all confused though. Headlines in the AFR bemoaned other, better, foreign(!) companies as the cause of Napoleon Perdis’ demise. As if people who write all day every day about the making and breaking of businesses have never heard about how consumers vote with their feet. Or the writers at SMH who tried to convince readers that the businesses failure was the cause of greedy landlords and lazy online shoppers.

I have no doubt Sephora and Mecca pay an absolute fortune for their rent, but I’ve also never seen an empty one, so clearly they’ve figured something out… mysterious. I buy a lot of makeup and skincare online too, strangely enough never from Napoleon Perdis though… again so mysterious. The AFR article alludes to 56 Napoleon Perdis stores nationally, as someone who shops in all of Sydney’s largest shopping districts frequently, I couldn’t tell you that I’d ever seen one… again, so strange. It’s almost as if they have a really bad product that no one wants to buy?

I own exactly two Napoleon Perdis products. One, a lipgloss that can best be described as ‘meh’ and I would never purchase again because it was in a very small, but deep, pot (if you have ever had long nails you’ll understand why this is a disaster). The other was an eyebrow palette I bought just as eyebrows were becoming ‘big’ again. The crisp white packaging lured me in, but quickly repelled me (after I’d parted with $49 for the thing) because as soon as you touched it it became dirty. The palette broke within a week, and the three pomades it included were clumpy, yet chalky, and somehow all made my eyebrows look ginger. As a makeup and skincare enthusiast, I try a lot of different brands and products, read and watch a lot online about skincare and makeup, and spend all together too much money on the stuff. I’m also a millennial, my need for long, luscious lashes and sparkly cheeks is something a financial analyst deep in the Fairfax Media trenches will never understand.

And I think that’s where everyone has gone wrong here. Napoleon Perdis hasn’t failed because of foreign competition, or even local competition from big bad Mecca. It hasn’t failed because of asshole landlords and Amazon. The crux of being good in retail is having a superior product that people want to buy more than the other guys product. Napoleon Perdis don’t.

We once tolerated their products because there was nothing else readily available in Australia. Now though, there is an huge array of high quality luxury and drug store products available – along with easily accessible reviews and guides to using the products to the best of their ability.  

Riddle me this - why would I spend $50 on a proven crappy, dirty, medium priced eyebrow product from Napoleon Perdis via one of their trashy Priceline displays when I could walk 200m up Pitt Street and try 139 products, with assistance from a makeup artist to get something perfect for me? Or walk into Myer and have the Benefit or MAC artists help me choose something. “What about online?” I hear you say. Well, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the likes of Lisa Eldridge or Nikki Tutorials review, let alone recommend, a Napoleon Perdis product. I’ve never seen Napoleon Perdis tagged in a Huda Kattan post. In fact, the AFR even alluded to Instagram beauty influences as being part of the cause of his downfall.

We try to explain this lesson to our bankers day in, day out. “Know your customer”, “understand their business”. In this situation Napoleon (and his commentators) don’t know the customer at all. If they did, my makeup collection might contain more than a forgotten, broken palette and a loathed lip gloss.