Where To Buy Fashion Fair Makeup Near Me

Loyal customers are shedding tears over the sudden scarcity of Fashion Off-white cosmetics. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)

The angry rumblings and confused lamentations are all over social media. They're coming from diehard customers of Fashion Fair cosmetics, a brand founded in 1973 to cater to African American women at a time when major makeup companies essentially ignored them.

Where is the Statuary Loose Powder? Where's the Perfect Finish Souffle Makeup? What virtually the Brown Saccharide Foundation Stick?

Customers who rely on Fashion Fair for exact peel tone matches and perfectly flattering lipsticks have been unable to locate their favorite products — or whatever products at all. In stores and online, they're finding color selections so skimpy and stock and then depleted there has been niggling for sales representatives to even sell. Even counter clerks accept been asking: What's going on?

Way Fair's response has been, for many loyalists, deeply unsatisfying.

"Cheers for your patience as we rebuild our inventories."

"We acknowledge that stock has been low in previous months; however, the replenishment process [is] underway!"

"Are they going out of business?" asks longtime customer Allana Smith.

"No," says Linda Johnson Rice, chairman of Johnson Publishing Co., which owns the makeup line. "Nosotros're not going out of business."

Just Style Fair is in upheaval — and customers have good reason to question its survival.

Breaking ground

Dazzler products are not essentials. But in those piffling bottles and jars are fragments of a social contract, elixirs of reassurance, drops of pure pleasure — and in the case of Way Fair, a good bit of proud history.

The brand was launched by Johnson Publishing, the Chicago-based company established by John and Eunice Johnson in 1942. For decades, information technology dominated the blackness media market with Ebony and Jet magazines. Information technology too created Ebony Fashion Off-white — a traveling roadshow of designer frocks and amusement that rolled cultural uplift, savvy marketing and fundraising into one dazzling stage extravaganza.

Eunice Johnson noticed that the African American models who twirled downwardly her runways were mixing their own foundations because they had trouble finding makeup to friction match their complexion. She took those homemade concoctions to chemists, and a makeup line was born.

When the brand arrived at retail counters, with its picayune pinkish compacts and pink lipstick tubes, it wasn't just promoting beauty and glamour but too cocky-esteem and confidence, and it served every bit a dynamic example study in the potential of black entrepreneurs and blackness consumers.

[Hip-hop was poised to conquer manner. Why did it finish short?]

Fashion Off-white addressed the beauty desires of black women long earlier Black Opal began touting skin intendance or MAC cosmetics rolled out its concentrated pigments and marketing campaigns that embraced everyone from the black girl-next-door to drag queens. Fashion Fair came well before Estée Lauder and Clinique discovered the righteous potential in expanding their color palettes and diversifying their advertising.

It remains the but major department store cosmetics make catering specifically to black women. Information technology is nevertheless fully endemic and operated by Johnson Publishing. And the name all the same resonates.

"Every bit a child, my parents used to purchase Ebony and Jet. The models were stunning," recalls Allana Smith, who grew upwards in Brooklyn. "As a 16-year-old kid, I recollect thinking, 'I want to expect like that when I grow up.' "

At present 41 and still living in Brooklyn, Smith has been using Fashion Fair products for xv years. She receives regular compliments on her skin. People tin can't even tell she's wearing makeup, Smith says.

So all she wants to know is this: Where can I get my Oil-Free Perfect Cease Cream-to-Powder foundation in Moka Moka? Where?

She made the rounds of her local Macy'southward this year and came up empty-handed. At Brooklyn's Fulton Street store, she asked the sales staff to recommend another Mode Off-white color — a nigh-lucifer to suffice until her shade was bachelor. Just they had nothing; they told Smith they hadn't had a commitment from Mode Off-white in nearly a year.

"Our buyers and senior managers are on it," says Macy'southward spokesperson Elina Kazan. The department store has carried Fashion Fair for more than 30 years. "We've been in constant advice with Fashion Off-white about when nosotros'll be in receipt of appurtenances."

When might that be? "Nosotros are waiting," Kazan says, after a lengthy break. "As shortly as we get information technology, we'll put it out in that location for customers."

A changing market

On a recent October morning time, Style Off-white's valuable real estate at the Metro Middle Macy'south was deserted. There were a few boxes of foundation on the glass shelves. A couple dozen packages of eye shadow were stored inside a glass-front instance. Two makeup brushes were propped in a drinking glass beaker on a lonely brandish table — part of a special promotion that seemed more of an afterthought. The shelves had a pre-snowstorm grocery shop wait of scarcity.

Interviews with company executives and industry observers suggest that Fashion Off-white has been squeezed between cultural shifts in the cosmetics market place and business challenges specific to a stand-alone brand.

These are good times for the U.S. prestige dazzler market place, which was worth $11.2 billion in 2014 — a iii percent bump from 2013, driven by sales of skin-care potions and lip colour, co-ordinate to the NPD Group.

But Fashion Fair is a modest actor in an industry dominated past major corporations: Estée Lauder, L'Oréal, Procter & Hazard, LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton. And different the others, information technology'southward a subsidiary of a troubled media company. Ebony is losing advertisers; the print edition of Jet closed in 2014. Johnson Publishing has put its historic photo archive up for sale; it has already sold its South Michigan Avenue headquarters.

Johnson Publishing chief executive Desiree Rogers, left, with chairman Linda Johnson Rice at the United Negro College Fund's 66th anniversary dinner in 2010. (Earl Gibson 3/Associated Printing)

"We're a small company with capital constraints. Information technology'southward not something we're thrilled about," says Desiree Rogers, chief executive of Johnson Publishing and a old social secretary in the early years of the Obama White Firm.

[Desiree Rogers may have improved Washington's wait. Washington may not take noticed.]

Manner Fair's product shortfall built up slowly, Rogers says. But it somewhen triggered a self-perpetuating cycle. Once customers realized products were deficient, they started buying in bulk whenever they could detect them, which drew down stock even more.

Catching up "is not a quick process," Rogers says. "We've inundated our suppliers. Nosotros've inundated them with orders . . . [simply] I tin can't demand they shut down other projects and just do mine."

Theoretically, these should exist advantageous times for Manner Fair. A contempo survey of teenagers past the investment business firm Piper Jaffray & Co. constitute they favor pocket-size, independent cosmetics lines over large mega-brands.

Merely even if Fashion Fair had the capital to have advantage of this trend, "they take to become where the consumer is going," says Stephanie Wissink, a Piper Jaffray director. It was e'er a point of pride that Way Fair was a department store brand, rather than a drugstore i. But today's younger customers gravitate to multi-make outlets, such every bit Sephora and Ulta, where they can experiment with a wide range of makeup without a beauty consultant making a hard sell. And Style Fair doesn't distribute through Sephora or Ulta.

Meanwhile in a "minority bulk" culture, Wissink says, black women no longer want or need a separate counter. A host of brands have broadened their colour palette to cater to them; a once-ignored client is at present beingness wooed by many suitors.

Three years ago, Style Off-white began to reconsider its position in the marketplace. Makeup artist Sam Fine — famous for working with models Iman and Tyra Banks— signed on as creative director, and in Jan 2013, his outset capsule collection was touted to the beauty press. Past the fall of that twelvemonth, all the same, Fine had moved on to Cover Girl.

In early 2014, Way Fair announced that Tia Dantzler, another makeup artist with a celebrated clientele, would accept on the part of creative director.

That summertime, a group of beauty bloggers and journalists were invited to Fashion Fair's Chicago headquarters for an unveiling of new products and packaging. They were greeted past the brand's recently installed president, Amy Hilliard, equally well as Rogers. Dantzler was there, likewise, providing makeovers for the guests.

They "discussed where the brand was going," recalls makeup artist Courtney Waldon, who lives in Chicago. "I understood it equally having a more modern feel. Consumers my age think of information technology as something their mom or grandmom would article of clothing."

Waldon, 34, is a fan of MAC and Nars. But she was won over by the silky texture and colors of Fashion Off-white's $25 cream-to-pulverization foundations.

Terez Baskin, a role-time beauty concern writer, liked what she saw that twenty-four hour period as well. But she also noticed a problem. "The colors were groovy. The pigments were good. But all of that has been washed earlier," Baskin says. The leadership squad was especially excited nigh marketing a mascara for the first time. Just they didn't take any samples to examination. They didn't take the full range of foundation colors available either.

"They were excited about all the newness," Baskin says. "They gave us a bunch of balloons, merely nothing to necktie them to."

A brusque time later, client frustration picked upwards steam on social media.

Moving forward

Rogers says Fashion Off-white has been closing some outlets and remodeling others. The visitor is also redesigning its Spider web site, which has enjoyed a triple-digit increase in sales, Rogers says. "E-business is a large part of the future," she says, "specially for women replenishing what they already have."

Way Fair has retired its signature pink packaging and replaced it with metallic bronze. A fresh advertising campaign with new "faces" will launch in 2016 and Fashion Fair's social media has been dotted with images of actresses such equally Tika Sumpter, Raven-Symoné, Ciara and others who might appeal to a younger demographic.

But meanwhile, the empty shelves are testing the patience of retailers such as Macy's, Dillard's and Belk. Macy's worries that frustrations customers have with Fashion Fair will turn into frustration with their stores. Shoppers believe they are watching a celebrated make wither — despite the company's denials.

So they're looking elsewhere. Avon has a tempting cream-to-pulverisation makeup in deep tones and it'due south but almost $12.

Rogers says the Manner Fair transformation is about 75 percent complete. "We know we have to do better, and we volition," she says. "We're not here to make an excuse but to thank [customers] for their business organization. The worst is over."

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/what-happened-to-fashion-fair-why-the-black-cosmetics-brand-is-so-hard-to-find/2015/10/27/17416cf0-72be-11e5-8d93-0af317ed58c9_story.html

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