The Nicole Miller company is ready for some respect.
Despite two years of growth that have doubled wholesale revenue of the Nicole Miller Collection and Signature labels of eveningwear to $75 million, the company can’t claim the cachet it would like. Placement in fashion magazines has been scant, and retailers don’t mention the label to the media much, either.
So Bud Konheim, who owns and manages the company with Nicole Miller, is going on the offensive. He’s contracted Agency Assouline, the advertising and marketing division of the publishing company, to produce a $2 million spring ad campaign to elevate Miller’s reputation as a designer and inject some hip factor into the 24-year-old brand.
Agency Assouline has produced campaigns for a number of luxury brands, including Harry Winston, Chanel and Tag Heuer.
“We have to change people’s perception about how cool the stuff is,” Konheim said. “We have to make people aware there is something going on at Nicole Miller. Everybody has us pegged and typecast and labeled as prints. Nobody is open-minded.”
Calling himself “the culprit,” Konheim admitted he had focused on building sales to the exclusion of image.
“The challenge is about image and cachet, and we don’t think we have done ourselves justice in that area,” he said. “If clothing is good design and made well and priced right, it sells, so we keep to that, but we are missing the hype and cachet, so we don’t resonate in some areas, like magazines. You don’t see magazines filled with our stuff.”
Over the past four years, the company has had nothing short of a renaissance. The change began when Miller and Konheim ousted salespeople who were touting proven styles to buyers instead of new looks. The partners cleaned out the sales staff and overhauled every other department one by one.
“Some people were being destructive to the company,” Miller reasoned. “They were in ruts and had attitudes, and sometimes when people have been there too long you don’t have a fresh approach….[Now] it’s been a whole new company with a fresh view and people and different values, and everybody has been much more gung ho and motivated.”
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The designer herself took a step back to reconsider how to craft her collection.
“I felt like the recent past had been rehashed so much — every year there was a different period,” she reflected. “So I started going back to ancient cultures, because I felt the only way to do something new was to start with something ancient. I did Celtic, Byzantine, Nordic, the Valkyries — and for spring I did Mayan. I’ve had such an unbelievable reaction to the prints because there is nothing like them in the market.”
Miller also has been keen to experiment with technological advancements in fabrics, such as an unusual crinkle metallic taffeta she introduced last year that is now filtering throughout the market.
“Her prints are stronger than ever, her fabrications are stronger than ever, and her silhouettes are always flattering to a lady’s figure,” observed John Maguire, dress buyer for Tootsies, which has three stores and is one of Miller’s biggest specialty accounts. “And her scarf dresses have started to be worn by celebrities like Angelina Jolie.”
While Nicole Miller Collection and Nicole Miller Signature are the marquee labels, the company has also built an empire of 35 licenses that brings another $225 million in annual wholesale revenue to the firm. Spanning from socks to linens to furniture, the licenses have raised Miller’s profile among the public.
The designer credits J.C. Penney’s advertising for the Nicole by Nicole Miller private label with boosting sales of the higher-priced Collection label over the past two years.
While Nicole’s separates and dresses retail from about $20 to $70, Nicole Miller Collection is tagged from $295 to $695. Her Signature label is higher, from $1,000 to $3,500. Miller has also signed on to do a Platinum label of evening and prom dresses for Penney’s, which debuts next spring and will retail up to $189.
“The good thing about this is, you can bring better taste and fashion to a lot of people without hurting your own business,” Miller said.
There’s also some unexpected overlap among consumers, Konheim pointed out. A woman wearing a Nicole top from Penney’s bought a $3,000 Signature dress at an Oklahoma trunk show, he said.