Liz Claiborne Makes Scents With a Bit of Mambo

HANOVER, Md. — At a restaurant in this Washington suburb, 240 cosmetic counter salespeople, the ladies who stand on their feet all day, pushing a little bit of glamour across the glass counter, clap wildly and shout, “Whoo! Whoo! Whoo!”

Crank ‘em up! Spend $15,000 to $20,000 on a rally to get ‘em trembling over Mambo, Liz Claiborne’s new perfume that somehow distills the beauty and mystery of all things Latino.

Here’s the pitch in the publicity packet: “We all know that mambo is not just a dance, it’s a scorching bond between two people, enraptured in movement and feeling. But isn’t this the way of all things Latin? Come; find the Latino way of relationships, love and romance, captured within the magical liquid in every bottle.”

Perfume is nothing but promise.

The $20-million launch of Mambo is a careful, canny extension of the undulate-down economics of the ecstasies promised by Jennifer Lopez and Ricky Martin, and so many other Latino stars, along with the dark romance of grace, passion, flashing teeth and the pulse of the tropics. It goes back at least to the Hollywood movies of 70 years ago.

The scent is the brainchild of Neil Katz, president of Liz Claiborne Cosmetics. He is a 57-year-old man in perfectly tailored suits who has been married for 36 years and spends a lot of time reading magazines such as Cosmo Girl and Maxim. His working life has been the culture of beauty, first as the director of market research for Revlon and Clairol.

His target for Mambo is the “independent, passionate psychographic” of all Americans ages 18 to 34, who probably wouldn’t be caught dead wearing Liz Claiborne clothing. Katz watches everything, he says, and he saw this group having “a love affair with all things Latino: up things, pleasurable things.”

You may ask: How does a Latino person smell? Liz Claiborne printouts answer that the women smell like mango life scent, mandarin salsa and flirty ylang-ylang. The men smell like zesty lime and natural bergamot and geranium bourbon.

Now we know. Donna Karan once developed a fragrance that she said was based on the smell of the nape of her husband’s neck. Commes des Garcons made a perfume that smelled like absolutely nothing found in nature, and it sold quite well.

The whiff of possible ethnic stereotyping has led one columnist, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Tanya Barrientos, to complain that “it’s ridiculous and, frankly, more than a tad racist to claim you have distilled the essence of a myriad of cultures into one 3.4 ounce ‘parfum’ spray.”

Katz protests that he isn’t making a fragrance “that smells Hispanic. White diamonds don’t have a smell,” referring to the popular scent of that name. “Liz Taylor doesn’t have a smell. The scent is not important. The lifestyle image is. Does it make you feel erotic or exotic?”

The bottle is important. This one is tall and glass, with a curve that suggests a swiveling hip. So is the in-store video loop, which shows two young and beautiful Latino dancers, suggestively circling to an infectious salsa tune.

To sell Mambo, Liz Claiborne is targeting Latinos, who constitute 12.5% of the U.S. population, and commercials in Spanish and “Spanglish” will air in certain markets. But Katz is after a bigger demographic.

“You don’t have to have a Latin living in your town to be part of this cultural acceptance,” he says. “We have people trying to mambo in Pittsburgh! In Minneapolis!” In the first week, sales have confirmed his hunch. Mambo was the No. 2 fragrance sold last week in Des Moines and Chicago.