Hip Tastes Blog

Some sake with your...lipstick?
filed under: Ramblings

Sony Pictures Entertainment recently announced that it will promote its upcoming $80 million film Memoirs of a Geisha using non-traditional marketing tie-ins such as clothing and make-up. In addition to a limited-availability line of Kimono-esque dresses from Banana Republic, the campaign will feature sake-infused oils and beauty products from Fresh, Inc., a cosmetics company and subsidiary of Paris-based luxury goods conglomerate LVMH Moet Hennessey Louis Vuitton SA (try fitting that on your corporate letterhead).

The Wall Street Journal reports that execs from Fresh, Inc. began developing the line of sake- and rice-based beauty products independently of the film project while exploring Japanese beauty rituals for a line of oils, lotions and body scrubs. When they heard about the film, they pitched Sony marketers the idea of a tie-in. The result is a special line of products and packaging based on "the beauty rituals of a geisha" (per Fresh founder Lev Glazman) currently on display in Fresh, Inc. store windows.

Sake, the Japanese rice wine enjoying a surge in popularity in the US thanks in large part to the widespread appeal of sushi, is hardly your typical beauty product ingredient. But the wine's inclusion in Fresh, Inc.'s new line underscores an interesting trend afoot: this country's consumers' growing acceptance of and curiosity about wine. Since Sideways brought the stuff to the masses, the universe of folks "in tune" to wine has grown seemingly exponentially. What was once obscure and stuffy is now at the epicenter (sorry, Californian here) of our cultural consciousness, showing up in contexts and categories never imagined...like makeup.

www.fresh.com

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Posted by Courtney on October 25, 2005 03:45 PM