What started as a sideline in Bob sidell’s garage has grown into California Cosmetics Corp., a Mail order business with $5 million in revenues, a dozen employees and two locations

As an old Hollywood makeup guy, Bob Sidell was in over his head trying to sell his own cosmetics to retailers. The only thing to do was give up, so that’s what he did.

At least until he ran into a direct-marketing maven, who convinced him it would be possible to resuscitate the makeup line. Now he’s splitting his time between homes in Calabasas and Las Vegas and projecting to generate $5 million in sales for the fiscal year ending Aug. 31, 2001.

“This (business) was going to be an alternative to me carrying my makeup case, and it turned out to be the tail wagging the dog,” Sidell said of his California Cosmetics Corp.

Sidell can wag his tongue, as well. A runaway train when asked to discuss the company that once had unmovable inventory on three pallets in his garage, he has turned into a salesman with worldwide distribution and celebrity endorsers such as Joan Collins. His SilkSkin products as well as other merchandise are sold through mail-order catalogs and via the Internet.

The business has been growing consistently in recent years and employs 10 people, including Sidell and his 30-year-old son, David. The Sidells are based in the Calabasas headquarters, where the customer service department and computer operations are also housed. The company’s distribution is run out of Las Vegas.

In this high-tech age, the 63-year-old Sidell doesn’t pretend there’s anything fancy about what he does. He develops skin-care products and sends out mail to people he thinks might be interested in putting them on their bodies.

“Good skin care is no big mystery; it’s the simplest thing in the world,” Sidell said. “What it requires is keeping it clean, keeping it moist and doing it regularly.”

The seed that grew into California Cosmetics came while Sidell was doing makeup on “The Homecoming,” a television movie pilot that ended up as the long-running series “The Waltons.”

Hollywood kids

Trying to convincingly apply makeup to kids who are supposed to live in Appalachia during the Depression presented one of those opportunities that would either drive a man mad or make a career.

“I spent $5,000 of NBC’s money at various cosmetics counters and couldn’t find anything that would do what I needed,” Sidell said. “Eventually, the production manager told me to quit throwing away money.”

So Sidell enlisted the services of a brother working in the vitamin supplement business. Together, they labored to come up with a subtle moisturizing foundation that would not make a Dust Bowl boy look like a Tinseltown teen. They came up with the prototype of what would become SilkSkin an underbase and a makeup remover, the first two products. The mad-scientist duo developed a third product, a nonalcohol-base remover, and started stockpiling it. The problem was that it was tough to market, and Sidell found himself staring at three pallets of the stuff in his garage. He decided to turn to his friends in Hollywood.

“I called makeup artists up and offered them some,” he said. “I figured, I got all this stuff sitting here. It’s never going to be used before it goes bad.”

Six months later, Sidell found himself working like crazy to move the product, but he was unable to collect on $71,000 in invoices and was still burdened with a large stockpile of returned product, much of it returned unused by buyers.

“I closed the door; I said, ‘That’s the end of it,'” Sidell said.

That’s when his son, David, told Sidell about a friend whose mother was in the mail-order diet pill business.

Birth of a business

The U.S. Postal Service had started cracking down on the sale of diet pills through the mail, and the woman was looking to replace the pills with something less controversial. In July 1985, Sidell showed her the Five-Minute SilkSkin System, and California Cosmetics Corp. was hatched the next year.

While the business has been growing ever since, there have been setbacks. While saying he never had any product disasters involving rashes or sickness, Sidell said there was one marketing nightmare. In 1990, he enlisted the services of a big-time L.A. advertising firm to create a direct-mail piece. After dropping $70,000 for the ad, Sidell mailed out 100,000 pieces.

The mailing list proved less than fruitful.

“We didn’t make back the price of the stamps,” he said.

The only real product failure was a short-lived men’s line, Sidell said. Men simply weren’t interested.

“Women buy 65 percent of all men’s skin-care product for the men,” Sidell said.

In 1992, Sidell bought out his partner and has taken the company from the original four products to more than 60 today. The line includes aromatherapy, body scrub and hair products, many with anti-aging themes. Through the years, Sidell has tinkered with the chemistry of his product line and developed products from natural ingredients. One skin smoother contains marine enzymes. Others include aloe, green tea and seaweed.

Jill Griffin, president of an eponymous customer loyalty consulting company in Austin, Texas, included Sidell in her book titled “Customer Loyalty: How to Earn It, How to Keep It.” She said he has proven his savvy over the years by deciding to focus on existing customers rather than continuously pursuing a new base.