the folks at star treatment have built a booming Business by finding perfect gifts for hollywood’s biggest names
A small group of companies is expected to be the biggest winner in the area’s war on dirty diesel, as a series of regulations force transit buses, refuse trucks and other public fleets to convert to clean-burning fuels.
The local market for these products is likely to become the most competitive in the United States.
Those jockeying for position under rules mandated by the South Coast Air Quality Management District include a firm owned by legendary Texas oil man T. Boone Pickens, best known from his 1980s-era, corporate-raider days.
Pickens Fuel Corp., based in Seal Beach, has its eye on both the market for compressed natural gas (CNG) and liquefied natural gas (LNG). Pickens will face tough competition from Pinnacle CNG, Trillium USA Inc. and Applied LNG Technologies USA LLC, among others. Most of these firms are small, with less than 40 employees each.
Also seeking to grab its share of the expanding market are propane suppliers, though air-quality officials expect natural gas will displace propane and become the fuel of choice for a majority of users.
“We’ve been feeding on a dead carcass for 10 years, and now there is going to be a tremendous amount of interest in the industry,” said Drew Diggins, operations manager for Midland, Texas-based Pinnacle. “(And) anytime there is blood in the water, there is going to be a feeding frenzy.”
The “blood in the water” is the AQMD’s new regulations requiring the operators of public fleets including street sweepers, airport shuttles and limousines, as well as light- to heavy-duty municipal fleet vehicles to convert their vehicles to run on clean fuel in a phased-in program ending in 2003.
It’s all part of the agency’s battle against diesel, which not only is a contributor to smog but a leading cause of cancer, according to a district study.
In some cases, the public operators will be able to get by on new, super clean and efficient gasoline engines, but for the most part alternative fuels are the answer.
Pickens opened for business in 1996 after he beat out a host of other companies to take over the Southern California Gas Co.’s network of retail CNG dispensing stations, which the state Public Utilities Commission had ordered the company to largely divest itself of.
Pickens Fuel, which sold off some of the clean-fuel facilities, now operates 27 stations, the most of any company, including eight in Los Angeles County. It services Los Angeles International Airport, Waste Management Inc. in Palm Desert, and Sunline Transit in the Coachella Valley, among other sites.
The company has 12 more stations under construction, including facilities to service Waste Management in the San Gabriel Valley and in Carson. And now it expects to expand even more as public fleet operators face the conversion mandate.
Pickens said he is optimistic about the company’s prospects, but was frankly surprised it took until this year for the air board to make the move to clean fuels.
“We believed you were going to go to a cleaner-burning fuel, but I thought it would happen a long time before it did,” he said. “It’s a domestic fuel, clean-burning and cheaper than diesel.”
Despite the recent price spikes in natural gas, the company’s selling point is that it builds and operates a natural-gas station for a customer and then enters into a long-do you get for George Clooney for $300 that he’s really going to want?”
The company does get an occasional odd order for a very expensive gift. One was the $15,000 four-strand garnet choke necklace and matching earrings given to Angelina Jolie by Tri-Star Pictures for her Best Actress Academy Award. But most orders emphasize cleverness over excess.
Marnie, who was named after the Alfred Hitchcock character in the movie of the same name and counts herself a huge fan of the famed director, said one of her favorite projects involved the 1998 remake of “Psycho.”
In addition to buying knives from the same French company that made the infamous knife from the shower scene in the original, Star Treatment created baskets for the cast and crew that included miniature rocking chairs complete with chenille throws reminiscent of Mother Bates. The baskets for director Gus Van Sant and star Vince Vaughn also included real taxidermied birds.
By their own admission, Marnie Lerner and Cynde Cassell knew little about running a business when they decided to start Star Treatment. Lerner was working as a reporter, writing celebrity interviews and movie reviews for “La Guia Familiar” and “Mundo L.A.,” Spanish-language weeklies owned by her parents’ company, Latin Publications.
Cassell was a personal shopper at Bloomingdale’s in New York, where the pair first met at a fashion show in the early 1990s. In 1996, with both women living in Los Angeles, they launched Star Treatment from Lerner’s parents’ guest house in Van Nuys. Each woman invested $5,000 to get Star Treatment off the ground.
“The only way we were able to survive is because we had no overhead,” Marnie Lerner said. “I think we lost about a third of our investment in the first year. We kept our day jobs to make money.”
With virtually no contacts, but convinced that the studios represented their best hope of success, Lerner and Cassell began aggressively blitzing entertainment companies with brochures and e-mails, following up those communications with phone calls until they got in touch with the person who was responsible for handling talent and purchasing gifts.
Disappointed by their inability to make a profit but buoyed by the positive feedback they were receiving from clients, Lerner and Cassell found themselves at a critical juncture at the end of their first year in business.
“We realized that the only way we were going to make it work was to quit our day jobs and devote ourselves to this full time. It wasn’t going to work half way,” Lerner said. At that point, the Gen-X partners convinced Diane Lerner to leave her job as a vice president at Latino Publications to help manage the company.
“My dad wasn’t happy,” Lerner said. “First, I wouldn’t work at his company and then I got my mom to leave.”
