For SkyMeals, Long Beach Provides Orange County Entry

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If Long Beach were searching for a promoter, the city could consider Richard Katz.

Katz recently moved his company, SkyMeals LLC, to Long Beach from Santa Monica and credits the location’s convenience for the change. Situated between Los Angeles International and John Wayne airports, Long Beach is an ideal spot for the purveyor of upscale meals for airplane travelers.


“The reason for us being here was to really open up Orange County,” Katz said. “There is just going to be a tremendous amount of development, and it is very exciting to be here.”


Due to the relocation, SkyMeals has stopped charging a delivery fee for its meals for passengers going out of all local airports, with the exception of Ontario. The entrees, which are made to order, cost anywhere from $20 to $30 and are delivered to passengers prior to a flight.


Another reason for SkyMeals’ move was JetBlue Airways Corp.’s flights out of Long Beach. The carrier doesn’t serve food on the flights not even for its staff and hungry passengers can depend on SkyMeals to ease stomach pains. In fact, Katz said SkyMeals has gotten a lift from various carriers cutting back on in-flight meals. American Airlines even axed Haagen-Dazs from its first-class plates, he pointed out.


“Part of the problem is that you don’t know from flight to flight what you are going to get or not going to get. There is a lot of uncertainty about what is going on out there,” he said. “The message we are trying to tell passengers is, take a little control.”


Within the next several months, Katz hopes to open offices in other locales, though he hasn’t decided where. When that happens, he’ll be able to deliver meals to Angelenos coming home and to residents in other cities as well, even some who’ve tried SkyMeals after coming through L.A. on business trips.


Katz acknowledges that paying for SkyMeals’ service isn’t for everyone only those who are discerning about what goes into their mouths will shell out to avoid grab-and-go airport fare. But he said he’s been pleasantly surprised that since its founding in 2002, the company has built a following that isn’t isolated to Southern California’s wealthiest areas.


“I don’t think zip codes matter. I don’t think household income matters. I think what matters is how important it is to you to get something decent,” he said.



Furniture Fever


Abbyson Corp. has taken a carpet ride into the furniture industry.


For 10 years, the Chatsworth-based company, owned by Millennium Rugs Inc., was selling hand-knotted Tibetan rugs to the home furnishings trade. To complement its rugs, the company decided last year it would start selling chairs, beds, tables and sofas, among other items.


Abbyson spokeswoman Sarah Rahall said that today the company’s sales are split about evenly between furniture and rugs. “The furniture has just exploded,” she said, adding the company has created a furniture division to handle this new business. An Abbyson leather sofa goes for roughly $1,200.


Despite a tough marketplace filled with experienced manufacturers, Rahall reasoned Abbyson has found its niche by selling classic furniture while other companies are turning to modern designs. By going the classic route, she said, the company will not be stuck with outmoded designs if the trend veers away from ultra-modern furnishings.


Another plus is that Abbyson has attracted a bevy of customers from its furniture venture. With Bloomingdale’s Inc., a subsidiary of Federated Department Stores Inc., the company is negotiating exactly what combination of products to put in stores. In addition, Abbyson is teaming up with Chinese companies to offer hospitality clients the ability to buy containers of furniture with everything from podiums to conference room tables to stock a hotel.


And Abbyson isn’t going to let its furniture merchandise go stale. Rahall said the company is going to add different types to its collections. “We are always trying to add a fresh product mix,” she said. “We want to push the envelope and see what else our customers are looking for.”



Puny Prices


If there’s a cosmetic or skincare project in the offing, chances are Scott Vincent Borba could be in on the action.


Borba, founder of Woodland Hills-based nutraceuticals company Borba LLC, is also the creative director of the cosmetic brand e.l.f., which stands for eyes, lips, face. While Borba the company sells its healthy skin drinks and snacks at places like Sephora, Borba the man is busy pushing e.l.f. products into Target Corp. stores.


The concept behind e.l.f. is make-up at a reasonable price: $1 for every item, to be exact. That idea led Borba and Joey Shamah, the company’s chief executive, to pitch the products to 99 cent stores, but they weren’t interested and chose instead to rely on the stuff they’d been vending for years.


Borba and Shamah didn’t give up and turned to their Web site for sales to prove to retailers that consumers supported e.l.f., which was established in L.A. and is now owned by New York-based JA Cosmetics. In 2004, the Web site was launched and has since served 150,000 customers and has a repeat customer rate of more than 20 percent, according to Borba.


Those results helped e.l.f. appeal to Target, where the brand began selling in the travel bins last year. This year, the products are in around 200 stores and are beginning to be available not just in the bins, but on the walls, where they are placed near items by Bonne Bell Inc. and New York Color, a subsidiary of Del Laboratories Inc.


Going forward, Shamah said the company is looking to put its products in grocery stores and other chains where inexpensive make-up can find a willing customer. It’s also developing other items including a compact that users can pack with fillers of their preference to lure consumers who might otherwise be hesitant to buy an inexpensive make-up product.


Borba and Shamah admit that one of the biggest hurdles to growth is skepticism about low-cost products. But they insist their product has the quality of a premium cosmetic, and they can still make money even with the basement prices by buying massive quantities of components to keep production expenses at bay.


Little by little, Borba said the skepticism is ebbing as customers realize that e.l.f. products are packaged like premium brands, and they’re not embarrassed to carry the make-up in their purses. This year, the company expects to increase sales by 20 percent over last year.



Staff reporter Rachel Brown can be reached at (323) 549-5225, ext. 224, or at

[email protected]

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