Star Power: Effective Celebrity Branding in Home Furnishings

Jaclyn Smith and Kathy Ireland are two top-notch businesswomen who have translated their personal brands as celebrities into winning furniture collections. They offer well-conceived and thoughtfully presented products that have practical application in today's busy home. Both women have taken a hands-on approach with the product design and messaging for their respective brands. The winning combination of a well-known personality with great products and an effective marketing strategy makes both of these brands ideal for Futon retailers reaching the biggest furniture-buying demographic: women in their 30s and 40s. Futon Life & Living Spaces had the opportunity to talk with Jaclyn Smith and Kathy Ireland at the World Market Center about their distinctive brands, the strategies they've used to develop them and the programs they help retailers use to sell more product. Click the links below to learn more about both companies.

“Value” is a key word for the Jaclyn Smith brand. “The brand stands for quality, style, value,” she said. “I think value is a very important component today because there’s so much out there for the consumer…you can go and pay $10,000 for a piece, but oddly enough, because of what we’re able to do today, you can also pay $1,000 for a piece of furniture, an armoire, a table; and it’s hard to sometimes tell the difference if you’ve done it right, if the quality’s there, if the finish is there.”

In 1985, she began her foray into consumer goods with a line of women’s clothing for Kmart. Smith forged ahead in the face of opposition when she started. “No one thought I could put beautiful clothes out at that price,” she said. “I thought, ‘Hmmm, it’s going to be a challenge,’ which I love in life. It’s going to be venturing into an area I’ve never gone. And I think that keeps life fresh, and it keeps your mind hopping, so I took it on.”
Smith achieved the combination of style, quality and value she was looking for.

“[When] I went on Oprah, I wore a black pinstriped suit,” she said. “The whole outfit was under $70. Even [Oprah] said, ‘I can’t believe they’re doing that at that price.’”
Smith said that starting her consumer brand was “not only successful but very fulfilling for me. I felt a part of that company, a part of the development of something unique and new…it was the beginning of celebrity branding. So I sort of pioneered the way, and it certainly was an education. Totally different than furniture but still an education about branding.”

She jumped into the home furnishings market in 2002. Furniture had inspired her from a very young age. She started collecting antiques when she was a little girl. When she saw “Gone With the Wind,” she had to have a canopy bed. “I love the Aubusson rug at the bottom of the stairs at Twelve Oaks, not even knowing what it was called,” she said. “Frankly, [furniture] was a more natural outlet for me than apparel, even though I loved clothes–I designed my senior prom dress–but my passion has always been home.”
Translating her personal passion and style into consumer products has been a very successful venture. Says her website: “Awareness of the Jaclyn Smith name and brand by women 35-60 years of age is currently higher than 80 percent, making her one of the best recognized people in America.”

The brand is targeted to a broad range of consumers, from those who are furnishing a first home to those in a busy two-income household without much time for home decorating. “I want to become a total home resource,” Smith said. “It’s what I did in apparel. Where you get ideas, you go in, it’s a one-stop shop. Whether it be the carpeting or the wallpaper, the lamps or the rug or the upholstery… you have choices, you make the final decision and put the stamp of your personality on it and make it your own.”
The idea of using one’s own personality in room design is an important one for Smith. She likes mixing and matching furniture pieces to create a unique style, and her brand offers that versatile mix of products to her customers.



“[The collections are] a little different, whether we’re mixing periods, mixing finishes,” she said. “It’s a journey, it’s a process to educate the customer to be a little more daring, to shake it up, to put in some surprises…If you have a rocker that’s been in the family for 20 years, don’t be afraid to put that with a new collection you’ve just bought. Mix it up. [It’s] different than going out and buying a whole suite of furniture and just matching everything. That’s what I want to do, not only offer these incredible collections at affordable prices but teach people to put surprise in their rooms, to put their personality in, to not be afraid of bringing a part of their history into the room. You know how people think, ‘Well, that’s my grandmother’s, I can’t put that in,’ but it would be a beautiful accent.”

Smith brings her personal collection of furniture gathered over the years into her branded furniture lines. “A lot of it, say, for instance the Spencer-Margaret collection, was inspired by antique pieces that are in [my daughter’s] bedroom…we’ve taken a chair from our home, an antique chair, enhanced it, graced it, made it more functional for today’s customer. It’s inspired by pieces that I’ve loved, pieces I’ve admired, studying 18th century designs, collecting from flea markets, from auctions.”

Along with personal style, functionality is also important to Smith. She describes an armoire in her collection with side doors that open and display “little cubbyholes for belts or purses or socks or jewelry. We have an ottoman that opens for storage. We have a mirror that opens up, and you can hang all your jewelry in there. A dining room table where the leaves are stored inside the table. Ball bearing hinges on all the drawers, [which are] all lined with this beautiful suede fabric.” Her desire for her furniture products is “to take these old designs, to make them look authentic but have the functionality for today’s world.”

In this quest to design stylish and functional furniture, Jaclyn Smith Home currently has four partners. Largo International makes bedroom, dining and entertainment furniture. Hickory Hill Furniture produces sofas, accent chairs and ottomans. King Koil/Comfort Solutions offers bedding, and Kingsway Fabrics makes wall coverings and fabrics.



Smith is working toward having coordinated collections of everything from rugs to main furniture pieces, including home accents. She has had offers from several companies that make products such as rugs and lamps, but she has not yet chosen any new design partners. She has high standards for potential vendor partners, the most important of which is that she be involved in the design process.

“I want to be an integral part,” she said. “I don’t want anything out there that I really can’t initial and put my name on and say, ‘Yes, I was part of that design.’ If I can’t really be a part of it, I’m not going to license my name to add another rug, or a lamp…I want to be able to say, ‘we’re going to put a pleated shade on this lamp’ or ‘it’s going to be in polished brass, not antique.’ If I don’t believe in it, then I wouldn’t want to do it. It’s not just about adding all these licensees. It’s really about the creative process…So we all really have the same vision.”

Smith also values partnering with the retailers that sell her brand’s products. Jaclyn Smith Home supports retailers in selling by giving them promotional materials such as ad templates with product photography and brochures with display ideas. Smith does store appearances in support of retail as well. “You just have to stay in constant contact with what your customer’s needs are, and you do that through store appearances, through markets, through being very visible, being approachable,” she said.

To retailers who want to begin retailing Jaclyn Smith Home products, she recommends contacting the different licensees. “You would go and view all the different collections at market, and you would decide which ones you wanted, which ones were suitable for your store. Ideally it would be great if you would want to mix the case goods with the upholstery into a complete story in a little gallery where you would see the furniture set up in the different showrooms with a theme, with how I see it and decide if that’s appropriate for what you want.”

For Smith, it all comes down to providing value: the value of style, the value of quality and the value of elegant choices at accessible prices.

FL