Donna Louis, national sales manager for Worldwide Cosmetics, has been around the nail industry long enough to remember a time when not everyone knew what acrylic nails were. Louis, who now oversees all the marketing efforts for Worldwide, including its China Glaze division, and came up with the “Babes in Toeland” toenail lacquer concept, recalls a story of when she was traveling to a show about 17 years ago and was carrying some acrylic liquid and powder samples in her briefcase for an international flight.

“They were new products so they weren’t formally packaged yet. I had the powder in a ziplock bag and it was secured in the briefcase by a foam holder. Well, when I took that through customs, they took one look at that bag of powder and whisked me into a private interrogation room and demanded to know whether I was a drug courier!” Louis laughs at it now, but she says she was terrified and actually had to sculpt a nail on one of the customs officials to prove that the “contraband” was just for making nails.

“I’ve seen a lot of changes in this industry,” she says, “but one thing that’s always the same is people buy from people.” Louis and her boss, Worldwide owner Sol Majer, are excited about the support they’ve received from their dealers on the directions a year.

Majer says, “Donna has been involved in so many aspects of the industry, we’re lucky to have her on our team overseeing this brand in particular, as well as the other product. Lines under the Worldwide umbrella.” But Louis chimes in: “There’s still so much I’m learning about all the different components that go into producing and packaging quality polish—from caps to bottles to brushes. For instance, did you know there are 220 strands in the China Glaze brush?”

 

For reprint and licensing requests for this article, Click here.