" . . . a 21st century apothecary integrating health, beauty and well-being. Combining the introduction of spa products that are easily used at home with the incorporation of simple rituals into daily life, Bath & Body Works is committed to helping consumers improve their emotional and physical being."
- from the Bath & Body Works official website
The stores
Bath & Body Works is a purveyor of scented bath products. Over 1,700 stores exist across the United States, selling various unguents organized under twenty-nine scents (at the time of this writing). New scents are occasionally introduced, while older ones are retired, and certain product lines are only available seasonally (like the 2005 Christmas season, which brought us 'Very Merry Cranberry', 'Vanilla Bean Noel', and 'Winter Candy Apple' scents). The everyday products tend to have the same gimmicky fragrances and names: 'Sun-Ripened Raspberry', 'Warm Vanilla Sugar', 'Pearberry', and the perennially popular 'Cucumber Melon'.
Their stores give the general sensation of a somewhat Starbucks-inspired approach to fancy bath products. Just like Starbucks cafés, with their calculated and faintly disturbing, focus group-tested ambience, Bath & Body Works gives the appearance of carefully designed casualness and a sort of bourgeois sophistication — but I can't deny that the candy-like scent of 'Creamy Coconut' or 'Mango Mandarin' body wash is pleasant. For most of the brand's history, the stores were designed around a country home motif, but beginning in October, 2005, the process of converting the chain to a more modern "21st century apothecary" began.
The goop
They sell a fairly repetitive array of products. Each scent comes in several varieties of more-or-less identical lotions ('Body Lotion', 'Body Cream', 'Purely Silk Body Lotion', 'Hand Repair Healing Hand Cream', and 'Skin Conditioning In-Shower Body Moisturizer'); cleasers (liquid hand soap, hand sanitizer, 'Shower Gel', and 'Creamy Body Wash'); perfume ('Body Splash' and 'Purely Silk Body Splash' — and no, I haven't the foggiest what the difference might be) as well as scented candles and gift items like baskets with products from one scent line.
Aside from the shelf upon shelf of the same products repeated in different scents, they sell other lines of personal care products, mostly under different brand names (though largely exclusive to Bath & Body Works): 'American Girl' and 'Fekkai' hair products, foot care items, exfoliant scrubs, and all sorts of skin care products.
The business
Bath & Body Works was founded in New Albany, Ohio in 1990; the brand is owned by Limited Brands, which directly operates (rather than franchising) its stores, including such mall staples as The Limited, Express, and Victoria's Secret (they're also former owners Abercrombie and Fitch and Lane Bryant.) The net sales for Bath & Body Works were nearly $2.2 billion in 2004. Currently, Bath & Body Works stores are being reimagined — in the breathless words of the parent corporation, "from gingham check and country-inspired fragrant body care to a modern apothecary of beauty and well-being." All that, plus the insufferably pretentious tagline, "Beauty for Body and Soul". The restyling is beginning with 'flagship stores', offering consultations with aestheticians, and modeled (according to their website) on the apothecaries of yesteryear, though given medieval Europeans' attitudes towards bathing, I must say the juxtaposition seems odd.
I've lamented the use of pseudo-spiritual justifications for pampering yourself before; Bath & Body Works' advertisements tend to emphasize natural ingredients while not mentioning the many synthetic chemicals used alongside them (deceptive on many levels, since "natural" personal care items are nigh-impossible to find nowadays and likely wouldn't be very pleasant or effective). That said, I can't complain about the quality of any of the products I've bought at Bath & Body Works. Most of their scents — natural or not — do smell pretty nice, albeit rather strong. Their body washes and lotions work well. Most of their products are extremely expensive, though — the sophisticated image that their marketing wizards have cooked up comes concomitant with high prices. A bottle of Cucumber Melon Shower Gel, for instance, is a mere ten ounces, but it'll set you back $9.
One thing you have to give the company credit for is being at the forefront of its business. It is by far the biggest chain of bath product retailers in the country (with The Body Shop a very distant second); its previous chief executive, Beth Pritchard, had a goal to turn the company into "the McDonald's of toiletries" — and that's pretty much what the company did. The introduction and yanking of seasonal items as well as the rapid turnover of its regular fragrance lines reflects a desire to keep customers entertained — novelty is one of the company's basic marketing strategies.
Affordable luxury
Beth Pritchard's success at turning a chain of ninety-five stores to 1,600 some ended in 2003. The business is now headed by Neil Fiske, who took over during a period of low same-store sales across the chain; the reimagining of Bath & Body Works' image was his idea. The transformation of the Bath & Body Works brand matches well with the long-time strategy of Limited Brands, which has built its success on a sort of mass-marketed boutique, with stores as accessible as the nearest shopping mall but prices designed to create a sense of 'affordable luxury'.
This is an example of a much broader trend in American marketing. Many businesses nowadays are based upon convincing consumers that a product which is cheap to produce is a luxury item. Companies built on this type of everyday luxury include Starbucks, which brought the idea of the four dollar cup of coffee to the masses. Same goes for the new fancier fast food places — you pay $6 for a sandwich at Panera Bread not because it's an expensive item, but because you perceive it to be high in quality (or at least higher than what you could get for half the price at a burger place), and because the business is designed to come across not as a place designed for efficiency above all else (like McDonald's) but as a pleasant little bistro (even if it is bland and corporatized.)
Part of the problem is the overall trend in the beauty industry towards upscale products at reasonable prices — Bath & Body Works now faces competition from drug stores that offer comparable items for far less money. Thus the retailer is repositioning itself, with a plan to ultimately offer three tiers of stores: the redesigned Bath & Body Works stores, the aforementioned flagships, and another store called C.O. Bigelow (purchased in late 2003), which offers not just personal care products but also makeup lines and intends to compete with high-end makeup retailers like Sephora and department store makeup counters. Along with the repositioning of the retail stores, October 2005 saw the launch of online selling at the Bath & Body Works website, and plans exist for expansion overseas and perhaps sales via catalog.
Fiske is implementing a strategy based around the theory he and co-author Michael Silverstein described in their book Trading Up: The New American Luxury. The book describes marketing based upon trendy luxuries: 'fast casual' dining, Williams-Sonoma kitchen gadgets, and so forth. These 'new luxuries' are affordable for the middle class but considerably more expensive than competing products. Bath & Body Works' new image is precisely modeled upon Fiske and Silverstein's ideas. By marketing products that seem comparable to the truly expensive high-end items that might be dubbed 'old luxuries', Bath & Body Works can sell their products at what appear to be, comparatively, bargain prices.
References
Bath & Body Works website (http://www.bathandbodyworks.com/)
Limited Brands website (http://www.limitedbrands.com/)
"Bath & Body Works: 'The McDonald's of Toiletries'", Business Week (http://www.businessweek.com/1997/31/b353898.htm)
"Making Bath Time Cool", Time (http://www.time.com/time/insidebiz/article/0,9171,1103559,00.html)