Don't Shout, Listen

"The beauty business has always been about push," says Ginger Kent, 46, CEO of Reflect.com, a startup based in the SoMa district of San Francisco. "But women are changing, and new consumers aren't loyal to the old brands. They're loyal to the brands that serve them."

Reflect is the offspring of dotcom exuberance and big-company investment. The idea behind Reflect originated in the late 1990s, when Dennis Maloney, one of the startup's founders, was working at P&G's new-ventures group. A.G. Lafley, who was then overseeing P&G's global beauty-care line, heard about the idea and decided to greenlight it. Reflect received $50 million in capital from P&G and additional capital from Institutional Venture Partners and Redpoint Ventures, both of Silicon Valley. By early 1999, Maloney, who had served as an officer on a nuclear submarine in the U.S. Navy, and Kent, who had been president of the U.S. toy division at Hasbro, were setting up shop in San Francisco.

Today, Reflect is majority-owned by P&G but operates as a stand-alone enterprise. While P&G won't say how close Reflect is to profitability, Kent emphasizes that the site garners a healthy amount of traffic. (In April, Jupiter Media Metrix ranked it as the number-one cosmetics-retailing site on the Web.)

Nowhere on the Reflect site will customers see any sign that they are in effect shopping for a P&G product. Nor will they see much evidence of branding as P&G has traditionally understood that process. "It's an antibrand," says Tim Haley, 47, a Redpoint partner and Reflect board member. A brand is essentially a promise from a company to deliver a predictable customer experience. Yet there's no predicting an experience that customers largely design themselves.

Using interactive software, visitors to the site mix and match various options -- colors, scents, skin-care preferences -- to create what amounts to their own brand. "Reflect doesn't exist until you make it," says Kent. A P&G facility in upstate New York manufactures the product, and a "concierge service" in Cincinnati handles follow-up interaction with customers. Reflect even allows customers to redesign a product as many times as they want.

But handing control of product design over to customers doesn't reduce the importance of listening to them. Using a cold, technical medium to sell products that are all about the five senses poses a challenge that only constant attentiveness can solve. Maloney spends most of his time monitoring site traffic, hoping to use what he "hears" from customers to improve the site's offerings. By that means and through usability studies, for example, the Reflect team learned that women had a keener interest in buying lipstick through the site than had been anticipated -- so the team has beefed up that part of Reflect.com. "We haven't made a single change that hasn't started from a conversation with one of our consumers," says Ranae Kline, 38, manager of the concierge service (aka "call center"). "Every meeting, every decision is driven by what we hear from them."

Recently, the Reflect team learned that being an "antibrand" will take a company only so far. People who were paying premium prices for Reflect items expressed disappointment with the thinly branded, homespun look of the company's original packaging. "The women we talked to liked the idea of Reflect," says Alice Au, 26, director of design and visual identity. "But they wanted something more, something more permanent." So this summer, Reflect is rolling out a new look that combines personalization with a strong brand identity. Like the original package design, the new one includes a customer's name, as well as the Reflect logo, but it also lets each customer choose from several jewel-shaped emblems that signal to her (and to her friends) that she has bought an upscale brand. The future of mass customization, it seems, lies less in hiding brands than in giving customers a role in shaping them.

How far could customization go at P&G? "A.G. [Lafley] sits on our board. Everything we absorb, he absorbs," says Kent with a secretive gleam in her eye. "Having something made especially for you creates a very powerful relationship." Reflect plans eventually to customize almost every product to be found in a woman's (or, indeed, a man's) bathroom. While Kent declines to comment on specific products, the Reflect project suggests that someday P&G may offer personalized versions of some of its signature brands -- perhaps even brands like Tide and Crest.

But that's a long way off. While using the Net as a listening device has yielded a huge bounty of information for P&G, the company is just starting to drive that data back into its marketing and product-development operations. Says Gay Piller, 55, digital brand manager for PG.com: "On the road from A to Z in how Internet feedback will actually change a brand, we're at about B." Meanwhile, fostering two-way communication between the world's largest consumer-products company and its 2.5 billion customers is no small achievement. "So far," says Greg Icenhower, "the biggest value of getting all of this feedback has been letting consumers know that we're listening."

Fara Warner (fwarner@fastcompany.com) is a Fast Company senior writer. Contact Greg Icenhower (icenhower.gl@pg.com), Bob Gilbreath (gilbreath.rd@pg.com), Vince Hudson (hudson.ve@pg.com), and Ginger Kent (ginger@reflect.com) by email, or visit Procter & Gamble on the Web (www.pg.com).