Trendsetter - Hilary Billings

You are one of them, though You may not know it. You fly Virgin Atlantic to London, not British Airways. You buy Your makeup at Sephora and skip the scene at the Saks counters. You wear Patagonia when L.L.Bean would do fine. You cried on the day that Webvan went under. you are one of them, and Hilary Billings is onto you. She's been onto you for a while, actually. In the early 1990s, Billings helped save Pottery Barn by crafting an approach to design that conquered upscale American malls. In the mid-1990s, she served as one of the chief design brains behind the launch of W Hotels. Now she's at RedEnvelope, the Web site and catalog that offers one-stop shopping for frustrated gift givers.

These companies operate in different segments of the economy, but they share the same customer: upwardly mobile people in their thirties and forties whose needs and desires will be familiar to readers of psychodemographic treatises such as Bobos in Paradise or The Cultural Creatives. The companies also share a strategy: the creation of something called a "lifestyle brand."

Billings, having built three of them, probably knows as much about how lifestyle brands work than anyone, and she defines them in two ways. First, lifestyle brands resonate with people who expect to live increasingly stylish lives. "People who once ate only meat and potatoes and had plastic slipcovers on their sofa are traveling more, and they have a much wider range of influences," she says. "At the same time that they're figuring out what's great about balsamic vinegar and cotton sheets, there's a lot more style and innovation in such everyday goods as furniture for the home or the pitcher that pours your water."

For a brand to rise to lifestyle status, however, it must also appeal to consumers who want to lead a particular style of life, who want their homes to feel comfortable and their chain hotels to feel like their homes, who want to mark occasions with a great gift, but who don't want giving to become a chore. "I don't know where I picked up the phrase 'lifestyle brand,' " she says. "But when people started lining up at parties to talk to me about Pottery Barn, I knew I wanted to devote my career to building them. With lifestyle brands, it's not just about serving another consumer need. It's about reaching a higher level in terms of the kind of connection you make with the customer."

The Billion-Dollar Concept

Back in 1991, when Hilary Billings signed on with Pottery Barn, there weren't many people lining up to do much of anything. The company had (and has) a lousy name. Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn's parent, was quietly trying to sell the brand after a couple of years of slow sales. The catalog, where Billings went to work as a buyer, did only about $14 million in sales the first year she was there.

But there was room to maneuver. People who wanted to furnish their entire homes in one place didn't have too many options. "You could go to a department store and get a generic choice of furniture," Billings recalls. "Or if you wanted any style in your home, you could use an interior designer to go direct to the trade and spend exorbitant amounts of money." Billings, who spent her childhood in Tanzania surrounded by her parents' collection of African masks and designer furniture, sensed an opportunity.

Because the catalog business was so small, Billings was free to test new merchandise. First, she expanded the line of coir rugs (made of coconut husks), and they became one of the catalog's most successful products. Simple cotton curtains with iron rods were also a huge success. After working around the perimeter of the living room for a year, Billings put a sofa on the catalog cover in 1992 -- before Pottery Barn had even attempted to sell one in its stores. "That was the signal that we were serious about this new strategy," Billings says.

But to consumers, it may well have signaled something more. "A sofa isn't just a thing in your closet," Billings says. "It's often the first piece of furniture you buy, and you spend a lot of time engaging with it. It should have more meaning than just a wood frame with cushions. And when you come home, you should feel more deeply about it than you do about something that's simply functional." To drive that point home, Billings and her colleagues shot the catalog pictures of the thousand-dollar sofa in million-dollar homes. "Reading the catalog, you could imagine what your world would be like with that collection of furniture," Billings says. "Compared with the offerings at the time from other merchants, the Pottery Barn sofa was nowhere near as stiff and predictable." Perhaps the lives of the buyers wouldn't be either.

"What Hilary and her team did with the catalog was to tap into some core values that people have in relation to their homes," says Pat Connolly, a 22-year Williams-Sonoma veteran who has long been a mentor to Billings and who is also a RedEnvelope investor and board member. "The new image of Pottery Barn was contemporary but casual, and it spoke to the whole idea of a home as a place of refuge and a private retreat." Catalog sales surged over the next few years, and the company eventually started selling many of Billings's picks in the new, larger stores that are familiar today. By the end of 1999, three years after Billings had left, Pottery Barn helped push its parent company past the billion-dollar sales mark.