Skin Care Executive Puts New Face on School Items

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Skin Care Executive Puts New Face on School Items
In Color: Yoobi school supplies on the shelf at a Target in Los Angeles.

Ido Leffler wants to make shopping for school supplies as enticing to kids as shopping for toys.

“Every time I went down the school supply aisle, there wasn’t anything that made my kids stop and go wow,” he said. “We wanted it to be as hard to get the kids out of the school supplies aisle as it is to get them out of the toy aisle.”

So the co-founder of San Francisco natural skin care brand Yes To Inc. set out to wow his kids. The result was Yoobi, an El Segundo school supply brand offering neon-colored pens, heart-shaped push pins and pretzel-shaped erasers that launched last week exclusively at Target. Yoobi products cost less than $10 each and are made in Asia.

While Leffler’s background in skin care might not seem the right kind of preparation for an entry into the crowded school supply category, he said the strategy of making appealing products is the same.

“It was about, ‘How do we create a fun, engaging product line that also lets the person who buys it feel good?’ ” he said.

Adlai Wertman, a professor at USC’s Marshall School of Business and founding director of the Brittingham Social Enterprise Lab there, said shifting industries is not the problem when starting a second business.

“For an entrepreneur, that’s not the issue,” said Wertman. “The issue is: Do you understand your clients and what’s your distribution channel?”

Local talent

When he started to build a product and development team, Leffler found that most of the talent was based in Los Angeles. He formed Yoobi here early this year and has staffed it with 11 people. He splits his time between his Los Angeles and Bay Area businesses.

Paul Zaffaroni, director at Newport Beach investment bank Roth Capital Partners, said Yoobi’s advantage is Leffler.

“He’s good at brand-building,” said Zaffaroni. “Whether you’re building school supplies or cosmetics, at the end of the day, you’ve got to have good products and a brand that stands for something.”

Zaffaroni added that Yoobi’s association with Yes To can be an advantage if the company decides to expand its distribution channels as the skin care brand is sold at thousands of retail stores.

Before Leffler started Yes To with partner Lance Kalish, the pair had a branding and consulting agency called Trendtrade International that helped health and beauty brands develop in international markets.

Yes To, formed in 2006, was started to fill what they saw as a gap in the market: a natural skin care line with attractive packaging, pleasant fragrances and a lower price point than competitor Durham, N.C., natural skin care brand Burt’s Bees.

Now, the Yes To brand, whose products include face washes, body lotions and lip balms, is stocked in more than 25,000 stores across 25 countries.

Its lines such as Yes To Carrots and Yes To Blueberries are also carried by Target, which made it easier to snag a deal with the giant retailer for Yoobi, Leffler said.

He said Target was also attracted to Yoobi’s donation model, which is similar to Santa Monica footwear company Toms Shoes.

For every Yoobi item a customer purchases, the company donates a school supply item into a “Yoobi Classroom Pack.” The packs are filled with more than 950 items such as pencils, glue, folders and crayons then shipped to classrooms across the country. However, the Yoobi products in the packs are not the same items sold at Target.

Each classroom pack is expected to supply a class of 30 children for a year.

Leffler said the company partnered with the Kids in Need Foundation to help it identify K-3 schools where at least 70 percent of the kids qualify for the national school lunch program. Yoobi is expecting to donate its packs to more than 30,000 classrooms by next year.

Leffler declined to state projected sales but said even with its give-back model it expects to be profitable.

Wertman said the donation model might not play a big factor in driving sales as customers are typically attracted by price and quality. But if Yoobi amps up its marketing efforts to highlight its one-for-one strategy, it can motivate customers to buy.

Eli Kaufman, creative strategist at ad agency A Hundred Years in downtown Los Angeles, said marketing is what will differentiate it from other school supply brands.

“It’s more vibrant in its look, but it’s not all that different than what’s on the aisle,” said Kaufman. “So, I do think that the cause marketing is going to be crucial in order to create a space and make an impact in terms of competing with everybody else.”

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