By Jessica Lee
This week, the Business Journal debuts a column on smaller and midsize businesses. The goal: to capture sizable businesses that otherwise might fall through the cracks amid our coverage of the Broadcoms and Allergans here. The column is set to run every other week. Our columnist Jessica Lee plans to seek out interesting smaller business, including those owned by families, women and minorities. She can be reached at lee@ocbj.com.
Perfume Bay Inc. is a twist on the classic family business story: Mom and dad start the business. Daughter takes it to the Web.
The online seller of perfumes and beauty products stems from founder Jacquelyn Tran’s days working at her parents’ company.
David and Kimberly Tran, Vietnamese refugees who came to the U.S. in 1980, run L.A. Fragrances Inc., a perfume and cosmetics distributor that shares space with Perfume Bay in Huntington Beach.
L.A. Fragrances supplies Perfume Bay, which sells more than 900 brands of perfume, cologne, makeup, bath, body, hair and skincare products online.
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Tran: borrowed $50,000 to start company |
About 175,000 visitors go to Perfume Bay’s Web site each month.
Rivals include Vancouver, British Columbia-based Communicate.com Inc.’s www.perfume.com as well as LVMH Mo & #235;t Hennessy Louis Vuit-ton SA’s Sephora and department stores.
Tran learned about the fragrance business helping her parents run their original Los Angeles stores. She then worked at L.A. Fragrances from 1987 to 1999.
In 1999, Tran borrowed $50,000 from her parents to start Perfume Bay.
“When I started Perfume Bay, I wanted to take my parents’ wholesale business to the next level and bring it online,” she said. “Since my parents had been in the industry for over 20 years and had the buying power, I could.”
Early on, Tran spent $50,000 buying key words on search engines. It didn’t help much, she said. Back then, she was shipping about 10 orders a day and was Perfume Bay’s only employee.
In 2001, Tran redid the site as a store within Yahoo’s shopping section.
That year, Perfume Bay’s sales hit $1.4 million, up from $200,000 in 2000.
The company now does about $13 million in yearly sales with 15 workers.
The company has outgrown its 20,000 square feet of warehouse space in Huntington Beach and expects to move into a 25,000-square-foot storage building in Fountain Valley within the next two years, Tran said.
“We need to find a space where we can grow over the next five years,” she said.
Tapping Vietnam
Vietnamese immigrant Tracy Nguyen wants to bring medicine from her home contry to the U.S.
Nguyen runs Garden Grove’s Affordable Quality Pharmaceuticals Inc., which packages drugs from other companies into dosage-sized bottles and bubble packs.
Affordable has plants in Vietnam as well as in Canada. The company does research, testing and some production in Garden Grove.
Nguyen, who came to the U.S. from Vietnam in 1979, started Affordable in 2000 as a maker and seller of generic drugs and health supplements. She started doing business in Vietnam in 2003.
In November, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention awarded the company a three-year contract to make and sell affordable drugs in Vietnam.
Nguyen’s goal is to win work with U.S. drug makers, making generics for them in Vietnam, she said.
“There are a lot of manufacturing pharmaceutical companies, but we’re trying to leverage low labor costs to bring down the overall cost of prescription drugs,” said Twee Pham, Affordable’s vice president of marketing.
Nguyen said she’s working with U.S. regulators and could start shipping drugs here in five years or so.
Affordable counts yearly sales of about $40 million.
Pizza Chip Push
Xengaru Fun Foods LLC, a Laguna Niguel maker of pizza-flavored chips, has enlisted brokers to try and get its Pizzettos into specialty grocery stores this year.
The company has hired Arizona’s Naturally TCL and El Dorado Hills-based Optimum Sales to pitch its low-fat-pizza flavored chips to stores.
Xengaru’s products are sold at college campuses such as Chapman University and Orange Coast College. Local stores including Irvine Ranch Market and Pacific Ranch Market also sell them.
The company hopes to land them in Mother’s Market, Whole Foods and Bristol Farms with the help of Naturally TCL and Optimum Sales.
Gerri Adams and Anuradha Prakash started Xengaru in 2005. The company makes 8,000 pounds of Pizzettos a day at a bakery in Azusa. Thens they’re sent to a packaging facility in Corona and packed into 1.5-ounce foil pouches. They sell for 99 cents to $1.29, depending on the store.
