Nelson-based Carol Priest Natural Cosmetics got its vital break via the visionary skills of its Korean marketer. By Nigel Costley

When Guiyoun Kim discovered Carol Priest Natural Cosmetics through her father, a ship’s captain, the seeds of the Nelson-based company’s export fortunes were sown. The Korean businesswoman took some of Carol Priest’s 77 different products to the Daegu Department Store in Seoul. The store was so impressed, it allocated space on its ground floor to the Carol Priest brand, a privilege usually reserved for big international names.

Buoyed by her marketing success in Korea, Guiyoun moved to Nelson with her five-year-old daughter for six months in 2006. She learned English and fully immersed herself in the natural cosmetics business.

Since gaining a highly respectable physical presence, Carol Priest’s online sales have increased to 80% of the Korean business. Last year Guiyoun opened a spa bath which became another point of sale for the cosmetics and now Korea contributes over half of Carol Priest’s revenue.

“Her marketing changed our perspective – quite visionary really. She put us at the top end of the market, otherwise we would have got lost in the middle,” says Jane Christian-Welsh, who runs the business along with her husband, Gary Welsh, and the company founders, Carol Priest and her husband Richard.

The two couples became friends in 1989, when the women were in the Palmerston North maternity home, each having their youngest daughters. The friendship deepened as the families shared childminding.

A former laboratory technologist for Glaxo Pharmaceuticals, Carol Priest started her home-based business when she left work to start a family in the 1980s.The Priests moved to Nelson in 1998 for the lifestyle and to tap into the tourism market, with the Welsh family joining them in 2001 to help run the business. The company now provides varsity holiday jobs for several of the families’ six offspring.

There’s a well-defined division of labour between the four partners but not so strict that one couple can’t cover for the other when they take a break. Carol Priest is the formulator and covers the production side of the business with her husband, while Christian-Welsh and spouse run the marketing, packaging, IT, and import/export logistics.

While the company turnover of $500,000 to a million hasn’t changed much in the last couple of years, its successful marketing – particularly in South Korea – has greatly improved profitability.

Although the company is small with just seven staff, it is part of a huge industry that’s projected by UK-based market analyst, Organic Monitor, to reach sales of US$10 billion by 2010.

The company is now expanding further offshore, replicating the Korean strategy in Japan and Canada. Fuelled by growing numbers of affluent Chinese consumers, the Japanese cosmetic market is regarded as a Mecca, Christian-Welsh says, so the company has engaged a Japanese distributor with an established background in packaging. Similarly, a Vancouver resident, ex-Nelson marketer Belinda Spier de Erney, is its distributor in Canada.

Both these enterprises are in the early stages of setting up websites and promotional events, and will formally launch in April or May. Carol Priest expects to double export sales in the next year.

Christian-Welsh says the South Korean experience has taught the partners the importance of supplementing online sales with a strong physical presence.
“The key things are having a really good distributor and to take notice of them because they understand that market and the culture.”