He still has an eye for sales

Ex-Jordan's exec gets a look at the makeup biz

Former Jordan's Furniture impresario Barry Tatelman has hawked many a product in his day: sofas, sleepers, La-Z-Boys, Sleep Lab mattresses, eyelash serum.

Wait a minute. Eyelash serum?

Indeed, after 34 years as the unponytailed co-owner of the region's most beloved furniture empire, Tatelman has taken a hairpin turn into the beauty world as the co-owner of a cosmetic company.

"Furniture is in my blood," said Tatelman, 58. "But this is different and it's fun."

The road to beauty entrepreneurship was at best circuitous. Tatelman and brother Eliot took over Jordan's Furniture from their father in 1973 and spent the next three decades redefining the region's sofa-shopping experience. By 1999, when they sold the chain, the brothers had taken a eight-employee company and built it into a four-store mini-empire complete with "shoppertainment" perks like the singular Motion Odyssey Movie (MOM) ride.

Tatelman eventually left Jordan's in 2006 to produce Broadway musicals "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" and "In the Heights" and to dabble in film and TV.

"I wanted to try some other stuff," said Tatelman from his winter home in Delray Beach, Fla. "You only live once, so you might as well enjoy all that it offers."

A beauty venture, however, wasn't something he considered. Then one evening at dinner, longtime friend and skin-care distributor Robert Trow handed Tatelman a small unmarked tube.

"I said, 'What is it?' " Tatelman recalled, "and he said, 'It grows your eyebrows and eyelashes.' And I said, 'What?' "

His curiosity piqued. Tatelman began nightly applications of the product (applied like a liquid eyeliner), giving the process little thought, until, about month into the trial, he was hit with some unexpected praise.

"I was on business for a week," Tatelman recalled, "and when I came back both my son and my wife looked at me and said, 'Oh my god, look at you!' "

Nor did the compliments stay in the family, he says. "People would come up to me and say, 'Why do you look different? Did you get work done?' "

Sold on the product, Tatelman went back to Trow and offered his services as both investor and marketing guru.

"And I said, 'OK, fasten my seatbelt, you're in charge,' " Trow recalled. They formed Rocasuba, based in Mashpee (the name derives from the first names of Trow, Tatelman, and their wives and business partners Carol and Susan), and launched their product, RapidLash, last fall.

Dipping an unpedicured toe into the cosmetic industry after decades of hawking dining room sets could have felled a lesser soul, but not Tatelman. He stuck with his modus operandi: promote what you know.

"At Jordan's for all those years," he said, "I never said anything I didn't believe in."

Inspiration came from another source - Warren Buffet, whose Berkshire Hathaway bought the Jordan's Furniture chain for approximately $250 million in 1999.

"He once said no matter what you do, do it with people you like," said Tatelman, his Boston accent familiar to anyone reared on the TV ads he and his brother made for years (and which Tatelman wrote himself). "And it's true. Rob and Carol are very good friends and wonderful people, and they have great ethics."

Lash enhancers were already big business. The product RevitaLash became an instant celebrity favorite when it first hit the market in 2006. Just last month, the Federal Drug Administration approved Allergan's Latisse, a prescription-only eyelash enhancement product derived from the glaucoma drug Lumiga. (Lash enhancers also became a controversial subject in late 2007 when federal marshals seized more than 12,000 tubes of an enhancement product containing bimatoprost, found in smaller doses in Lumiga but then approved for glaucoma treatment only.)

The goal with RapidLash, says Tatelman, was to bring a comparable, over-the-counter product to market for an accessible price. A tube of RevitaLash goes for $150; Latisse costs $120 for a one-month supply. RapidLash, meanwhile, sells at spas and mass retailers like CVS for about $50, with 5 percent of gross proceeds going to breast cancer foundation Susan G. Komen for the Cure.

Sales have exceeded expectations, he says, which Tatelman counterintuitively attributes to the sagging economy.

"People still really want to look good," he said, "and our price is so much lower [than other products]."

Alas, there are no Barry and Eliot-inspired RapidLash spoof ads coming down the pipeline, though Tatelman can't avoid a little ribbing at his brother's expense: asked jokingly whose lashes are longer, Tatelman replies, "Well, he has a much longer ponytail."

Though his has been a behind-the-scenes role, Tatelman did get a taste of the beauty industry's good life when the product launched last year.

"We unleashed this in New York, and we had all the magazine editors come," he said. "We gave them all manicures and pedicures, and I'm thinking, this is a lot more fun than furniture."