looks kind of like...”
“A man in drag.” Cole finished. He jabbed his finger toward the offending photo of an attractive young woman juxtaposed against an older one presumably representing Espresso. “Not only are they relegating us to the brand for senior citizens, they exaggerate the point with one of the ugliest old ladies I’ve ever seen.”
“Well, as you just said, he’s no lady.”
A vein on the side of Cole’s head pulsed. “You think?” Sarcasm permeated the question. “What gave it away, the hot mess of a gray wig or the damned goatee?”
“Hmm.” Victor tilted his own graying head to one side, then the other as he continued to study the grainy color photo. “Not really a goatee. I’d say it was more of a five o’clock shadow.”
“Are you actually defending that photo?” Cole asked.
The corner of his stepfather’s mouth quirked upward. “You know he kind of looks like the guy who stars in those Maw-Maw movies.”
“Who or what is a Maw-Maw?”
Victor looked up, an incredulous look on his face. “Wow. You have been out of the country a long time. Maw-Maw is the star of a slew of movies about a wisecracking, busybody matriarch, who can’t stop sticking her nose in her family’s business.” He chuckled and shook his head. “Can’t believe you never heard of them. I have a couple on DVD. I’ll let you borrow them.”
“No, thank you,” Cole said firmly, his patience waning.
“Oh, come on. You have to at least see Maw-Maw Passes the Plate. It’s the one where Maw-Maw puts an envelope containing a thousand dollars into the church offering plate by mistake.” His stepfather burst into a fit of laughter, slapping the newspaper against his thigh. “The old girl starts leaping over the church pews, like a sprinter clearing hurdles in the summer Olympics, trying to get it back. She even tackles a deacon. It’s hilarious!”
Cole cleared his throat loudly.
“I’m not interested in any movie featuring a grown man wearing a dress. Right now, all I care about is this article and the damage it’s doing to Espresso’s image, which isn’t one bit funny.”
“Sorry about that, son.” Victor dabbed at the tears that had gathered in his eyes from laughing. “I guess I got sidetracked.” He extracted a pair of reading glasses from his shirt pocket and resumed studying the article.
A few minutes later, he shrugged. “Okay, so they took a bit of a dig at us. Try not to get so bent out of shape over it. It’s not that big a deal.”
“Not a big deal?” Cole fumed, the headline imprinted on his brain—Not Your Granny’s Makeup: Stiletto Cosmetics Puts Its Spiked Heel in the Competition. He quoted the article, “As Cole Sinclair makes a last ditch attempt to rescue his family’s declining Espresso Cosmetics from near extinction, an edgy new brand is poised to pick up the torch.”
Victor removed his glasses, folded the paper and tucked it under his arm. “We just had our first successful collection in nearly a decade thanks to you,” he said.
“And there wasn’t a single word in the press about it, despite the efforts of our public relations team.”
“Still, it was a huge boost to Espresso employees who haven’t had much to celebrate in a very long time,” the older man said. “You should be patting yourself on the back, not worrying about a ridiculous photo in some rag.”
“America Today has a nationwide circulation. Not to mention online and international editions.”
“My point is Espresso is finally making a comeback,” Victor said.
“Comeback?” Cole leaned against the front of his desk and folded his arms. “We’re a long way from what I’d consider a comeback.
“A sold-out holiday collection was a heck of a good start.”
Cole shrugged off the praise with a grunt. His first order of business as CEO of Espresso’s cosmetics division had been to sit down with the company’s chief financial officer, Malcolm Doyle, to find out exactly where years of stagnant sales had left them financially.
The second had been to untie the hands of the creative and product-development teams and allow them to do their jobs. For too long their ideas had languished due to Victor’s insistence on remaining loyal to what he believed Cole’s mother would have wanted for her company.
“You’ve done more for Espresso in five months than I accomplished after years of being in charge.” Victor’s chin dropped to his chest, his gaze cast toward the carpet. “It’s just I thought...”
“The success of the holiday collection was just a drop in the bucket.” Cole cut him off, refusing to play the blame game.
All he cared about was making Espresso relevant in the cosmetics industry again. It was too late to take back the harsh words he’d exchanged with his mother the very last time he’d seen her. Now the only way he could make it up to her was to save her legacy.
He swallowed hard. “We’d need a tsunami to erase the red ink from the company books and our old-lady image from women’s minds.” Rounding his desk, Cole tapped at his computer keyboard until the survey he’d commissioned appeared on the screen. “I was going to email you a copy of this later, but you might as well take a look at it now.”
Victor sat in Cole’s leather executive chair, once again retrieving his reading glasses from his pocket.
“This is a survey taken over the holidays of customers shopping at various department-store cosmetics counters,” Cole explained. He leaned over Victor’s shoulder, right-clicking the mouse to expand a page. “Here are just a few of the comments female shoppers made when asked about Espresso.”
The older man read aloud. “‘My great-aunt uses their foundation. We call her Auntie Cake behind her back because her face always looks like it’s been dipped in batter.’” Victor winced. “Ouch.”
“It gets worse.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope. Keep reading.”
“‘Their makeup counters are deader than a morgue.’”
Victor read another one. “‘I didn’t know they were still around.’”
Cole pointed out a remark made by a twenty-two-year-old woman actually making a purchase at an Espresso counter. This time he read it aloud. “‘I’m only here because my grandmother ran out of her favorite pink lipstick. No way I’d wear this old-lady stuff. I’m a Stiletto girl all the way.’”
His stepfather exhaled a long drawn-out breath. “This is why you’re so peeved about that article.”
Cole nodded. “The more I think about it, the more I believe it’s too late to change people’s minds about us. Our senior-citizen image is too entrenched.”
“But...” Victor started to protest, but Cole held up a hand to stop him.
“Hear me out,” Cole said.
