How to understand the US consumer

Emanuel Perdis is the managing director of Australian cosmetics label Napoleon Perdis and the brother of Napoleon himself. The business, which has turnover of more than $80 million, has an extensive footprint in Australia and the US.

But Perdis admits the company still has a way to go before it can truly claim to have cracked the US market.

“As a market itself, because it’s so enormous and so complex and so fragmented, it is incredibly difficult.”

“The most difficult thing would have to be that Americans generally as a market are very xenophobic and they’re quite conservative – they need to feel that you’ve adopted them and their culture and you become one of them before they can really uptake your product and take it to that next level. So that’s been one of the hardest things in terms of culturally understanding the market.”

“It’s a very complex and multi-layered market from local to federal to state and then you have racial barriers, you have social class. So we’ve made some amazing inroads to date and we’ve made some backward steps but we’ve always gotten back up and got back on the horse again.”

Read a full interview with Emanual Perdis from cosmetics company Napoleon Perdis.