A new company founded by former Procter & Gamble Co. employees thinks it has found a ripe new market in the highly competitive personal care sector -- boys between 9 and 16 years old.
OT OverTime LLC, which has a licensing agreement with P&G, will start selling a line of shampoos, body washes, deodorants and other products with names like Body Slam and Pit Defense in Target Corp. stores nationwide this month.
The company, based in Cincinnati, will also launch the products in Meijer grocery stores in the Midwest.
"We think it is a largely untapped market that is just ripe for these products," Karen Frank, a cofounder of OT OverTime and a former P&G executive, who helped develop the products for boys while working at P&G.
So called "tween" and younger teen boys may be one of the last great untapped markets for personal care sector, which has already successfully sold soaps, shampoos, deodorants and scents to women, teenage girls, men and older teen males.
OT will advertise in Sports Illustrated for Kids, and CCS, an extreme sports catalog, but no television advertising in the first year.
One advertisement will carry the tag "Grind Stink to a Halt," Frank said.
The company also plans to use Kathy Peel, an author who has written 17 books on home and the family and a mother of three boys, to push the products in television and other appearances.
Drawing on her experience with her boys, Peel said in an interview: "When they came in the house and they were 9 years old, there was a new odor."
Peel will push the brand as a way for mothers to talk to their sons about personal hygine.
"The t(w)eenagers need to learn, without defensiveness, that more effort at hygine is necessary. Moms need to learn how to encourage without nagging," she said in press materials for OT.
The current market for personal grooming products for boys ages 9 to 16 is about $2.2 billion, Frank said in an interview.
"It's a pretty big market. It's growing," said Ken Harris, a partner at consumer products and retail consultancy CannondaleAssociates.
Still, it was not big enough for P&G, which chose not to bring OT to market itself.
"It really just has to do with the strategic focus of the company, to focus on the big brands, big countries, big customers," Martha Depenbrock, a P&G spokeswoman said.
Rival personal care manufacturers have also chosen to focus on markets other than "tween" and teen boys, although that is starting to change.
While Gillette Co. does not have products specifically geared to that age group, the company's Right Guard Xtreme Sport deodorant is a "younger" brand and than the traditional Right Guard, spokesman Eric Kraus said. The company has also sponsored sporting events like the X-Games, which attract younger males.
"You want to impress them with performance at an early age, which will bode well for a lifetime of brand loyalty," Kraus said.
Neither OT nor P&G would disclose details of the licensing agreement.
