Archival Consumed: The Princess Factory

[Club Libby Lu]

Whether we want to admit it or not, Mary Drolet argues, there was a time in our lives when we all pretended to be rock stars or princesses. That time was childhood, the years before the line between fantasy and reality becomes more tangible. This belief, in part, is what guided Drolet in founding, with two partners, a business called Club Libby Lu, which offers 5- to 13-year-old girls the chance to live out one of several (overtly girlish) fantasies, at least for the duration of an hour-and-a-half-long party in a shopping mall.

Club Libby Lu is what’s known as an ”experience” retailer, meaning that it sells a kind of packaged happening rather than just products. There are plenty of examples of the mammoth store-as-spectacle approach (the American Girl Place locations in Chicago and New York City, or the outdoor-gear seller Cabela’s), but Club Libby Lu was always meant for malls, and it has locations in 77 of them now, with 8 more on the way by the end of the year.

The main attraction is the in-store party, built around the fantasy makeover. It works like this: Suppose a little girl is turning 8 and wants to have a party; her parents can sign her and a dozen of her closest friends up for a ”Libby Du” package. The five choices do not exactly test the limits of gender empowerment: Sparkle Princess (which involves a ”glittery tiara”), the diva-ish Drama Queen (including ”glittery sunglasses”), She Rocks! (with ”sparkly headset microphone”), Rising Star and Trend Setter. The $20 (per kid) version of the package gets you the ”accessories to complete the ‘look,’ ” plus five items from a wide range of girlish gewgaws that cram the store’s shelves, all in a Lu-branded backpack. For $30, you also get a sort of beauty kit with either ”The Fancy Potion Pack” or ”Super Smooch Lip Gloss Kit.”

In addition to hairstyling and (glittery) cosmetics, administered by ”club counselors,” there are games, line dancing and singing. There is not much downtime. ”Basically it ends with a big hurrah birthday dance,” Drolet says. She adds that the length of a party can vary depending on the number of attendees, but it rarely lasts more than two hours, since this is a ”highly stimulated target market.” Recently at the Club Libby Lu in the Menlo Park Mall in Edison, N.J., a half-dozen members of the target market in tiaras and body glitter, looking eerily like so many miniature beauty-pageant contestants, were being fussed over by the store’s employees at a tiny makeup station. The rest of the store was full of items like small sequined sneakers, stuffed dogs in little handbags and other items that seemed mostly to be pink.

Asked whether Club Libby Lu has any connection to the culturewide mania for makeovers, Drolet firmly asserts that it does not. The business plans were drawn in up 1999 and based on a handful of insights unrelated to the subsequent onslaught of makeover-related reality TV shows. One was the fact that Drolet had noticed that her own young children seemed to be going to increasingly elaborate parties every weekend. Second, while there was already a glut of brands chasing the teen market, this younger (but huge) demographic still seemed to represent a good retail opportunity. Third was a revelation that came from studying ”some consumer behaviors of our target market.” Namely, she explains, ”This is an age where friends and being part of a club, or just kind of belonging, is very important.” That discovery led to the ”club” format and a habit of calling its customers ”very important princesses.” Here, in short, was the heart of the project: ”That magical moment in time when a little girl can pretend that she is a Sparkle Princess,” Drolet summarizes.

Could the widespread craving for reinventing a more glamorous version of the self possibly mean that the wider culture is becoming more little-girl-like? Drolet demurred on this question, but it’s not such a wild thought, really. On some level, it seems pretty likely that many trips to the shopping mall by those of us who are well beyond childhood probably have something to do with fantasizing about products and services that will make us a little more like Jay-Z or Lance Armstrong or Sarah Jessica Parker — whether we want to admit it or not.

[This installment of the Consumed column appeared in the August 21, 2005, New York Times Magazine; it was posted on this site some time much later, despite the fiddled-with time/date stamp.]