The Front Lines of Oscar Week '09

posted on Sat, 02/21/2009 - 14:40

This week was a very action-packed week for iZO. In addition to running our normal juice feast production and distribution operations, iZO was rocking the Oscar week celebrity events with live juice bars. Our celeb gift suite of choice this year was the Haven House on a posh estate on the top of Loma Vista in Beverly Hills. It was by far the most luxurious setting of any Oscar gift suite I’ve ever been involved with.

And I’ve been involved with a few. We’ve had mixed success with them. Our first one produced by Nicole Landers at the RC Green furniture store on La Brea and 3rd for the 2006 Oscars worked really well for us, netting us our first celebrity testimonials with Tony Shalhoub from ‘Monk’, Patricia Heaton from ‘Everybody Loves Raymond’, and Daisy Fuentes, among others. It was a great breakthrough for iZO.

By the end of 2007 however, celebrity gift suites, with their predictable ‘gifts’ of hand bags and skincare products and their groveling atmosphere, had become somewhat of a joke. Although we always found the few gems in the rough, we stopped sponsoring gift suites altogether. Besides, by then we already had a very well-developed celebrity client base, so what was the point? But when the Haven House produced by HFM out of New York City came across our path, we decided to go for it. For starters there was the palatial location. And our good friend Brenda Swanson-Borseau was leading all the efforts to make everything run smoothly. Why not spend my 50th day halfway mark in the thick of the media!

I hired the beautiful Naada to be my juicing and marketing assistant for the 3 days, manning the juicer and informing our VIP guests about the benefits of the iZO Cleanze. Wednesday was predictably slow, aside from some cool characters from Heroes and a couple of Olympiads, but Thursday and Friday picked up pretty nicely. There might not have been many big ‘names’ per say, but there were lots of talented semi-big names who are currently on the rise, as well as an impressive amount of media. I’m for the most part a pop culture ignoramus so I didn’t recognize even half of them, but the celebrity weeklies and on the supermarket checkout line and the entertainment news shows certainly do. Of course, as far as sales go, it’s all in the follow-up as far as cleanze sales go, so I’ve got my work cut out for me this week. All in all, the Haven House was a success!

The networking didn’t stop there either. Each night, Naada and I party-hopped around some of the most high profile events of the week. Thursday night was an amazing double-header. First there was my friend and client Tierney Gearon’s art opening at Ace Gallery in Beverly Hills. And then it was onto the VIP section of the Global Green party at the Avalon in Hollywood where Sheryl Crow and Gavin Rossdale performed. There were amazing people everywhere I turned!

But the highlight of the week by far was getting tapped to juice Russell Simmons’ fashion show Friday night. Russell’s Director of Integrated Marketing wanted us at the party because she knows how much her boss loves good fresh, organic juice. She asked that we keep the iZO Juice bar open for the party later that night so that she could bring Russell by for his juice. We kindly obliged. !!! ;-)

The party was most certainly bangin’, and many guests were so thankful for there being a healthy alternative to the vodka and fake juice bar that was right next to us. It was an interesting pairing. As the evening wore on, it was questionable whether Russell would make it by our bar. He had bypassed the entry where we were stationed and had gone straight to the front seats of his fashion show. Naada raised the concern that we’d never get the iZO Juice to him if we didn’t take action. I made an executive decision to go for it and Naada boldly led the way, bum-rushing ourselves onto the fashion show runway just before the show started and hand-delivered Mr. Simmons his juice. Flawless execution!

I will be posting photos from LA Splash when i get them.