Cinderella Distributors has survived for nearly three decades by staying the course; they survived by shifting their business to meet the needs of the times and their clients. Although the adult company doesn’t command the vast market share they once commanded, Cinderella hopes that their recently launched Gold Series, a new imprint takes the venerable company in a new direction, conceived by the new, young blood of the organization.
Steve Brickman is the son of the company’s founder Charlie Brickman and is both energetic and enthusiastic.
Though Steve Brickman had worked occasionally in Cinderella’s office or in the warehouse while a teenager, his adult industry education didn’t begin in earnest until he joined the company four years ago, after working for a short while as a golf pro. “I came in trying to soak up as much as I can. And when I saw what was going on, I wasn’t too happy with what I saw,” Brickman told AVN.com.
What he saw was poor packaging, and a weak production schedule that didn’t leave room for any margins of error and wasn’t keeping up with the extreme sex dictates of the gonzo market, problems that Brickman attributes to a lack of oversight. The Gold Series which includes titles such as Immature Encounters, Teen Working Girls, Teen Riders and Sinful Passions was conceived as a way of letting people know that Cinderella wasn’t just a catalog company.
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| Teen Working Girls is one of the top selling series in CDI's new Gold Series |
The first order of business for Brickman, who has a marketing degree from University of Arizona, was developing new packaging, with gold foil around the top of the VHS box or around the top of the DVD. More gold foil can be found on the spines. “That’s just to make the packaging a little more snazzy, give a little pop to it,” Brickman said. “With the box taken care of, we focused on the movie, making sure that the content was edgier.”
With the box and jewel cases sorted, Brickman turned his attention to the productions.
“Everything’s more hands on now, especially with me. I’m choosing the girls that are going into it. We used to get the same girls a lot of the time, the same guys, and even the same location. Now we’re producing more variety,” Brickman said. “We have different girls all the time. We take different locations. We’ve gone out and we’ve bought costumes and outfits for the girls so that we can develop some kind of wardrobe department for them.
Variety isn’t the only change that Steve Brickman has orchestrated for Cinderella titles – he’s also taking the sex further.
“The sex is definitely harder with our Gold series. It’s not just boy/girl sex like scenes were previously. Now we have added d.p.’s, and anal.
The response to the Gold Series was immediately noticeable when the first title under the new imprint was released this past February – the title sold double the average for Cinderella titles, as did the other titles released under the new hardcore imprint.
“A lot of my big distributors really love the Gold line,” Brickman said. “I don’t know how many of them watch the movies, but just the box itself received a lot of positive feedback, not to mention orders. It made me feel really good, that they were able to notice the difference in quality.”
Not that everything has changed at Cinderella. Brickman, who is now the vice president of Cinderella, still follows his father’s lead, and still practices the face-to-face sales practices his father taught him.
“I still believe in not just using E-mail, faxes, phones and such to communicate with clients. I believe in face-to-face contact,” Brickman said. “I still get out on the road. My dad taught me that. Maybe after two years here, he started taking me out on the road with him. We would do road trips that would be a week long, where we’d see 12 customers in a week.
“Trips like that are pretty hectic and pretty grueling, but well worth it in the long run. That’s something that you can’t replace – seeing a customer face to face and making them more than a customer, making them a friend.
“It’s about the relationship. And I definitely enjoy the people I’ve met in this business and the relationships I’ve made. They are very valuable to me.”
Another thing valued by Brickman is his father. “The guy has come from nothing and built this company into an empire. He supported me, he sent me off to college, no worries. A lot of my friends were working their way through college. I didn’t work. Rather I played golf, had fun and concentrated on my studies. And now, if I have the chance to repay him, I want to repay him tenfold.”
“So to me, that’s the important thing. It’s not the money, the dollars and cents; it’s looking at my dad and seeing him be happy. As long as he has a happy life, that’s what makes me happy.”
And revitalizing the company that Charlie Brickman founded nearly 30 years ago will no doubt make both father and son happy.
For more information on the new Gold Series, call 1-800-423-5593 ext 110
