Word: becker
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...signed. Down the street, at the Helmut Weber bakery, which displays in its windows the scuffed shoes and muddy togs he wore the day of his famous victory, the bakers whipped up thousands of "Bobele" pretzels. They are B-shaped, and their name is an acronym standing for Boris Becker of Leimen. He does not receive any royalty on their sales. Not yet, anyway...
...Klein-Becker stumbled on StriVectin's effect on fine facial lines by accident back in 2002, when the company started testing its new stretch-mark cream. Says Klein-Becker's Gay: "There were no directions on the tube. So some of the testers used it on their face and discovered that it smoothed out their skin. It was just dumb luck." Many products throughout the ages, of course, have promised to reverse the aging process. StriVectin's particular solution relies on peptides--strings of amino acids that stimulate enzymes in skin cells to produce more collagen, a protein that restores...
...here's the rub: many other antiaging creams use exactly the same types of compounds that target collagen production. Says Avon's research chief Janice Teal: "We've been using peptides in our products for years." Louis Rinaldi, head of Klein-Becker's new product acquisitions, counters that StriVectin's particular concentration of those compounds and the inclusion of a certain botanical extract make it more effective...
Meanwhile, Klein-Becker has some wrinkles of its own to worry about. There is competition from alleged knock-off brands, which so far has prompted the firm to file 16 trademark-infringement suits in federal court. Then there's a Federal Trade Commission suit scheduled for trial in July against Klein-Becker and its parent firm, Basic Research, alleging that its ads for several weight-loss supplements and tummy-flattening gels are misleading, although a spokesperson for Klein-Becker (which denies the charges) notes that StriVectin plays no part in that case...
Perhaps most important, though, is the Botox issue. Even as Allergan's litigation with Klein-Becker about StriVectin's "Better than Botox?" ads is pending, the Food and Drug Administration has warned that StriVectin might be reclassified as a drug (which Klein-Becker is seeking to avoid). At the same time, other cosmetics competitors have jumped on the opportunity to compare themselves to Botox. Estée Lauder's Perfectionist is promoted in its ads as the ideal cream "for every woman who says no to Botox"; Avon's Anew Clinical Deep Crease Concentrate jabs at Botox with the line, "look...