HSN Posts Strong First Quarter, And Mary J. Blige Fragrance Gets Big Play In Women’s Wear Daily

HSN CEO Mindy Grossman

It’s late, it’s been a busy day, and we finally listened to HSN’s first-quarter earnings call. Since it’s 10:40 p.m. — and we’re dying to watch the “24″ episode we missed Monday because we were covering “The Real Housewives of New Jersey” party — we’ll keep this very short.

We got a phone call, and now it’s 11:25 p.m. So this is going to be really, really short. And we’ll have to delay watching “24″ on Hulu until later in the week.

As we wrote earlier in the day, HSN had a good first quarter, with a 9 percent increase in sales, to $518.9 million. During the call with analysts Wednesday, HSN CEO Mindy Grossman said a couple of new things, beyond all that blah-blah-blah about having differentiated products, products exclusive to the network, etc.

Grossman mentioned the news that we just wrote about, that of singer Mary J. Blige launching a perfume called My Life, in partnership with Carol’s Daughter, on HSN. Blige is an investor in Carol’s Daughter, which makes hair and skin products.

The story made the front page of Women’s Wear Daily, according to Grossman, and that’s a pretty big deal, nice press, for the home shopping network.

“Blige and Carol’s Daughter are breaking the bonds of traditional prestige fragrance retailing by choosing to launch My Life solely on HSN on July 31,” WWD wrote.

During the first-quarter conference call Grossman said that HSN HD is now in 13 million homes, and will be in 25 million by the end of the year. She noted that at some point the HD and standard definition channels will be merged.

There were several successful apparel launches in the first quarter, including that of Badgley Mischka and Twiggy London, with Twiggy due back in June.

There will be eight apparel-line premieres this summer.

And on the hard-core cable side, Grossman said that half of HSN’s carriage deals expire this year, and that several renewals have already been struck with distributors.

“So far, so good,” Grossman said. “It’s progressing…”

Time for bed.

Tags: first quarter earnings, HSN, Mary J. Blige, Mindy Grossman, The Homeshoppingista, Women's Wear Daily