Greatest Of All Legends

Chapter 357: Skin Serenity III

Jason and Adele arrived at the building where a conference room had been rented for their meeting.

Since Skin Serenity was not based in Portugal, this was the only way they could meet with Jason without it being a public setting.

Skin Serenity was a unisex skin-care brand that dealt with lotions, soaps, oils, skin-care face-masks, etc. and they had contacted Adele a while ago for an endorsement deal which Jason had put on a hold due to his injury, but now that he had gotten back to regular football, he finally had time to listen to their offer which had further increased thanks to his growing worth as a player.

Originally, Jason hadn’t been exactly ecstatic to sign a deal with them as he already had a commercial with a perfume company, Scentual Escapades, and he was already thinking that one self-care endorsement was enough.

Especially with the deal with Skin Serenity having a clause that would require him only to use their products.

Jason was generally apprehensive of a controlling contract like that, but when he heard their offer, he made a U-turn on his decision.

Skin Serenity wasn’t a big company yet and their worth just barely reached 70 million dollars which put them at the level of a start-up brand in the worldwide skincare industry so far.

They weren’t exactly rapidly rising either and their progress had stalled just barely three years after their start.

Perhaps they were looking for a boost to their popularity which would give them the push they needed to rise and because of that, they had come to Jason with a particularly ludicrous offer.

They wanted Jason to become the face of the male part of their brand for five years with a starting offer of 2 million dollars which in itself was already a sizeable percent of their company’s worth.

However, that wasn’t all, they had also put forth a contract clause stating that on every brand he represented, he would get a percentage profit of every single sale and that was not just ludicrous, it was something any normal businessman would call stupid.

Jason was merely a start-up celebrity, and he didn’t have a particularly strong fan base , yet the company was so stupid as to literally put all their hopes on him and still giving him the benefits of a major investor in the business when all he did was endorse the product.

If that wasn’t stupidity, then what was?

The business world was a world full of sharks, yet these guys were out here being overly nice and that immediately tingled Jason’s money senses that he didn’t know he had until now.

He immediately noticed that there was a sliver of desperation in their offers to him.

It was like they didn’t want him to even think of rejecting the offer.

Almost like not signing him would damage them greatly and that was strange so Jason had asked Adele to look into their situation to see what was wrong.

He didn’t want to sign a deal that would be particularly damaging to his reputation no matter how huge or tempting it was.

It had taken a while and was what had caused the delay till now, but Adele had managed to find out the situation behind the company.

The first thing Adele found out was that Jason wasn’t the only one to have received the offer from Skin Serenity, though the terms of the offer made to him were a lot more enticing than the others, nevertheless, he wasn’t the only one with the offer from Skin Serenity.

It seemed the company had cast out a wide net and hoped to get at least one favorable response, and their targets were young, quick-growing celebrities.

It wasn’t only footballers, the company had also contacted debuting actors, singers, and even online celebrities, but so far, no one had signed the deal because they were still negotiating with Skin Serenity and trying to increase the benefits for themselves.

The offers Skin Serenity made to the others were vastly different from what they made to Jason which meant Jason was a focal point in whatever plan they had and the others were just add-ons.

The second thing that Adele found out was an interesting story that took her a lot of effort to be able to listen to.

The story went like this;

Skin Serenity Co., a cutting-edge skincare brand was founded three years ago by innovative chemist, Dr. Maya Singh.

With a revolutionary new product, Skin Serenity was poised to disrupt the industry and they did for a while, turning a company that started up with less than a million dollars to a a company worth 100 million in less than two years.

However, such good fortune didn’t come without consequences.

There is a Chinese saying that says that the bamboo that rises the fastest gets hammered by the windand Skin Serenity was the proverbial bamboo.

Their speedy progress had aroused the interests of others in the same field and while some of the competitors barely made changes to their products and put more effort into marketing their product, another group decided to try and take over the goose that was laying golden eggs.

Thus a conspiracy began to unfold and it started with someone bribing the lead researcher of the company, Victor Delgado.

With his greed aroused, he used his influence to push out a research product that wasn’t yet ready for production. He framed good results for the product and made Dr Maya Singh believe that this was the next big thing after their original recipe.

For Dr. Maya Singh who had been swamped by administrative duties and no longer had time to tinker with chemicals at the lab, this was good news and she believed the words of Victor who she thought was her friend, and began working hard to launch the new project.

The company took huge loans to finance the project’s launch and after a lot of work, the new product was launched, but barely a week after its launch, the product’s inconsistencies were revealed.

The product began to be returned and soon the company was bombarded with quite a few lawsuits.