Patricio Apey has been in the agent and event business since he joined the now defunct Pro Serv in '88. One of his first clients was Gabriela Sabatini, who played on Tuesday night in the annual MSG tennis exhibition in a legends match with Monica Seles. Apey starting at Pro Serv was not entirely coincidental: his father was one of Sabatini’s first coaches. Apey, who formed his own company, ACE Int'l, in '01, has represented her ever since. SBD Global caught up with him a few hours before the match at a N.Y. hotel to discuss Sabatini’s role in setting the tennis landscape that would lead to Maria Sharapova, and being one of the first athletes to launch her own fragrance line.
Q:When did Sabatini retire?
Patricio Apey: 1996. I remember everyone panicking, because there was her perfume line. She started that very early in her career. ... But we always had the intention of carrying on beyond her playing years.
Q: What is it called?
Apey: Gabriela Sabatini, that’s it. It is sold, the largest countries are Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and all the Benelux countries. Czech Republic, Slovak Republic, for some reason it’s huge in Poland, and parts of Russia. In the last six, seven years, it has grown massively in Brazil. Germany used to be 50 percent of the sales, that has been overtaken by Brazil.
Q: What are the sales of the perfume?
Apey: The sales on a global level are tens of millions of dollars annually.
Q: Does she live off that?
Apey: She did very well in her career. If you look back in time, the business model for Sharapova, [Anna] Kournikova, the beauties of the game who have the good fortune of looking a certain way and playing a good brand of tennis, she really revolutionized that. She was at one point quite attractive from a sponsorship point of view, from a licensing point of view.
Q: Does she own the fragrance?
Apey: It is now owned by Procter & Gamble. Originally it was a German company. They were brilliant in promoting it. If you looked at their advertising, they never once mentioned she was a tennis player. The name has a great ring to it. When we did a PR sort of blitz in Brazil two years ago, the people who came to the autograph signing did not have a clue she played tennis. A lot of the celebrity fragrances were based on Sabatini. She was the original. It is similar to, the best way to relate to it, you ask anybody on the street the best ever selling sneaker everyone says Air Jordan, when in fact it is Stan Smith. Similar to the fragrance.
Q: How did she come to play in the tennis event at MSG?
Apey: It came about because Jerry Solomon (the event promoter), who I worked for at Pro Serv… he has called me three years in a row to see if she will play. She has not been set to play (her last exhibition was in 2009), and last year she said we are getting close. And this year, because it was New York, MSG and Monica, she said, "Ok, let's do it."
