The EPI Three : Fashion: The siblings behind Epilady hair remover have a very profitable eye for gadgets.

Their new Santa Monica headquarters are already too small. The telephones in their Virginia Beach, Va., customer service center ring to the tune of 2,000 calls per day. In less than three years, they have launched 20 personal care products and talk about a 1989 sales figure of $200 million.

Meet the entrepreneurial Epiladies (a.k.a. the Krok sisters): Sharon, Arlene and Loren. Young (31, 29, 24 respectively), smart and born to hate the hair on their legs.

“Basically, we’ve always been obsessed with that problem,” explains Sharon Krok Feuer. Their solution has made them the talk of the cosmetics and the personal-care industries. They are the women behind the Epilady, a hand-held device with a rotating coil that pulls hair out at the root. Also to their credit are EpiSauna, EpiSsage, EpiPed and EpiSmile, to name a few of the goodies from their EPI (Essential Personal Items) Products company.

Their success depends in part on their eye for good gadgets. Instead of inventing every one, they frequently acquire the distribution rights for existing items, or they buy products outright from the inventor. Epilady, for example, was developed by two Israeli engineers and is manufactured on a kibbutz in Upper Galilee.

Five days after Loren and their father, Solly Krok, discovered the revolutionary hair remover, the family owned distribution rights in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. (Solly Krok is a South African philanthropist and multimillionaire, who with his twin brother owns Twin-Med, an international pharmaceutical company. One by one, the sisters moved to the United States.)

Stephen Ross, EPI Products’ chief financial officer and a longtime friend of the Krok family, says there has always been a game plan: “To become a major personal care company in the United States. With that decision, we built up a dental and a skin-care division to go with our hair-care division.

“It’s totally unusual. You can count on one hand those who have gone from nothing to $200 million.

“We believe in divine providence,” Ross says, “but we enforce that by being an extremely philanthropic organization. We give large amounts to charities. It’s our belief that what goes around comes around. That’s a lesson taught to us by Mr. Krok. He taught us to give.”

The business does seem to have grown by divine providence. Epilady was launched in the United States in 1987 at Bloomingdale’s Manhattan store. Fifteen hundred units were sold during the first week, even though it took extensive advertising, in-store videos and a toll-free number to get consumers past the fear of discomfort associated with the product.

A few months later, in what seems to be the story of their lives, the Krok sisters came across their next product.

As luck would have it, the Epilady was featured in a newspaper Sunday magazine story about new grooming devices that also included a photograph of a portable mini-facial sauna from Miami Beach, Fla.-based Bernhard Industries.

“It was a beautiful shot” recalls Arlene. “We said, ‘We love this product. Maybe we should contact the owner.’ ” They did, “he was dying to sell,” and three months later EpiSauna was launched.

Not long after, Loren stumbled upon what would become EpiSmile (a four-ounce, $12 cylinder of toothpaste sold only in department stores). It was invented by Dr. Irwin Smigel--the New York dentist who pioneered a tooth-bonding technique--specifically as a whitener for bonded teeth. Later, he says, he found that it removed stains on all teeth. Loren used it and raved to her sisters about what was then Super Smile; they tried it and wanted it for keeps.

Smigel says at least three giant corporations were after his secret formula. But it went to the Krok sisters “because I really trusted them. Super Smile was very difficult to make. Either a chemist or I had to be there to check on every batch. I was always afraid one of the big companies would dilute the formula to make it easier to produce. The EPI people were willing to put in writing there would be no changes without my permission. That was good enough for me.”

Despite a heady string of successes, the Krok sisters, by all accounts, remain down to earth. Employees, suppliers and retailers say they are accessible and receptive to new ideas. The EpiHeat pack, for example, was suggested by a supervisor in the Virginia Beach Service Center, and Smigel says he has just sold EPI Products the rights to another formula.

Within the industry, about the worst anyone has said of the Krok women is that they drive a hard bargain.

Arlene, for example, got MEPRO, the Israeli manufacturer of Epilady, to agree she would get “a million-dollar yacht” if EPI Products sold more than 3 million of the hair removers in the United States during the first year.

Six months later, EPI Products had filled the quota, and MEPRO came through with a 68-foot sailboat and a full-time captain.

“The three sisters have the reputation of being very tough, but I don’t think that’s bad,” says Suzanne Grayson, a marketing consultant in Santa Barbara and author of the Grayson Report, an industry newsletter. “Considering what they have accomplished . . . they have done an incredible job.

“They have managed to find a niche in which they are all alone. They have no real competition, which is certainly not true in the rest of the cosmetics industry. And they’ve done a very good marketing job; they’ve been able to be mass and class at the same time, which is a neat trick.”

The company is structured so that Arlene, a wiry, hip-dressing workaholic, is the president in charge of operations. Soft-spoken Sharon, married and the mother of two young children, is executive vice president in charge of advertising and marketing. Loren, the most glamorous of the three, lives in New York, where she handles East Coast operations and telephone sales. She is the co-producer of the current Broadway revival of “Meet Me in St. Louis.”

“When we started, we decided it would be a family business where we could all work together,” says Bernice Krok Ungar, 26, the fourth of the Epiladies and the last of the seven Krok children to settle in California.

“We’re all very close and very close in age,” she says, adding that two brothers, Ian and Martin, have their own businesses in Irvine. A third brother, Paul, is a student at USC and might be the first male in the family to work at EPI Products.

“When he’s not busy at school he sits in on meetings,” says Bernice, whose own project is working on a new line of “back to nature” cosmetics.

“To stay in business, you have to come out with more and more products,” says Arlene, who is always on the lookout for such modern marvels as EpiBrush--a self-cleaning hairbrush that was knocking around the Far East with no takers until the Kroks came along--and a cellulite fighter called EpiSsage, which they discovered at a Danish trade show.

As more and more products come rolling out, and competition increases (among the most recent, Remington Products introduced Smooth and Silky, a hair-removal device similar to the Epilady), the Kroks have expanded their strategy. They now offer “ultra” versions of their original products to department stores and have put less deluxe models into stores at the K mart level. They also rely on extremely slick, massive advertising campaigns (currently budgeted at $42 million).

The clout behind EPI is undeniable.

“No one is going to turn down anything EPI comes out with in the future,” says Doreen Erickson, J.C. Penney cosmetics buyer for beauty accessories.

“What I’m saying is, if they came out with an EPI handbag, we’d be watching to see what they would be doing with it.”